Openly showing our insecurities seems to be trending and it’s good that more and more people are sharing their struggles! I won’t be lying when I tell you I get people approach me nearly every day, expressing their insecurity in their work and seemingly unreachable goals for their career. They’ll ask me to look at their work and I’ll help them lift their spirit. I tell them that we all started somewhere and all we can do is work hard and see ourselves grow over time and that their work has potential.
Yet the more I do this, the more I realise that simply having someone’s spirit lifted doesn’t help them, it’s not the answer, it’s merely a band-aid to the real problem.
Let me start off by saying that artistic insecurity comes at all levels, from beginners, to people in the middle of their careers, to seasoned artists. The only difference that may be seen in the latter, is how we deal with it. Artists with more experience under their belt have seen more years of making mistakes, experiencing growth and failure. People that have fiercely stuck to their artistic career for some years have only done so by not ever giving up, even if their work failed at times.
So how will you deal with your insecurities, now?! How will you get the courage to post your work online, or apply for that job you wanted? Well, I realised some time ago that the moment you start understanding your insecurities is the start of beating them. I’ve put it down in steps.
You are insecure for a reason. I know this is an unpopular statement, but it’s usually true. We are insecure because we know that what we do, can be done better. Even if we gave it our all, it can still be done better.
Are you doing the best you can? Think about it. Have you spent enough time doing research, making sketches and planning things out? If you’ve done so, you have probably done your best. Sometimes we tend to cheat our brains into thinking we’ve done our best because of different motives: the need to wanna post it, the need to stop working on a piece and start on something else. Don’t let that influence you.
When you do commercial art, you work with deadlines. So you can only uphold your job if you have a clear understanding of planning and delivering quality.Fix the problem. Now, instead of lingering in the thought of how we’re not good enough. Find out exactly what you’re not good at and make an effort to improve just that. This all goes in steps too, you cannot be a noob at painting hands and then a master on day 3. Accept that to become as good as you want, you’ll need to learn and work for it. Accept that this doesn't happen in a short time, so give it all the (healthy) amount of time you can give it.
Share your journey. Now this is optional. But for me, it has always helped to post my work online and share in what I’ve learned. Talk with some other artists on how to improve and help each other do so by talking about it.
After these steps you’ve successfully entered the cycle of: Accepting what's wrong, finding the cause and improve those flaws. You can now tell your own insecurities that they have a place and that it’s being worked on. Don’t let them freeze your productivity.
Have a look at this artwork I’ve done for my illustrated novel: Caldyra.
It’s a project I’ve been working on for years, this means that over time I got better at my job, so often times old illustrations needed to be revamped and in some cases even completely redone.
What’s important to me is that the illustration tells the story it’s meant to and is of an average quality compared to the rest of the work in my book. I have accepted there will be a difference throughout the pages, but I’ve set rules on exactly how much it may differ.
So even with this newest step, it can be better: It can be more realistic in terms of materials, lighting, and proportions. But I accepted that it’s just within the borders of quality to match the rest of the work and it still tells the situation as I want it to.
These steps over the years were needed to reach the final result in 2019:
Now have a look at these ones. I’m very happy with these. But in time I will also outgrow this and feel the need to improve them. But, they are the direct result of my insecurities being taken care off, tackling the exact topics that made me feel inadequate. That why I often pick strange and hard topics, just so I can learn to design and paint them.
So close those social media tabs in your browser and work on your weak points!!