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Morning, DJ. Self doubt is a tough one. I like your approach of becoming an editor of sorts pushing these crippling thoughts. Love that, think I’ll use that and if I do succeed? Woohoo! Not ah man if I succeed I’ll be laughed at even more! No no..

I’d only show my personal stuff to my friend who also drew back in high school. Went to my community college after graduating high school for 2-3 semesters, and I loved the art classes I took. A teacher there gave me some self confidence with my art and that helped a lot. I stopped going because of lack of savings, and financial aid denied me so I decided to take a semester off and work to save up for another few semesters. That turned into a year, and eventually became 8 years later. 😳

When I did go back I found my self confidence was high and I didn’t have these thoughts of people laughing at my work like several years before. It wasn’t until several years ago that I did a group show with other local artists that this doubt started to creep in. Just bizarre that it has been some 20 years and here it was again. Then I remembered what triggered these feelings, and it was from a friend (or so I thought) who had DM’ed me on Instagram after I had posted a drawing of a girl on a skateboard. He said I should focus on posting good stuff only, not to show the unfinished /unrefined work. On a good day, a professional artist’s crap sketch is better than your finished stuff. Just a thought. I took it in stride saying people like seeing the process, and I said thanks for your input and told him to go fly a kite, then promptly blocked him on all my social media accounts. I told my friends and they all said that was a dick move, an insult plain as day. That just made me more determined to keep showing the process, and also improving my skills. I’m 80% self confident and 20% self doubt these days, but I try to tamp it down when it rears its fugly head 👹👿👊🏻. Back to drawing! Mirror…hmmm.

PS: Handling criticism/critiques maybe that’s a subject for another week. 🤔

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