Tag: creative practice

Patreon

D: / :D (or, Motivation Two Ways)

Somewhere around 2004 I joined a teen writers’ group in Ojai run by my now-friend Deb Norton. The rules of the group were simple: those who arrived on time got a bowl of sugary cereal of their choosing, and if we hit our self-determined goals from session to session we’d get a visit to the Prize Box.

The Prize Box, as far as I recall, was just…a cardboard box. But it was full of candy, novelty Japanese erasers, custom mix CDs, and Pilot Varsity fountain pens. Goofy shit. But it worked.

As I mentioned in my last Seacritters update post, I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation in this last quarter of the book. For many years I managed my freelance schedule by drawing these little “WHERE’S THE MONEY, BELLWOOD?” diagrams in my sketchbook.

Two diagrams of Lucy looking nervous with the words "Where's the money, Bellwood?" around her head.

They amused me, and helped me track down money when it was due. But there’s something telling in the facial expressions I always chose. Juggling this many jobs was draining. In my heart of hearts, I wanted to be moving from a place of joy rather than reacting in fear. Even now, when my workload is less scattered and my financial situation less precarious, I still find myself reacting more to the threat of the stick than the promise of the carrot. How do I orient toward joy?

I’ve struggled with setting (and actually implementing) rewards. When I made a NO Punchcard at a moment when I was trying to be more protective of my time, I successfully filled out all the squares, but totally stalled out when it was time to pick a prize. The accomplishment was (kind of) its own reward. Or I just couldn’t think of anything to celebrate with.

A punch card full of the word no with a star in the corner labelled prize.

Celebration is a crucial part of motivation! It helps my animal brain acknowledge that I’ve overcome an obstacle, accomplished a goal, or moved in the direction of my values. WHY IS IT SO HARD TO THINK OF REWARDS?

This seems obvious, but I only recently thought of making myself a slightly different mind map in the ol’ sketchbook.

A diagram of Lucy looking excited that says "What's the prize, Bellwood?" She's surrounded by suggested reward activities like going to the zoo or getting ice cream.

Okay, so some of these feel a bit too close to “satisfying chores” rather than “decadent indulgences” (that handlebar tape is REALLY GROSS, THO), and picking a prize also means grappling with the ways we’re pressured to use consumption as a reward. BUT IT’S A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.

Having a closing party for the 100 Demon Dialogues Kickstarter was such a lovely and life-affirming thing. We crammed a bunch of people into the patio of a Portland bar and had a joint countdown for the final few seconds of the campaign. I’m pretty sure I live-streamed it on Kickstarter. There was cake. There were balloons. When I think about the memory of that night in my body, I feel joy.

Lucy with a joyous crowd at her Kickstarter wrap party

The Prize Box worked because it was full of good pens and rad mix CDs, but it was also something that existed within a community. My peers would cheer when I got to visit the box. I think that was actually more important than any novelty eraser. So in the interest of involving my community a bit more in choosing a reward, I’m putting this to a vote over on Patreon.

WHAT SHOULD I REWARD MYSELF WITH WHEN I FINISH PENCILING THE BOOK?

Brain Food, Comics, Reading

“I draw the path to walk”

A page from Laura Knetzger's comic with lush black and white forests. The text reads "My friends don't come so often when I call anymore. It's my fault. They're children, and I asked them to earn me money instead of just playing."

Still thinking about this short comic on creative practice by Laura Knetzger.

Last night I sat in a cloud of campfire smoke with a friend, talking non-stop about the balancing act of creative practice. He’s a printmaker and a bookbinder, two disciplines that require a great deal of precision and craft. We agreed that we want to encourage everyone to make art, to make music, to dance, to be unrepentantly bad at things, to understand that there is art we make because we are dedicated to a craft and art we make because it’s an expression of our innate human desire to play. How it isn’t contradictory to preach the necessity of both. Sometimes I do feel like a hypocrite, cheerleading people who believe they “can’t draw” while internally upbraiding my own ability to put pictures in boxes. But these things are not exclusive.

Lately I’ve needed the energy of 2010-era Alec Longstreth, delivering this lecture at The Center for Cartoon Studies. Alec—who had, at the time, sworn not to shave or cut his hair until he finished his graphic novel, Basewood—was a human lightning bolt. He embodied that spirit of craft and professionalism, but with a punky, DIY energy that made it all feel both radical and attainable. I was so fired up after hearing him give this talk that I actually pulled all-nighters (something I was loath to do even at the tender age of 19).

A page from Alec Longstreth's zine Your Comics Will Love You Back all about setting reasonable timelines for your work by tracking progress and number of pages finished over time.

This image of his encapsulates everything I’ve come to rely on in the process of drawing Seacritters. I’m not perfect—I still occasionally underestimate the time things will take and fall prey to distraction and despair—but I’m committed to this idea.

