Someday I’ll sit down and read my own comic from start to finish.
It’s kind of an exciting daydream.
I am motivated to reach that day somehow. How will I feel reviewing the result of all this time and creative energy? Will I see how much I’ve improved over time, or will I instead notice a depreciation of quality via ennui?
Honestly, it matters little how I feel about my work quality over time, I think I’ll be more focused on the genuine pride of ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISHING SOMETHING.
Did I yell that? I definitely feel like I hit the keys a little harder there.
I may still be a bit frustrated with myself.
I crave motivation.
This month; I’m thinking about what gets me going, what keeps me coming back to the drawing table, what gets me in flow, what gets me inspired. As I’ve spent time thinking about what motivates me, I’ve been getting some reasonably agreeable results. In addition, I discovered an interesting, rather unwelcome byproduct of this thinking: some of my motivators are… not so virtuous on paper…
Here’s a few of the discoveries I made about my motivators:
I want to take real pride in my work
One thing I think I haven’t best utilized in this development phase would be my sense of humility vs my sense of pride. Pride in your work is important, right? Though I prefer to keep my ego in check, I am still aware of the fact that I am aiming to create something that I will be able to feel good about sharing with others. Something that has my name on it and can be revered, at least, as “impressive”, both to people I share it with and to myself. I need to be further motivated by a sense of success, I believe.
Why I claimed above that these motivators are not so virtuous on paper is the fact that most of what I’m talking about in this month’s topic stem from pride. Subjectively, pride has always been something of mercurial nature to me. My ambivalence seems to be a study of values, ever shifting like dunes in a desert. Wielding pride, to me, feels like a dance of ideals that cancel themselves out in different contexts:
I want to have and exude self-confidence (+)
I loathe what I interpret as “arrogance” in others (-)
I root for the underdog (+)
As a creative, I want to be envied and admired (-)
I want to be considered someone who seldom over-speaks (+)
I want to know that the quality of my work simply speaks for itself (-)
Pride is necessary for those who believe in their self-worth (+)
Pride must be a “deadly sin” for a reason… (-)
So, the best way I believe I can motivate myself here is to remember this: I am not doing this because I am in love with myself, I am doing this because I am in love with the work that I do. The result of this project is the thing I want people to find amazing, not the creator. Any positive sentiment that rolls off of my project and falls to me is a bonus. I hope for these bonuses, because you can’t deny that validation for your efforts often feels pretty damn good. But the big goal is that I feel more aligned with having pride in the works I create, more so than in myself for being the creator.
It is a struggle.
I want to defeat Imposter Syndrome
I want to be able to look at the work of my peers and feel inspired, not deflated. But, damn, I know some artists who just make this all look easy. It frustrates me sometimes because some seem to speak of themselves similarly to how I sometimes speak of myself. Lacking. Unmotivated. Lazy. Not particularly talented. I wonder if they see me the way I see them, as if there’s some quality they admire in me that somehow makes us appear as creative equals. I just don’t know.
Next month I’ll be giving a talk at an art conference. I’ll be speaking about what an artist needs to consider when they decide to make their artistry into a brand.
What am I doing? I don’t believe I belong among the other speakers.
These other speakers, many have local and national renown for their works or pursuits. They have bodies of work to make references to when explaining the firsthand-experiential aspects of their platforms. They have creative goals they’re working towards and they have evidence of their efforts. I am not sure I have the same qualities. I cannot fully remember how I was selected for this. Why was I offered this opportunity? It is something I have been thinking about for a month or so, now.
I hate this feeling. I believe it has something to do with the “dance of ideals” I mentioned about pride above. This has to be “Imposter Syndrome”, as they call it. I believe I’ve mentioned a couple of times now over the last few posts that a kind commenter diagnosed me with “Imposter Syndrome” a while back. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been called out for it.
The thing about “Imposter Syndrome” is that it doesn’t have to be relevant. I don’t have to compare myself to other artists and their bodies of work. I believe I am on my own path. I am motivated to try and defeat this bad feeling of being an imposter. I want to know what it feels like to not be intimidated by other artists, and to be able to talk to them like we both have something to offer.
