Your Unique Hands

"We all have our own style. You just believe in your style" - Véronique Vanblaere

So, every so often I get kind of down on myself as an artist. I wish art was easier. I don’t think it ever gets easier. I think any time you approach things, and you want to actually create and produce something, it’s never easy.

However, I feel there are two facets of art. There’s the production side where you’re creating something to appeal to masses, and you want it a certain way or to appease a client. Then there’s just drawing, and that’s meditative and relaxing and expressive because you’re doing it just for you and nobody else.

This is a character design I’m working on. It’s been super laborious and soooo many iterations. I love it but it’s taking a lot of draw overs just to get it from a hot mess to a less hot mess, at the moment I’m working on the hand posing and what reads better.

I like both of them, but given I make money off production, I have to really hammer down on it. It is so seductively easy to look at other people’s art and say to yourself, “Well, I suck.” Which is where I was last week.

I was really having some struggles as I was trying to draw, and I’ve been trying to move more to pencil and paper and tactile stuff because that’s where my heart is right now. I don’t mind doing digital work—that’s how I make money—but I also think I’m going to move more into doing just tactile work on paper, which I’m rusty at, so I have to really work hard (and there are a ton of mess-ups).

Our Better Angels

I have a friend. Her name is Veronique, and she goes by Vero for short. I messaged her as she’d had recently lost her father, wanted to wish her well and see how she was doing. She’s a fellow artist, very prolific and successful. I wrote her and just said, “Hey, hope you’re doing well,” and we chit-chatted for a moment and got to art asking what each other is doing lately. I said, “Do you ever look at your art and think it’s just bad, or you just can’t seem to draw better?” She wrote back and said, “You are just way too hard on yourself, Scott.”

Vero does murals, knitting, compositions and basically makes art out of anything she gets her hands on. This truck is just awesome (good job V!)

So we talked about that, and she said something that really resonated that I thought I would pass on to anybody else that’s struggling with art. I asked her, “How do you get past getting out of your own head, thinking, well, I’m not good enough or I’m not where I want to be?”

We all have our own style. You just believe in your style. Your hand is as unique as you. That is what makes it not a competition. No one can have the same hand, you work with what you have. It makes it special, they (other artists I admire) can’t have your hand and you can’t have theirs.

Unless you get a machete.

Vero goes dark sometimes :D

That really hit home for me, and I sat and munched on it for a couple of days and realized, yeah, if I’m going to do inking and stuff, of course, I’m going to make a lot of mistakes, and of course, I’m going to screw up, and that’s part of art. It’s messy. I think I’m so used to being slick and clean with production work that I don’t stop to think about just drawing something and letting me flow through my hands to do that.

So a day later, when I went to pick up my wife from work, I was a little early. So I stopped at a coffee shop and had my art supplies with me. I sat and looked at my sketchbook’s new blank page and was like, “Well, what should I draw?” Immediately my brain flooded with tons of things that I should draw, that I need to draw, that I could draw, and I just was like, “I don’t want to do any of that.”

That’s when I asked myself “Well, what do you want to draw, Scott?” And I took the steps to decide what I’d like to draw, which were little bread characters (don’t ask, I have issues).

it was very relaxing to take some time and get to draw some puns that I made in bread. Get it? In bread… (the worst part of this joke is that I grew up in Alabama which gets joked on for inbreeding).

So anyway, I wanted to share this with you. If it resonated with you and you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve got a unique hand, too,” man, I would love to see your work. And I know that sounds like some kind of little stupid-ass clickbait to get more likes, and maybe it is, but I genuinely like seeing people inspired and saying, “Hey, I drew this.” So if you do that, either tag me here or post it underneath or email me or whatever. Here’s my version of bread puns, and I’d love to see what flows from your hand and what unique thing you bring to the table.

Thanks, and I hope you have a good week.