Do your truth
Faking is noticeable
The most important thing I’ve learnt while creating things is to be true to yourself. This goes in all the directions, what you draw, what you write, what you photograph. It’s visible when that truth isn’t there in the DNA — mostly perhaps to ourselves, but I’m sure it’s noticeable even to others. It must be on some level anyway.
For a while I tried to do stock photography. It didn’t pan out. At all. The photos that seemed like the ones that would sell, my heart was not in those and they came out looking horrible. No soul. (Which, now that I think about it, is probably a pre-requisite for stock photos.) They also where not good in a lot of other ways. And when I did pour all my feelings into the photos I took, they had this melancholic shimmer. (They still do.) Those were rejected of course even if they were damn good.
This is an important part of being truthful to oneself: failing isn’t always a bad thing. It can be, but most of those times are due to us ignoring what we are. Drawings can turn out to be less than ideal and failing to live up to what we’d want but damnit, only the one’s where we tried not to be ourselves were the real failures. Those we never learn from. The others, they can be flawed as fuck but they’ll have parts that later in hindsight actually look pretty decent.
Lately, I’ve mostly been drawing. Words have failed and there’s been limited amount of photo opportunities. Skill progresses in sudden jumps often making the previous three to four month period look problematic. As it should, progress is built on three things: practice, failure, and self-critique — try to stay clear of self-doubt, that detour is… not that good.
After a while, let’s say a few progress jumps down, I noticed that things from a year back wasn‘t that bad. Sure, the skill I possess now is better, but there are old creations I’m proud of just as there are those that fills me with shame. The good ones? They’ll have something of truth rather than nothing but lies. That makes all the difference even when everything else is the same.