That summer at CCS I found myself surrounded by 36 other people who wanted to take making comics seriously. I had never been in a room with people who shared that dream. It’s hard to remember what that was like now, having worked in studios full of creative professionals and lived in cities lousy with cartoonists and traveled all over the world to huge conventions and tiny festivals crammed with passionate people hawking zines and graphic novels and minis. But it felt propulsive at the time, and right now I need the creative equivalent of jet fuel.

I need the reminder that there are other people out there touching the lightning bolt for the first time, and channeling sparks into the page.

Blog, Seacritters

Laid Low

I’m sick in bed the week of Thanksgiving, which is mostly bothering me because I was looking forward to using the holiday lull to finally get some work done.

This sounds bad, I know. But my family doesn’t even do Thanksgiving! My whole life I’ve made do with (and enjoyed, to be fair) turning up at other people’s celebrations. This year I’m starving for a secret pocket of time instead; one of those interstitial spaces that nurture creativity. I’ve been thinking of the days I’d bike to my studio in Portland having forgotten, in my freelancer’s fog, that it was a public holiday. The roads were empty. The traffic was quiet. No one was asking me to work, so I could actually work. And my work, of course, sits in the strange dip between play and purpose.

I wrote a little on Patreon this week about taking time off of penciling the graphic novel to design a new character. It has felt intolerable do this kind of thing when the spreadsheet looms and I’m constantly berating myself for how long this book has been taking and I want to see progress and I want to know how long it will take and the work of designing something new is anything but predictable.

And yet it IS predictable! I went from tentative sketches to a properly captured character in about three days! That’s barely any time at all!

Anyway, top of mind these days: how making a career of a creative practice does, eventually, impose a sense of constant dis-ease. The catch-22 of needing a sense of spaciousness in order to indulge the kind of experimentation and noodling that allows one to actually, y’know, create, but existing in a world full of deadlines and invoices that require foreknowledge of exactly how long something will take. There’s nothing new about this gripe, as evidenced by the very thoughtful and validating comments I got from other comics peers on that Patreon post, but I’m feeling it keenly right now.

At least I’m getting to draw a lot of outrageous lizards.

A dense sketchbook page full of goofy lizards.
Blog, Seacritters

The Switch

It’s happening again, the thing that happens when I get back to drawing after a slump.

The transition was abrupt. I woke up two weeks ago, went to the studio, queued up Neil Gaiman’s live reading of The Graveyard Book (my habitual comfort food of many years), cranked out four pages, rode my stationary bike for a half hour, and then took it upon myself to begin eating a whole head of lettuce every day to finally get ahead of our CSA box. The transition was shocking in its ease, especially when I hold it up beside weeks and weeks of disruption and self-judgement. I’ve been torn between dog-sitting gigs, two different living situations, visits from friends, heart procedures at the hospital with my dad, studio moves, traveling out of state for events, and passing obsessions with whittling, ultralight backpacking, and quilting scattered in between.

Writing it all out, I soften. Of course I’ve struggled to sink into the kind of flow state needed for real progress on my book. There’s been no consistency! No ritual! No routine! My poor little animal brain doesn’t know how to make sense of it all.

But now that the gears have clicked into place and I’m suddenly off to work every morning like clockwork, the other thing happens: I lock down. I become superstitious and squirrelly, prone to evading all well-meaning attempts at conversation from the people I love.

“How’d it go at the studio today?”

“What’s your page goal this week?”

“When are you heading to work?”

Too much scrutiny makes me fearful. The ease of transition is suspicious. How did this happen? Why did I magically wake up and find it simple to return to work on this day of all days? If I don’t understand it, anything might switch it off again. So I err on the side of secrecy, and remain a jealous guardian of my time.

It’s been two weeks of consistent creative flow. It’s working for now. I’ll bask in it for as long as it lasts.

Brain Food, Experiments

Inventory

I signed up for another one of Jocelyn’s online classes last month, and so far I’ve found it incredibly helpful in finding my way back to bits of myself and my creative practice that have been occluded by caregiving. One of the exercises was a mind map exploring all the tools we use to access and interact with our creative selves. The four stages she suggests are Ritual, Connection, Collection, and Synthesis. Here’s a big mess of ideas around those hubs:

A mind map showing various quadrants of creative connection.

I love letting myself use little doodles to explore concepts like this. I think it started after Shay Mirk shared some More/Less lists they’d made for the year and inspired me to make my own. (Pretty sure I did one for 2022 as well but I can’t find it so here’s an old one.)

A list of Less and More goals, featuring things like equating pain and work, blogging, ocean, trying to go it alone, and other little illustrated concepts.

I see these inventories and remember that I have such a robust series of practices for doing what I do. I also see how the things I’m pursuing in my life right now have roots in this list from two years ago, which I love. It all takes such a long time.

