A couple days ago I accidentally deleted an illustration that I spent 3-4 hours working on, which caused quite the emotional breakdown and spiralling negative thoughts about myself and my illustration work 🤡 fun times! Thankfully I’m now working through my feelings a lot better, and learning the hard way that I need to regularly duplicate my files on Procreate lol…
This new years, I set myself a goal of creating more illustrations for myself, this developed into creating a collection of travel related drawings, illustrating some of the memories I was making. I was really excited about the project, and the first few illustrations I created were ones I was pretty happy with. But as time went on, and ideas were growing, I started getting more critical of my own work, and stressed that I was getting behind.
I wanted to quickly create multiple illustrations, with this expectation for them to all be to the same standard of my usual work, and all on a programme that I still haven’t quite mastered, as I obviously can’t bring my full set up with me. This, along with the very incredible, but also very overstimulating experiences I’m having whilst travelling, were all a bit too much for me to handle.
I also feel for the first time (at least to this degree) that social media is having a negative impact on me. Usually I find platforms like Instagram and Linked In a really helpful and inspiring tool, and I’m happy to see other people succeeding. However, with my mental health already being in a negative overwhelmed state, I was constantly seeing incredible projects coming into fruition, and this lead me to thinking I needed to take note, and be inspired, and do similar things, rather than focusing on my existing project, and being graceful with myself and a calmer and slower approach to continued learning and progression within my career.
So for now, I’m taking a break from social media, and a break on this personal project, giving myself space and time to breath and decompress. I have an exciting commission in the works too, with a client who is thankfully giving me far less stress than I give myself, so that’s I nice distraction! For now enjoy some messy sketches to breakup this need for perfectionism.
I’m back in the UK next week! So hopefully by the end of the month I’ll be re-opening my online shop, sharing some upcoming market dates, and some finished drawings too. Ideally all with a much clearer headspace 🫶🏻