Making art as a kid is a lot easier and more fun than it is as an adult. Art should always be enjoyable, but the more I understand about it, the more of that underlying pressure I feel to only put out the best I can offer. Right now, that's too much to ask of myself. I no longer draw for fun and I'm always expecting that my work will turn into something I can benefit from in some way. It's no longer about that joy that I had when I was younger.

When I was younger, drawing was this thing that nobody else seemed to be interested in. All the other kids around me felt so distant because I was the only one who could draw, that was until high school anyway. So there was never any competition to worry about, I could be sure that no matter what I did I would always be the best at drawing and at least I had that. Then came high school and I found out there were other creative kids, and they were making all sorts of amazing things too, and we were all being graded on our work. That was around the time I started to "obsess" over whether my work was good enough.

I had a subscription to Gameinformer magazine and loved looking at the featured art every month, and fantasized about my work being featured one day. That's actually the reason I came up with the Okami Fan Art I drew, that picture was to be mailed in to gameinformer's offices with the hope that it would win first place in their magazine. Before that picture I never, ever worried about the outcome of something I drew, but it's been a reguler problem since then. I completely stopped working on it for almost a year because I worried it was not good enough to submit. I wanted to win, that was all I cared about, and it prevented me from even contributing my work.

I'm writing this so that maybe someone can gain some wisdom from my mistakes. I recently watched a video by Satchbag on this very issue, the conundrum of wanting your work to be absolutely perfect till  it cripples your ability to be satisfied. In the video he quotes another individual who works on the principle that "Done is better than perfect". This was something I absolutely needed to hear and that I need to repeat over and over. The work you do will never be as grand as it is in your head, it will never reach that point where you will become satisfied with it.

In order to get back to improving at art, I almost need to cut myself off from it. To get away from seeing how good everybody else is and just focus on how good I am. I'm really starting to believe that drawing 100 crappy drawings is better than drawing 1 good one, because at least you're training yourself for the future. If you do 1 nice drawing... well you only learned how to draw 1 thing really well. That probably won't help you too much down the road.

To try to bring this back full circle, don't worry if you need to take a crooked path to get around the wall, if you try to keep your path straight you'll never get past it. It's better to finish with a sloppy method than to get stuck halfway through your perfect run. There's a lot of halfway finshed work on my plate and I hope to bring you all that and more in 2016.