Two super mean tree dudes that were tremendous fun to paint :) I have also added the initial sketch and color lay-in for anyone who might be itnerested!

Listen,I like Instagram! And you guys at least seeeeeeeeeeeeem to like the watercolors I've been posting recently. So there we go, I am giving one of them away FOR FREE on Instagram, Boom! If you would like to have this original drawing picturing everyone's favourite onionbro in your house, go to my instagram profile to http://instagram.com/christofgrobelski , like the picture and hope for the best <3

I will be picking a random winner in 48 hours.

Monthly Review, June 2017

Hi everyone!

I have been (and still am) a little hesitant to post an monthly review thing this month because to be perfectly honest there just is not much to show as much as actual work is concerned. Most of my freelance work is under NDA and there was not too much time left for personal work and/or studies because as I mentioned last month me and my girlfriend finally moved into our new appartment and have been insanely busy setting everything up.

During the move something happend though, that I wanted to talk about. In a way my thoughts tend to spiral down quickly into the „aaah whats the point -realm“ when it comes to writing these long texts. I was debating myself if I should actually do this privately or if I should write it down and share it publicly but as the thought of sharing it has been spinning around in my head for three days now I figured that I might as well just write it down and try to get it out of my head that way. Maybe this resonates with someone, and maybe someone might even feel motivated to share his/her own views on and experience with this.

The thing I want to talk about is my experience of self worth and how it relates to my work, my attitude towards my work that is in turn resulting from that, maybe even my view on painting and drawing in the widest sense (as it relates to me personaly) and at last about how this might have started to change a little bit during the last few days in particular AND how aaaaaall that relates to the picture at the top of this post.

BUT first things first.

As I already mentioned we moved into a new appartment. It‘s large, it‘s cool, it‘s expensive and thus scary as fuck for a struggling freelancer like me, but that shall not really be the point here, maybe next month once the situation has settled in a little bit.

What‘s important here is that in this new appartment I do have an entire room just for myself, a REAL grown up person‘s office basically. Up until now all I had was a tiny tiny room that I could barely fit a desk in and for the past six months when my girlfriend and I moved around a little bit from Airbnb to Aribnb while she was tryting to get a fulltime office job I did not even have that. A simple desk had to to do during that time.

So now I have this biiig room with more than enough room to have all my drawing and painting supply out at the same time, ready to go whenever I want and it is great!

A few days ago after we got all our stuff into the new place I was sitting in my chair looking aorund the office trying to figure out what to hang on my walls, I just needed something up there, the room was too empty to feel comfortable.

I sat there thinking about all the awesome art from all the different artists I admire that I would like to decorate my walls with but the issue was that I don‘t own any prints not to mention originals here and just printing something out seemed kind of lame.

Being a little bummed out about that I proceeded to go through all my stuff when I found all my marker and watercolor drawings I did last year during „maysketchaday“. I looked through them and I noticed „ hey these are kind of fun!“. Moreover I noticed that they immediately sparked the desire to just grab my markers and get to painting again. I remembered the fun I had trying out a new medium last year and this just got me going. Weirdly enough I did not have this feeling for YEARS. Even during the time I painted these, sure it was kind of enjoyable but it all had this „o well, it‘s a drawing I guess“ feeling to it.

And then something hit me, and this is the thing I want to talk about here.

While feeling kind of excited about getting to drawing right away after rediscovering these tiny things actually feeling good about them I immediately remembered that I used to beat the SHIT out of me „emotionally“ after each one of these, sucking the joy out of the process I have just felt minutes before. I would be bummed out that the drawing did not come out the way I wanted, that I was not improving( which wasn‘t even true) and that I am not even close to anything „all the other artists“ are capable of. I took the drawings, put them in a drawer and would be happy to not have to look at them again.

Remembering all this I kept thinking about it and quickly noticed that I am doing this all the time, I beat myself down after each and every drawing and painting I do. I do this subconciously afer every single drawing I finish. I do this based on the work others do and even based on the response I get from it on social media, stupid shit like that. I am  not talking about a healthy mentality that made me realizy my shortcomings and motivated me to do better next time, I am talking about being resentful and downright hateful towards my own work and to be frank to myself as a person.

Thoughts like „ I‘ve been doing this for years now, I should be better“, „others have started drawing later than me and have surpassed me by miles, why am I still so bad at this?“ „is talent actually relevant afteral, or am I simply not intelligent enough to see the flaws and to be able to improve on them?“ were my daily routine. To a degree they still are, I just started conciously noticing this days ago.

I realized what I have been doing this for a period of years and it almost seems comical to me now that I was actually wondering why I was getting kind of depressive and resentful towards my work and myself even. All I do all day is trying to improve my skills with all that I have and after each time I decide to punish myself for that. What is supposed to happen if one keeps that up for years and even turns it into a subconcious routine?

Obviously you stop at least liking what you are doing, hell you might even get scared to do it, which is definitely what I experienced.

It feels a little weird to write this down in a rather short way (although for a simple blog entry this sure looks enormous) because this way of thinking has becomce such a huge part of me.

Measured on the time I spent doing if for the last 10 years I think it is obvious that drawing and painting has been the most important aspect of my life. During that time it has acutally become a part of me. I as a human am defined a lot through it. There just is not much left of me when one takes the drawing and painting aspect away from me, it is not just what I do for work. It‘s another topic to decide if this fact alone is actually good or bad, what I am trying to say is that this thing „painting“ has a lot of power over me. My personal well being as a human is highly dependant on the way I handle my relationship towards painting. If this relationship is compromised by constant self hate and punishment it‘s only obvious that all this bleeds into the rest of my personality. I feel like as a result of all this I have been kind of desolving into this unhealthy spiral of self doubt and resentment towards myself.

