It Is Not A Stupid Question To Ask Yourself

t sounds like a stupid question asked at job interviews. But it is a good idea to think about that for a while because knowing where you want to be in the long term makes short-term decision-making easier.

“Should I make an illustration for a friend? No, because I want to have a published graphic novel in a few years, and the illustration commission would cost me precious time and pull me away from working on my graphic novel.”

(Unless they pay you astonishing amounts of money because then you can work less and use that money to buy time to work on that graphic novel.)

Knowing where you want to be long-term makes it easier to say no to short-term opportunities that pull you in the wrong direction.

This Week: A New Challenge!

I am excited to announce that we have a new challenge in our Discord! Some fellow students expressed interest in a monthly story illustration challenge. This month, October, we are going to try our hand at making a story illustration for one of the first two chapters of Don Quixote. There is further explanation in the relevant thread in the Monthly Story Illustration Challenge section.

We are also wrapping up our first month of doing the Artists’ Mastermind. You can join in October if you wish, or at any future month. The idea is to formulate your own personal goals for the month and then report on how they are going throughout the month. Ultimately, you report on what you did, what went well, and what didn’t, and we provide each other with helpful tips and feedback. Based on that, we formulate our own personal goals for the next month. It is a way to hold yourself accountable, devise plans and objectives, keep track of your progress, take a step back and analyze how it went, and seek help from peers.

My goal for the month was to 1) draw a lot, and 2) make YouTube videos where you see me use the resources on the Practice Drawing This website to promote the website. It was successful in that I found a way to create these videos that doesn’t require a lot of time. I just hit record on the camera and started drawing. The videos need minimal editing in the end. The videos did better than the ones I had made in the past and got decent view counts. I also like them. They are cool. And I can show them to people next time they ask what I do. So they are keepers.

Where it fell flat is that I saw very little genuine engagement, like subscriptions to this newsletter.

I still need to formulate my plan for October. I suspect it will involve creating more of these videos, as that requires little effort now, while also delving into the story illustration I announced above myself.

Yours sincerely,