It’s a question of discipline.
I recently wrote Tom Richmond of Mad Magazine fame a brief note, to which he replied very promptly. I read Tom’s blog pretty regularly and the man writes almost as beautifully as he draws. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Tom a couple of times at past NCN conventions and he’s a great teacher and advocate of cartoonists and caricaturists.
Another person I’ve been reading recently is Steve Silver over on Facebook. Steve is a lead character designer in today’s animation field and recently started an artist’s group on Facebook where he posts motivational points on working as a creative individual.
Then there’s Sean ‘Cheeks’ Galloway, a comic artist and character designer who posts sketches and in progress designs, blogs, animates, and even though I’ve met him only briefly never forgets my face when we bump into each other at a convention.
Do you spot a trend yet? Successful, hard working artists, with families and jobs and probably even busier than I am in my own little world yet they still find time to blog and encourage and correspond with people on a regular basis. Whereas I find difficulty returning most emails within a three month period. It struck me that I should stop envying them this ability and do something about it.
As I look at the disorder that is my studio, I realized what I’m doing wrong is a question of discipline. Sure, I have discipline. I couldn’t put out nine comics a week without it, not to mention merchandise designs and other odds and sods of art. In the meantime though, the paperwork piles up, correspondence goes unanswered and the dustbunnies form warring societies behind the cpu like something out of an old EC comic. What I need to do is take that same energy and occasionally point it in another direction for an hour or two to get other things done and done well, so I don’t have to call 9-1-1 when a pile of old comics collapses upon me, pinning me to the linoleum as the cats pine for attention.
It’s not so much a question of priorities. I think I have those ducks well lined up. It’s the sundry activities in life that I make excuses about, that really would only take a few minutes of my attention to set mundanities right, instead of neglecting them until they become monsters I can’t ignore.
When someone asks me about being an artist, I always tell them there’s no shortcut for practice practice and MORE PRACTICE. There are no shortcuts. I think I may have just figured out there are no shortcuts for the rest of life either and I better start lifting my ponderous butt out of this chair a little more often to deal with it.
Later!
