Super grateful and excited for the past 3 weeks participating in Lilla Roger’s Make Art that Sells course on Illustrating Children’s Books.
Last year I crowd funded the opportunity for this course to see whether it was a possibility for me, and I was so grateful for all of my lovely supporters who donated so that i could be here right now!!! So here goes, I thought I would share a bit of my journey so far I think we are about half way through this course right now. 🙂
Firstly thought, it’s not the first time I have done one of Lilla’s course’s and I knew this would be a major commitment in terms of time and challenging my artistic, digital and creative blocks around doing this work, but something I realised about my self is that I am ok with putting myself out of my comfort zone. It might be challenging there might be difficult times but pushing through will move me forward.
True enough it has been ALL of that. The start to this year, I have been doing alot of mindset work, connecting with like minded people and going deep in my why and where I have come from the recent years. There have been lots of chapters shifting at the moment and I realised I really needed to sit with these a while as there are a some transitions I am in the process of making. I had a I had a conversation recently with a mentor recently about the fact that for me the illustration side of things is something that keeps coming at me, it keeps knocking at my door and I think i keep pushing it away. There have been times I have been focused on it and then another project will come my way, mouths need to be feed, focus will need to be shifted and this has been pushed to the side, that has been ok for a while and then it comes back again, its difficult to explain but a internal drive / connection that is coming up. This week i have embraced that, remembered that and when i was having a few difficult days struggling with my process, I tried working traditionally, then tried digitally, then tried both and then switched up between Adobe Photoshop, the Illustrator then back to Photoshop again, all of it was not feeling right I pushed on.
I saw all the amazing work done by the people in the group longing to find my own feet as to how it was going to work for me. I stuck to my idea despite the fact that I felt it was quite different and could perhaps not work. Yet, after work ALL day on my birthday without a break and then waking the middle of the night with an Assignment deadline looming there was a break through. Here are a few of the works in progress shot of the course so far, we have worked on characters, emotions and poses. Some parts I have found quite easy others as I have described have been challenging. I know there is still lots I would like to do on these but the great thing is that I can come back and revisit these after. Like i keep saying in all of my art classes and teachings its about the journey not the end result. [bctt tweet=”Like i keep saying in all of my art classes and teachings its about the journey not the end result.” username=”creativehardt”] I could hear myself (and I did actually talk to myself ) about what i would and have said to people attending my classes who are having trouble with their work and the whole thing reminded me just how overwhelming it can be when its just not happening for you the way you want.
Keep going, push through there is always something to learn and always another drawing you can do.
