4 Inspirational Thingies to Help You Keep Going With Your Art

How do you keep going when (as half of that early 90s World) put it, you’re out of gas and you need a jacket? And the tyres are flat and the paint’s peeling ~you get the idea.

Obviously I haven’t been brimming with sunshine or handing a fistful of lollipops out to everybody lately ~truth be told I can’t remember the last time I had.

So what does the average monster do when they’ve got no one within easy reach radiating UV rays or spamming sugar on a stick? They look for it on the internet, of course ^^

These pick-me-ups worked for me when I got so low I hit the bottom of the mountainside the Grey Pilgrim smote the ruin of his enemy on.

Just to shake things up a little on the jillablog, you know? And maybe to point the way towards a little sun and something sweet ^^;

Better if you watch rather than take my word for it (cos what’s that worth really, right). But I will be taking some notes (for me as much as for you), and noting how I may not agree with everything these people say or do. But what they said here really helped me a lot <3

1. Don’t Give Up As An Artist ​

You know how YouTube makes suggestions to you based on what you watch? I suspect I started getting these videos on account of that art class I was taking a couple years back. In any case, I am very grateful to the algobots for showing me this video by Rafi Was Here Studios.  This is the one I watch a lot, when the gloomclouds come like once in a while, you know what I mean?

• Just because you’ve been ‘arting’ for a long time, doesn’t mean you never get discouraged.
• Your art career will ebb and flow as you try new things and every time you do, you’ll get discouraged.
• The voice in your head telling you that you’re going to fail is your biggest obstacle.
• Don’t let anything stop you from ‘arting’, including the fact that maybe nobody’s paying attention.
• You have two choices: Continue or quit. Why would you quit art?
• If nobody cares, would you quit even though you love doing it? It doesn’t make sense.
• Discouragement doesn’t go away.
• Either your track record shows that you keep going when you get discouraged, or you give up.
• As long as you persist, there’s no way you’re going to fail.
• If you’re afraid of failing or you get discouraged, you don’t go for it.
• Remember why you create art in the first place. It’s not because you want to be successful. Obviously we want to make money and support ourselves, but that’s not why.
• When people say ‘Why are you doing this, you’re not making any money’. It’s because you love it.
• When you work so hard and you don’t get the response you want, and impostor syndrome and insecurity come in, you get discouraged. You just have to push through and remind yourself why you’re doing what you do.
• At the end of the day, you’re not ‘arting’ for people’s responses or validation. You’re doing it because you want to and because it’s important to you.
• It’s easy to fall into the trap of ‘Nothing I do matters.’ Everything you do matters.
• If you have an experience where it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted it to, and you just give up, then that’s it. That’s the end of the story. So just keep going.

2. The Journey of an Artist ​

So this isn’t the video that made me follow Swarez Art; it was actually a couple of other videos about something quite different. But what I like most about these videos is their tough love and how straightforward they are.

Since I now understand that this, gloomcloud I’ve had overhead is not, *unusual*, and that people do go through these things, I knew this channel would have something on this.

It’s subtitled how desire and momentum can change over time, and my main takeaway from this is how even when you get low, your work keeps getting better. Things will get better~ the graph goes back up. It doesn’t stay down. You just have to keep going and maybe take a step back to get a big picture view of things.

No notes for this one because it really is better when you watch him draw the graph ^^ (I know, I’m not usually one for graphs either, but, chalk another one up to datavis ^^)
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3. Artists Don’t Have To Believe In Themselves To Have Success

What actually drew me to this video from Film Courage featuring cinematographer Brad Rushing was a comment from a fellow artist on a previous jillablog post. The comment was about how most true artists need to believe in themselves, which I would write about, M, because it has given me something to think about, for sure.

It’s just, I’ve been drawing on my own experience for my posts and I feel like maybe now wouldn’t be the best time. In any case, I don’t suppose ‘self-confidence’ often appears in the same sentence as ‘discouragement’ (unless the former negates the latter somehow).

So this video answers ‘How do you keep faith in yourself and in your craft during turbulent times?’ My notes are mostly from the first three and a half minutes, but keep watching to the end. Maybe you’ll have some lightbulb moments along the way like I did ^^
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• When you’re so frustrated and down, and don’t believe in yourself, set a goal. You don’t have to believe in yourself, you just have to do the steps that you committed to do to get you through.
• A lot of artists struggle with self-esteem because ‘your identity is tied up in your work even if you don’t want it to be, because you put so much of yourself into it.’
• If people say they like your work but the jobs don’t follow, you wonder where the payoff is.
• Try to keep faith in yourself and when crises come, remind yourself that you are an artist. That was the contract you made and you never said you wanted to be rich. It’s nice to be self-sufficient and secure, but remember the contract you made. It’s that simple.
• Look at the work you’ve done and are doing now. If people don’t like it, or if everybody likes it and you don’t get a job or awards, you still have to do the work. You were given the gift and the opportunities and that’s enough.
• If you want something enough, you’re going to do the things you need to (even if they make you uncomfortable).
• Everyone wants a formula or roadmap to success, but it doesn’t exist. It’s always different and a moving target and you have to learn as you go. Take your best guess and try, and if it doesn’t work, don’t quit. Try something different.

​4. Writing Is A Bad Idea

The fourth ‘thingy’ on my list here is actually two thingies, and they aren’t meant to be watched, but read. Makes sense, considering Steven Pressfield is a writer, although I discovered him in a YouTube video (about something else, again).

In the first of the two, a Finnish writer named Kati had just about given up on her writing career. She gave everything up to pursue her dreams, scored book deals, and basically lost all her savings by age 60.

Lots of people replied before Steven himself did, and there are two thingies here that I now find rather interesting. 1. Mr Pressfield basically said what Mr Perez (Rafi from no. 1) and Mr Rushing (from no. 3) said: Remember why you’re doing this. It’s for the art, not for anything else.

And 2. I saw my own reply to Kati three years ago. I guess… I was a lot less down then than I am now ^^;

But I’d like to think where I’m at today is at least trying to get back on the horse. I think I’ve learned quite a few things in the past few, even though they happened pretty relatively fast. And while I don’t really know how to fix them (if they can be fixed at all!), trying’s gotta count for something? (Shut up, Yoda ^o^)

I think it’s been good for me to revisit the thingies here and I’d like to thank you for revisiting them with me <3 I think it might have also been good for me to see what the me from before was able to say to someone else ~a stranger, but a fellow artist struggling in the same mire.

I hope that these thingies helped you, too, even a little. That’s the way out from under the gloomclouds right? Taking even little steps? Because when you take little steps, you keep going~

Let’s keep going together ^^;
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