I hit a turning point last month with my art and where I want to go with it moving forward. I had a pretty turbulent start to the year, during which I had to complete finals for a book project-not ideal. Things had thankfully settled for me by the time I handed in all the final artwork, and I had a week or two off before I was supposed to be starting my next commission project, so not much of a break. I had verbally agreed to it and just received the brief but hadn’t signed anything yet. I sat down to start some early sketches for it, but found myself struggling to get into it. I’ve been telling myself that I’m burnt out for a while now, but I would still be able to keep working through it—almost on autopilot. But this time was different, I just couldn’t bring myself to draw or think at all. I made the difficult decision to step away from the project and take some time to evaluate.

Commission work has really been the driving force for me since starting out freelancing and I’ve been fortunate to have a steady stream of projects coming in ever since; however, over the last few years, it has gotten much quieter. I would catch myself taking this as a personal failure and that my work wasn’t good anymore or I wasn’t doing social media well enough to grab clients attention. I felt very lost creatively and I find that making my own work is always what makes me grow as an artist and feeds my creative spark.

Having some breathing space from any work helped me come to the realisation that I want to spend more of my time creating for myself, putting my personal work at the forefront, and being very selective about the commissions I take on. I’ll note this is a scary decision to make financially, but I really feel like I’ve hit a wall and it’s now or never to course correct. When I do take a commission, I have to be much better at balancing that with my personal work and not letting it completely consume my workday, like I have been.

So for the past month I’ve spent time in a sketchbook, drawing just for me again. I’d been feeling boxed in with this ‘style’ that I’d curated and gotten too in my head about. When I first started drawing more seriously as a teen, my drawing style would be ever-evolving, as I did, but in recent years it has become very stagnant. For the past year or so, when I did make personal work, most of the time I was making work that I thought was expected of me, the same old. And with commission work taking up so much of my time, I never gave myself the space to work at it.

So I opened a new sketchbook and on the first page, I wrote down what I wanted my work to be going forward and how I wanted it to look. It really helped to see it written down and how simple it looked on the page compared to how confusing it felt in my head.

I wrote this list on 20th May and haven’t revisited it since writing it; at the time I mostly just wanted to get the jumbled thoughts in my head out and organised.

Written are:

• more narrative work

• elements of eeriness/fantasy

• minimal colour palettes

• no shading, block colour, line art

• simplify faces

• make characters smaller so their whole body fits on the page/looser figures

• world build / create a full scene

• not completely realistic environments

Looking at this a little over a month later is interesting because there are some points I’ve achieved, some not yet, and some that I don’t feel as pulled to anymore. I like the idea of writing a list like this every so often, almost as a push to keep growing and evolving.

About two weeks ago, after deciding to focus on personal work, I received a commission brief that I couldn’t turn down. The deadline is at the end of July so not too long of a project and it gives me the chance to practice balancing my personal work alongside it. I’ve been managing this balance well so far, and whenever I notice that I’ve spent 2-3 consecutive days on the commission, I make sure to dedicate a day solely to personal work.

I could keep going, but I’ll stop here! I wasn’t expecting this to be so long but I also felt the need to share where I’m at. I’ll be sharing sketchbook pages from the last month soon!

Thank you for being here; I’d love to hear where you are creatively.

xo