Part 3: The Endless Loop
April 2023 Blog Post
Through three months of thinking and writing about all the ways I make, and how it works and doesn’t, I’ve been most excited to make this post. I’d like to start by calling back to a piece of newsletter writing from January:
It feels like something cyclical has opened up for me in the past year, a positive feedback loop that forges creative energy and then passes it around, softening it sometimes, alighting it other times, and overall shaping it to fit the many different ways I’m making. A lesson learned in writing may well be a lesson that applies to illustration. Inspiration here is inspiration there. Ease in this is ease in that.
These reflections are at the core of what I achieve when I can fully and magically enter the endless loop of Jack-of-All-Trades making. And today, I want to spend some time elaborating on what this can look like.
Like we explored last month, I’m currently operating under my sprint system and focused on illustration. Let’s pretend you’ve set up your first sprint too. You have determined your concessions, your timeline, and you’re feeling really good. What can you expect from putting in the work to open yourself up to all the making you want to do?
Courage
Fear in making is something I think about a lot. I want to write more about it, but it’s something I still routinely puzzle over, and it has not yet found its way here to be thought through.
Fear often shows up when I face failure, or difficulty, in what I’m working on. It can come from something as simple as making a not-so-good drawing. It can come from realizing a grand mistake in a sewing project. It freezes me up—how can I keep working at something that I am failing at? That thing becomes scary, intimidating, inaccessible.
Working as a jack-of-all-trades maker opens up the chance for failure in a different way. You might have to confront fear within five different ways of making. But it also unleashes a larger volume of courage. Just like failure might breed fear, success can breed courage.
It feels so amazing to soak up a disheartening experience throwing pots with a relaxing experience painting or sewing. Giving yourself the ability to switch mediums when you need it, succeed and build some courage, and then spread that courage far and wide, to face the fear you might be feeling somewhere else, is invaluable.
Mind Meld (with yourself)
Maybe most prevalent in the January quote above is the way that a creative loop lets you feast on energy and inspiration. I have noticed so many new things about all of my mediums as I let them blend together. They make each other (and me) better.
Sometimes this can be in small, practical ways. Spending a lot of time on clothing and fabric has allowed me to draw more realistic and interesting outfits for my characters. Illustration helps me to improve the scope and detail of written world-building. I often use writing to push boundaries within other mediums, experimenting and generating ideas that can be taken up elsewhere.
Sometimes it’s just the simple presence of all these things in my life that offers me new perspective and stability. Eating out of bowls that I crafted from a lump of mud. Listening to my niece exclaim about the beauty of my paintings. Slipping on clothes that fit my body perfectly (and are my favorite colors).
These mediums are every day pep talks.
Joy
As much as we want art-making to be easy, stress-free, and joyful all the time, for me, that is not the case. I imagine, really know, the same is true for anyone who pursues art seriously. It can be frustrating, disheartening, or just simply difficult.
I (and we) stick with it for a million different reasons, but a couple of them that stand out to me are 1. Beauty and 2. Flow. With this style of artistic practice, I experience both more than I ever have before.
Beauty in making floors me on the regular. I don’t necessarily mean that I am constantly floored by the beauty of my own work (that happens sometimes, but rarely!), but more that the beauty within art making processes is so rich. And, the more mediums I’m working in, the more beauty I get to be exposed to. Have you ever been completely awed by mixing a gorgeous paint color, the texture of a piece of fabric, and the gentle rightness of a sentence you wrote a few months ago in the same week? I have!
An artistic flow state is also an enviable motivator of art making. There’s nothing better than just working: uninterrupted, inspired, and motivated. Before 2022, though they would sometimes appear in moments of passion or through circumstances of forced focus, I rarely experienced these flow states. I was always too worried about what might come next, or what I might be missing, or some other art anxiety. These days, I find myself in a flow state multiple times a week! By granting myself generous scheduling, thoughts, and structures, I am making with so much less worry.
There are many more ways that this practice has changed my life—I discover new things all the time. But much of what’s special about these things is experiencing them, feeling them as an artist. So have I convinced you to try something like this out? To open yourself up to whatever’s calling you? To let making drive the bus in any direction it wants to go? I’m rooting for you!