Week 8 of The Artist’s Way covers how to face creative obstacles. The obstacles range from best ways to handle anxiety and procrastination, handling failures, and using those failures to turn it into a positive learning experience. I felt this was a good comprehensive chapter of points mentioned earlier in the book, but with tangible small action steps to take. The “Survival" section goes in depth about making sure we don’t dismiss our failures. Oftentimes we shrug our own failure off as: “Oh well, it happens to everyone” and then quickly try to move on. Ignoring a past failure without spending time with it eventually turns it into a creative block. I’ve had many instances where I shrug off a failure as being “normal” or “okay” and try to move on. However if I were to reframe this as a friend sharing their failure with me, I would not handle it the same as if I were handling my own failures. Instead, I would try to make that friend feel better and acknowledge their loss as valid. We often times need to take a step back and get a third person view of how we treat ourselves through our inner thoughts and actions. Oftentimes we are more harsh to ourselves than we would a friend. Let’s treat ourself as a friend rather than the usual dismissive self critic.
I resonated with the “Gain Disguised As Loss” section that’s about changing our mindset to essentially turn lemons into art lemonade. Let’s say a failure comes in the form of several rejection letters for your book proposal. Instead of hanging your hat and giving up, try to mold it into another possibility of where you can take it in another direction. Write another book. Easier said than done, but that’s exactly what Danny Gregory of the Sketchbook Skool YouTube channel said in his how to handle art failures video. Twenty five years ago he mailed his first book proposal to many publishers but they all rejected it. Instead of giving up on his dream of getting published, he filed the book away and then created another one to pitch and it ended up getting published, along with his original proposed book years later. Danny has since published an entire shelf of his books. You never know if the timing is not quite right or if some other better opportunity will open its way that you may have missed had that first offer worked out. Take time to acknowledge the loss and then mold it into a new possible direction.
This week’s artist date allowed me to finally start reading a book I recently bought about making webcomics. Have you ever bought a new book, but thought you’d save reading it for another time and then that time gets pushed further and further until it collects dust on your desk? Not just me I hope? Well, my intention with this artist date was to make time to finally read that book I wanted to check out. No better time than an artist date! The book is called How to Webcomic! by Star Prichard who has a popular long-running Webtoons comic called Castoff. I discovered her through her YouTube channel and learned that she published a webcomic-making book. Her book was inspired after she presented how-to-webtoons at comic con panels and decided the book would be a great way to include more detailed instructions. Her book made me feel inspired to finally pick up my long-neglected webcomic. I admire how her webcomic pages aren’t imposed with the typical vertical scroll format, but somewhere in between the traditional comic page format while still translating well when read in Webtoons. I previously gave the vertical web format a solid chance through my webcomic and I can honestly say I’m not into it. I still prefer the traditional comic page format and feel that Star’s happy medium approach may work best for me. I also want an easy way to print my pages into a book for convenient reference. That’s the rough thing about translating vertical scroll format to print: it can be challenging and awkward to impose onto print pages. I’m looking forward to reading more of the book and hopefully uploading my latest webcomic pages for the first time in over a year!