Amanda Lago
Storyteller Artist
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- June 18th, 2021
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The journey begins
365 days of art
In December 2018 I decided to start this challenge as a 100 days of practice and I was open to extend it to 365 days, if things went well. I made this decision because I was lost in my life and I didn’t know what to do (check the previous post if you want to know the story before the challenge), but what I did know was that I wanted to draw!
So after seeing Picolo’s amazing challenge, I decided to jump into it and not let go of the bone until it was done!
It was tough and I’ve lost myself so many times while I was doing it that I can’t even count.
But as much as I lost myself, I was also found so much more and this was worth all of the tiredness, frustration, anger, and sadness that I experienced while doing it.
Well then, I didn’t have a tablet at this time, so I started with a pencil, pen, and paper. To be honest, by the end of the 125º day, I could have bought almost 2 tablets with the money that I spent on brush pens and sketchbooks T-T
From here, I bought my first Wacom tablet (see the image below) and I choose Clip Studio Pro from the free software license options that came with the it (turned out it’s only a 2 years license, so I had to buy the software recently anyway -_-‘).
While I was testing the tablet, I remember I thought “how do people draw on this thing?”, because it felt so strange to draw on a black square and having to look at the computer screen to see what’s happening. I remember I kept looking at the pen every time I was going to make a longer line, because I was afraid of trespassing the workable space on the tablet. It took me some days or maybe a week to start getting used to it and to not look at the pen hitting the surface everytime XD.
As you can see above, I decided to start with monochromatic drawings until I was comfortable with the tablet and the software, and then I slowly started testing some colors.
Then I jumped into colors!
I made some shorter challenges inside the challenge, like the week painting only environments (above).
And by the end of this section, I got my first commission!
(It’s the blue one bellow.)
I made a few commissions at this point and I was starting to discover things I really like to draw.
I also made my first Draw This In Your Style (the one before the black and white drawings above) aand I decided to join the Inktober challenge, which was really fun because I could take a break from thinking about colors and just focus on the line art and storytelling.
At the end of Inktober, I finally discovered the Multiply layer tool and it really helped me to learn how to make proper shaddows and to paint faster.
I also made my first animation! It was really fun and time consuming lol
It’s really simple and short, but I was proud of it.
I also made this self portrait study at the end of the challenge, to challenge myselfand also to celebrate one year of improvement.
This was the hardest painting I’ve ever made at that time and it was so awkward to keep looking to every centimeter of myself. O_O
And it was done!
Not as simple as making this post (tbh, it wasn’t either XD), but one day at a time and I was able to finish it.It wasn’t easy.
I did want to give up at the end of the first month. But then I looked back to all that I’ve done and I picked the pencil and kept drawing, one day after the other. Not worried about the final result, but with the delivery itself.
This might have been the hardest thing for me, a perfectionist. To just drop the pencil and deliver it.
This is something that I carry with me every since, even though I still get myself into trying to fix some drawing that I’m not happy with. After some time, I remember the “delivery rule” and just stop trying to make everything so perfectly.
The whole challenge itself, I might like only 5% of all the art I made. 20% are just meh, good enough and the rest 75%, I HATE IT!
But the thing is, this is not exclusively about the challenge.
To have a good relationship with your art, you must drop the perfectionism and stop treating your art as a cute little puppy that must be protected, perfect and untouchable.
To have a good relationship with your art, you have to learn (sometimes in the hard way), that you don’t have to know everything at once. That to learn 1 thing, you must make it wrong several times. And it hurts, I know it hurts.
It hurts to not make your dreamy illustration right away. It’s frustrating and you can’t escape from this feeling.
But what you CAN do is to thank for the opportunity of learning with a drawing and go to the next one. To mess it up again and again.
At the end, why do you make art?
Why bother? Is it worthy?
Why did you start in the first place?
Sooner or later, you must answer YOUR WHY and stop looking at what everyone else is doing or at someone expects from you.
At the end, it’s just you and your pen.
What do you want to spend your life doing?