Daily Sketch - On the Road, Tx - and some doubtful musings.

About midway through a 22 hour drive.

Travelling is always a weird experience for me - I always leave with the expectations of accomplishing a bunch of different goals, considering I'll "have all this spare time," but it inevitably condenses into a kind of super-focus on one or two things.  I admit that I intended to get a bunch of comics work done, a bunch of sketching and a bunch of writing, and have mostly done none of them.  The doubt creeps in - does this mean I don't have what it takes?  "Draw every day" is the advice I most often hear from artists, with the notable exception of Sean Gordon Murphy.

Or maybe it's something different.  Maybe everyone has their own environment where they work best.  And though we'd all like to be Jeff Smith and be so psyched on what we're doing that we work for 24 hours straight and have to be reminded by the doctor to blink more often (true story - check out his segment in the cartooning documentary "Stripped"), most of us aren't.  I can't seem to stay in one place for longer than a few hours at a stretch, something that makes it hard to produce that much work.  Did I make the wrong decision?  Should I be content with comics art as a hobby?  If so, how will I ever develop the necessary skills to tell a great story?  Not by making one sketch a week.

Or maybe it IS environmental.  Thanks to my buddy Jonah (of Under the Radar, a bouldering blog) for reminding me, but for most people who aren't Jeff Smith, motivation is the biggest struggle we face, and the easiest way to remain motivated is to surround yourself with motivated people.  That's why college can be such an efficient way to develop, if you use it properly.  That's why art collectives exist, and despite what I've always tried to tell myself, maybe I can't do it alone.

When in doubt, here's Jimmy Valvano, on motivation and success.