#field scientist

It’s been a long time since I’ve drawn a finished comic.

For a while, I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on myself to develop a new comic idea, and for about the same amount of time, drawing had stopped being fun. Probably not a coincidence. The point is, this pressure I was putting on myself was showing in my work. Like, looking back at my sketchbooks for the past year, I can see that my drawings actually got objectively worse over time and approaching a blank page with a pencil was this unhappy frustrating thing.

Part of it is how I’m always wanting to make this big epic sprawling gorgeous comic book adventure, and in my head it feels so awesome and ambitious and audacious, and everyone’s going to love it, and then I start to draw, and the crystal palace of a story that’s in my brain shatters almost immediately, because whatever I draw doesn’t come close to living up to the magnificence I’d constructed mentally. Plot holes galore. Artistic short comings. Insecurity takes root. And then the creative despair sinks in. You probably know what this feels like.

So that’s it. I’ve had enough of finding no enjoyment in drawing. I’m actively pushing away that compulsion to live up to this vague out-of-reach goal and leaving my mental baggage aside while I draw. And it feels good. 

I’m just having fun making up characters. If they happen to point to a bigger world, awesome. If they snowball into some bigger project, I’ll roll with it. 

For me drawing is simultaneously how I process life and how I escape from it. I think I’d gotten away from that, and it feels really good to be back to enjoying making things for myself again.