I want to get into a sense of rhythm and momentum
Flow. It’s something I mentioned above. “Flow state” is that good feeling you get from working on something. It’s a sensation akin to being “in the zone”. I crave that feeling often. It could be considered a sort of “productivity high”. When I am drawing or writing, I sometimes feel the sensation of “flow” creeping up on me, and I begin to get excited. I feel enthralled to be drawing, I feel agile in problem-solving, I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile and I’m doing a good job at it.
I worry the most about this one because as the years have gone by, I have found myself becoming jaded. As I said above, I sometimes look at the work of my peers or other digital artists and I think that I’ll never be able to hold a candle to their skill and work ethic. I am much more aware of my energy limitations and I find it easier to succumb to relaxing activities earlier and earlier in the day. I sometimes find myself in a mindset which greatly resembles a “voice of reason”; this voice wants me to stop pretending I’m going to make a slam-dunk totally radical comic and focus on being a better provider.
Being jaded is never a good thing. You lose sight of what you used to (and probably still) enjoy. You’re a bummer to those who are still brave enough to be inspired and energized by whatever it is which jades you. You give up on things. You sit and ruminate on where you went wrong. Time continues to pass.
I want to justify my investments this thing in the right side of my brain which claims to identify as “creativity”
I’ve been to school. Yup, I’m pretty priveldged. Heck, I went to school, then I went back to school for more school (because I’m priveldged and an idiot). I went to SCAD for my bachelor’s and I was exposed to the world of art. I was surrounded by amazing artists for four incredible years. This was an expensive endeavor that cleaned out my bank account entirely and set my parents back far more than my own meager savings. I am so very grateful for that time, because so much good came from it.
But, since that time at SCAD, I find myself unsure if I’ve even come close to living up to what the school set me up for, which were the things I dreamed of. I was supposed to be a game designer. I was supposed to be doing QA for 3–5 shitty years before scoring an assistant design job somewhere in California. I was supposed to be Art Director for a game I dreamed up years ago, pitched to a team, then shipped by age 30. Game of the year, baby!
Lofty.
But, those kinds of dreams really moved me.
Where did that dreamer in me go? Am I still here, somewhere? Is this what age does to a person, or is that dreamer in a dormant state, waiting to be awakened?
I made monetary and time investments as a big-dreamer, only to find myself merited with papers, but uninspired and sapped of my verve.
I learned so much. I want to make the people who are rooting for me proud. I hope that someday I can finally show them something, even if they don’t fully understand it, something that has brought me fulfillment to do and has set me off on a positive path.
Maybe this project is that. Maybe it is something else.
I don’t ever want to forget this particular motivator.
I want to tell an uplifting story someday
These motivators will hopefully keep me in the game. Keep me thinking about myself as a creative and an artist with big goals. Big, but achievable if I am strong and smart enough. The far-end result of that achievement comes long after the actualization and any pats on the back I may receive. It is something rather casual in manifestation. Something with a sense of longevity. That ‘something’ is the story.
I briefly talked about this in my May post of last year. Here’s a link:
5/12/2022 — I’m on a Mission
It’s time to win at this.
In that post, I said that I want to use this project (mostly this blog and any useable “design ephemera”) as an example. In short: I want to be able to find a point in this project where I can clearly conclude it as a “success” or a “failure”. I don’t really know what either of those mean at this time, but that’s irrelevant. That value of that “point of success or failure” is that I can reminisce on the whole of the project and create a narrative to tell others about.
The change in me since that post from last May is that I am absolutely not interested in telling the potential “failure” version of this story. I don’t want this project to reach a point where I have to say “well shit, this is it. This is the moment where I pronounce this project officially fucked.”
I don’t want to tell people a bummer of a story. I don’t want to tell anyone the story of how I really wanted to make a comic, spent years dreaming and designing it, tried to do everything right, then realized that my abilities couldn’t match my standards and my efforts couldn’t align with my ambitions. You know, like an idiot with too much wasted time on his hands. That sounds like a story that I wouldn’t want to remember.
It’s a cold, icy day today. It’s not necessarily reflective of how I feel. I actually greatly enjoy these days where I can write in this blog. The icicles hanging from the tree branches outside are really pretty, but I am still really looking forward to Spring.
I declared it in my last post, and I mean it: This will be my year.
❤ Casey