Vlog! About Deconstruction and Study (Patreon)

Hey everyone, time for another little vlog update! I’m doing more inking on the career zine here, and as always I’m really grateful to have something concrete to work towards. As an artist, I’m always wrestling with self-doubt… “is this the right thing to be working on,” “is this the best thing I could be doing right now”... but when I can manage to put that aside and just focus on inking (my favourite phase of the process) it’s a great feeling.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m starting to invest more time into deconstruction and study lately. I think this is always a safe investment of time when the landscape ahead is uncertain. Practice is never wasted. Getting better at my craft is never going to be a detriment, no matter what I decide to do.

For me, this has involved a lot of “un-learning”. I didn’t have very much formal schooling in art -- just a few classes here and there -- and so like many self-taught cartoonists I sort of just muddled my way through to a kind of half-proficiency in most things. This has become a real barrier at this point, though, because while I feel like I have a good fundamental understanding of some things, there are massive gaps in other places that I’m now trying to overcome.

It’s strange, because art is so subjective and personal and everyone comes to it their own way. It’s not like there is a centralized course or resource where everyone agrees “this is the right way to do it”. Of course, if there were, art wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. A tutorial on oil painting is going to be structured in a completely different way to a tutorial on watercolour painting, and only about half of those techniques translate directly into a digital process. The courses you can find can be on very limited topics, and the teacher makes a huge difference. Even if they’re all good artists and good teachers, very few are going to create materials that can speak to the way you understand the visual world. Courses are often way too introductory or way too advanced, and hitting the sweet spot of “what I needed to hear right now” is rare and treasured.

It’s a lot like trying to learn programming, actually.

I’ve made peace with the fact that all I can really do is try and try and try and keep trying. I won’t be able to produce a decent digital painting until I can produce fifty terrible digital paintings. I won’t be able to pick good colours until I spend enough time picking wrong colours. I won’t be able to render beautiful details until I invest the time to render and render and render and still have it come up … looking wrong. That’s a tough pill to swallow! I feel like especially with social media there’s a lot of pressure to project that everything that you’re doing was 100% on purpose.

Alongside this, I’ve been trying really hard to more deeply understand myself and my own voice. So many techniques are interesting, but what do I want to do with it?

What do I like? Why do I like it? What do I want to develop, and what for? It’s drilling down into that uniqueness that I think will be the source of the real breakthroughs in my work. That being said, it has proven to be very difficult to be that honest with myself. My own tastes take a long time to untangle. It’s never easy, and it’s rarely comfortable. I feel like I have to navigate a lot of false-positives, like “oh, I think I like this,” and make sure it’s true and not liking something just because I’m “supposed to”.

Maybe with enough practice something will just ‘click’. Maybe it won’t. The point is finding joy in the process itself and sharing as much of that joy as I can with others while I’m here.