Its also another story to go into of when I think all of this has started, all I know for now is that this is something that HAPPENED, it has not been that way from the beginning. At some point something switched and drawing which was this huge and exciting unbeatable but beautiful and POSITIVE mountain of a thing became this dreadful chaotic monster that one can not get a handle on no matter what.

I can‘t really tell why all this dawned on me as soon as I held these drawings of dead people in my hands but it sure did. I also tend to be rather scepticals towards these moments of „revelation“ but I felt this so strongly and clearly at that moment and I still do that I decied to act on it and to ultimately write about it.

I decided to take all of them and hang them on my wall and to just have them there as a reminder that this is actually what I do and that no matter how these turned out these were the best things I could do at that time and that I don‘t have to be ashamed for or angry about them but that I am actually allowed to like them for what they are.

Now are they the best drawings ever? Hell no, they aren‘t even „professional quality“ (whatever that means) and I am not trying to trick myself into thinking that they are. But they are a part of me in some way, I painted them, I gave it my all when I painted them and this is a good thing. They have a right to be pinned on that wall. They remind me where I was a year ago, they show me where I should improve on, they motivate me to do better and they make me want to get to painting as soon as I enter the room. What‘s bad about that?

The impulse to just lock them up in a drawer and hating myself for having created it is so utterly destructive and stupid, sitting here right now writing this makes me realize that even more.

As a matter of fact I came up with a plan out of all of this.

There is still a ton of free space on my walls, I am going to use it. Whenever I paint or draw something that I think turned out okay, or god forbid even „good“ I will pin it on the wall. One day sooner or later the wall will be filled with no room left, that‘s when I will start swapping out drawings one at the time. The new „best“ drawing will replace the current „worst“ one on the wall. I think I will also divide the wall into sections I want to improve upon like „watercolors“ „oilpaintings“ „anatomy“ „design“ and so on. I want this to feel exciting again and I want to actually see my progress rather than just feeling like sinking into a swamp of „o well I hope I am going to end up somewhere sometime“

There it is, I think I poured my heart out, I don‘t really know what to say anymore.

So what‘s the point of this text in addition of just allowing me to sort out my thoughs on that topic?

I think that if you belong to the kind of artists (or people in general) who tend to go down the path of self loathing for trying to do something thats arguably hard to do, no matter if conciously or unconciously you might want to start looking at what you are doing selfhate wise and try to figure out a strategy for yourself to get out of that. As I already said I have been thinking about this for the past week or so so nothing I say is really worthy of being called „founded advice“ or anything like that but there are very personal lessons that I think I am learning right now which feel right and more importantly feel like a good means of proceeding into the future with a healthy mindset to improve and enjoy whatever this all is.

Don‘t be ashamed for what you are doing and incourage yourself like you would incourage a person you care about. Not being the best at something should feel interesting and exciting, it does not mean that you suck as a person. You are your own benchmark, do your best, try to improve on your weaknesses and be thankful for your wins and losses on that path.

Don‘t be an asshole towards yourself!

Talk to you next month!

Monthly Review May 2017

whew here we go again. I actually forgot to do this for April, whoops. 

That being said April has been a pretty slow month so you did not miss much.

May however has been pretty busy as you can see, probably the busiest month I had so far as far as freelance as concerned, I have no Idea how I managed to cramp some personal stuff in there as well. I actaully have finished some more work, both commercial and personal stuff but I can’t /don’t want to show that yet :)

Soo let’s do this.

Art/ freelance stuff

Freelance has been going well, it has slowed down a little bit since the last month but there has not been a shortage of work nevertheless. June might turn out a little bit slower but I am actually planing on picking up some personal work again, so that’s not too bad :)

In my freetime I’ve been picking up the real paints and brushes again and gave gouache a shot. I’ve been wanting to focus on traditional painting for quite some time now jumping from oils to markers to watercolors which was a lot of fun but none of these mediums proved to be something I wanted to persue for actual finished work. Gouache is really different there, I am  having a lot of fun with it as it’s so damn flexible as a medium and at the same time it’s really easy to use as far as setting the whole workspace up is concerned, it kind of unites the best of all worlds in one medium at least for what I am planing to do with it.

For now I’ve been experimenting a little bit with it, trying a bunch of different stuff and trying to figure out a workflow that would end up in results that I actually like. Still not where I want them to be at all buuut I am getitng there:)

personal/life stuff:

Weightloss has been going really well even if it has slowed down a bit (which is bound to happen I believe the closer you get to a “normal” weight) . I still have to lose around 7-8 punds until I am where I want to be and I hope to be there by the end of next month.

The much more interesting news is the fact that my girlfriend and I do fiiiiiiiiiiiiinally know where we are going to live haha. She actually got a job in Hamburg and we will be moving into our new appartment on July 1st which is SO SO SO SOOO AWESOME!!!

We found a really cool appartment and will finally have my own “office” again to stuff all my stuff and myself in. I can’t wait until we can move in, it’s going to be so great!

I guess that’s it for this month I guess. A lot of stuff has happened but I am also super happy that freelance is just keeping it’s pace more or less. Having the feeling of being able to just flow along with it is a nice change of pace compared to the constant existential fear stress levels of the last months.