How’s it going this week guys? Hope you’ve all been creating dutifully! If you haven’t, maybe what I’m talking about this week will help out.

With illustration, as we all know, we have a wonderful mixture of fine art and commercialized. As an illustrator, you can create beautiful pictures that mean something, but also accomplish something. This sort of way of art making can be difficult though, because you’re always thinking about creating something that can be sold or put in your portfolio, or used in some way to market yourself. Hell, even taking the picture of the art to put up on instagram can be stressful, because you want it to be perfect! You want the art world to see you through this frame, this filter, that can hold you back from creating something that just pushes you to create.

When I was younger, and sometimes even now, my hands just needed to draw. They needed to have a pencil and they needed to be scribbling. Now I can add a brush or pen to that list thanks to practice. However with this, I have gotten more afraid of making things. I’m afraid of doing stuff that people won’t like, that I can’t put in a professional or school portfolio. I’m afraid of making mistakes and wasting expensive art materials (Heck let’s face it, they’re not cheap even with awesome college discounts at A.C.Moore) It can be hard to make myself do anything now, because I never “Have anything to draw”, even though I have the world around me, and I can just draw something even that’s sitting on the coffee table in front of me. Filters and social media make drawing even more intimidating because we only see some people’s art through a filter of what they want to show us.

In reference to last week’s post about doing side projects, I wanted to add onto that and remind everyone that not everything you create has to be perfect or well made. Not everything has to be archivable, and not everything has to be worthy of a history book 100 years from now. Sometimes you just need to scribble and paint a cat made of flowers, and that’s okay! Without the bad illustrations, you can’t be wow’d at the amazing ones, after all. And without the bad ones, you can’t get better!

That’s all for this week, don’t forget to follow me on my instagram to get a good eye of terrible scribbles and practice drawings! Till next week, keep on drawing!