Thank you, Bobby Chiu

Last Monday morning I was running through my mental to do list, trying to decide what to work on that day, what new piece of artwork which could, if it was good enough, get me into the studio, gallery or agency of my dreams.

But where to start? What to do? An illustration or painting? Some character designs or the short story I'd left unfinished? In one week I'd received three rejections. Three more to add to that already thick pile. So whatever I did it had to be better than good. Because the walls of my apartment were shrinking. And pressure - from parents, from depressed friends demanding I be problem free for them (could I ask them to return the favor without sounding like a bitch?), bills, my own unfulfilled expectations, all of them pushing in on me from every side. I was drowning and feared sinking deeper if I applied my time to the wrong choice. And my sister, my support of last resort, was unreachable, in Fiji, until she called with her new number. So round and round I went. Until I'd given myself a better than good migraine and had to lie down the rest of the morning.

Great. Just great.

Later, my head still aching in a dull, unrelenting way, I wandered around the internet looking for useful things, or something useful to do, ending up on the Imaginism blog. I clicked on one of their Youtube tutorials. Then another, and another. What I'd taken to be lessons on storyboarding or digital painting were instead the artist, Bobby Chiu's meditations on life and advice on how to succeed as an artist as he paints a digital illustration in forty minutes or less. Tutorials, basically, on how to persist in the creative endeavor no matter what.

In one video he explains how artists should never take a crappy art job just for the money...Like I've done. Time and again. Because I assumed any art job was better than not working at all. It robs them of their enthusiasm for art, he says. You go home, after a long day of creating crappy art, art that is useless for your portfolio, and you're not going to feel like working on your own stuff. And before you know it, your skills have stagnated along with your career. Viola. My life.

Another thing he talks about. Practice. Like an athlete, hands, tone, line, color. The work of other artists, how do they think? What can you learn from them? Practice, for ten, fifteen hours a day. Always pushing oneself to the next level. Have I been doing that? Now and then, yes. But consistently, no. I've gotten lazy. I've been spending more time looking for work, or distracting myself from my state of unemployment, than I've done practicing the very skills I want to be hired for. The drive I had in school, where I went from all day drawing classes to extra life drawing workshops at night, every day of the week (except Sunday where I went sketching) had been burned away by too many crappy art jobs.

But not any more. Inspired by Mr. Chiu, I dusted off the Wacom and began painting digitally, a skill I've long desired to learn but had deemed so difficult, so frustrating and counterintuitive to one used to the feel of oils and brushes, that I gave up after two or three very tight but not very good paintings.

Back in school I would have continued on despite the frustration because my drive to improve was so intense. Frustration, he says over and over again, is nothing more than the cracks in the dam. It means I'm starting to learn. And I'd given up just as I was starting to take off. Never mind. Nothing for it but to start again. Eight hours later I'd completed the image in my previous post. A nice start. Pat myself on the back.

Another subject he talks at length about, his theory that bad things now equals great things in the future. Because current difficulty, he says, is nothing more than the universe asking you, Are you sure you really want this? Because if you are then you're going to dust yourself off, despite setbacks and disappointments that would make less resilient souls consider plan B, and plow forward. Where good things await. Have faith.

I listened to these videos every day last week. And much of this week, too, as I worked for eight, ten, twelve hours each day. (Except Sunday and Monday when I went out sketching. Sunshine + sketching = happiness. My dream studio has glass walls, and a glass ceiling, with trees on one side and the ocean on the other.) I am retraining myself to work at the level of enthusiasm I used to work at, to have the same kind of optimism and belief in my future I had back then. I imagine, throughout the day, a more satisfying way of living, one without so much struggle, a life I am fully capable of achieving. And, at night, I see my next painting in my imagination, and I can feel how it should be painted, though I'm not at that level yet. But, as I said somewhere last week, I know I will get there. Wish me luck.