I recorded a Ramble about all this the other night that I still haven’t edited and uploaded to Patreon, but it’s coming. Still circling the question of my job and what I think it is vs. what it actually is.

Brain Food

Matt Thoughts

Got to catch up with the inimitable Matthew Bogart on the phone the other day after an embarrassingly long lull in communication (although his Patreon updates make me feel like we’re good pals just chatting away on the regular, so maybe that’s why I lost track). At one point he said “That’s the entirety of comics for me: turning story into space” and I think that’s a REAL GOOD LINE! I wrote it down immediately because YES! EXACTLY! What a great form of wizardry to practice.

But now I’m thinking about why it is that pictures occupy spatial real estate for me in a way words…don’t?? I’m tired and it’s the end of the day so I’m not going to dig into why right now. Just chucking it into the posterity machine.

Anyway: Matt’s a good dude. The last time I saw him he was letting me borrow his corner rounder during the Pandemic. That’s a real friend.

Reading

Operating Instructions

People keep asking me about AI and I really think how you feel about AI comes down to whether you believe art is about producing things (images, objects, data files, “content”) or about a way of operating in the world as an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional creature.

Austin Kleon

There it is again! Indentured spiritual servitude! Gotta beware that shit.

Blog, Reading

“We weren’t even watching ourselves”

An added benefit of Brendan’s Christmas thread of appreciation: an enormous slew of new blogs to follow! Honestly too many. I get overwhelmed easily these days. But I lingered over his tweet about Nadia, because it mentioned experimentations with microgrants (HELLO), which then led me to her very clean and pleasing site.

I bopped around for a while, delighting in the short-form Notes and reading a few blog entries before adding the feed to my RSS reader. The joy in doing this (depending on how often someone updates their blog) is getting to jump back a few months or years in the timeline to see what they were up to before. That’s how I landed on this post about The Creator Economy from 2021. There are so many gems in here; things I think about all the time, but also things I don’t! She probes further beyond where this conversation usually ends, asking the kinds of questions the post suggests we should all be asking.

When I imagine a cultural renaissance that inspires me, I think about working together to address unsolved questions, tugging on threads in conversations that need unraveling, creating enduring artifacts for generations to pore over and iterate upon. The “publish or perish” model that nudges people to rack up more followers is not the pinnacle of creative freedom; it’s indentured spiritual servitude.

Indentured spiritual servitude! Hot damn!! This is precisely the situation so many of us cartoonists find ourselves in. Precisely the reason I feel so much resistance to the simple act of sharing a photograph or a passing thought on social media. However trivial, it still feels like something I have to do. It’s a matter of survival.

Towards the very end of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which I finished in a glut yesterday morning), one of the protagonists gives a little speech about luck, and the circumstances of birth that led to their company being able to succeed at making video games where and when they did.

“[…] I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves.”

And just before that:

“It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.” “I think that, too,” Sadie said. “The knowledge and experience we have—it isn’t necessarily that helpful, in a way.” “So depressing,” Sam said, laughing. “What’s all of this struggle been for?”

They almost felt like too much, these tidy conversations at the end of the novel, because they’re exactly the conversations I have with my peers about “making it” in comics. But they were also so accurate I found myself nodding along.

I don’t have a tidy wrap-up for this. I just want to be watching myself less. I want to go unsurveilled.

Brain Food, Reading

Rhymes

I haven’t historically been someone who reads a lot of books simultaneously, but I won’t lie: it’s doing a lot for me right now. My brain is scattered and anxious and burnt out and overwhelmed and uncertain, but allowing pattern recognition to come into play as I’m reading across genres and timescales…that I can manage. It helps things feel as if they make sense.

Of course, sometimes the patterns I recognize are massively uncomfortable. Here’s three about habit, practice, belief, and enthusiasm:

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way:

A photo of a book that reads: As artists, grounding our self-image in military discipline is dangerous. In the short run, discipline may work, but it will work only for a while. By its very nature, discipline is rooted in self-admiration. (Think of discipline as a battery, useful but short-lived.) We admire ourselves for being so wonderful. The discipline itself, not the creative outflow, becomes the point. That part of us that creates best is not a driven, disciplined automaton, functioning from willpower, with a booster of pride to back it up. This is operating out of self-will. You know the image: rising at dawn with military precision, saluting the desk, the easel, the drawing board... Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline. Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us. Enthusiasm (from the Greek, "filled with God") is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself. Enthusiasm is grounded in play, not work. Far from being a brain-numbed soldier, our artist is actually our child within, our inner playmate. As with all playmates, it is joy, not duty, that makes for a lasting bond. An annotation in the margin reads "Jesus fucking christ, OKAY."

Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods:

"Right," said Om. "Now...listen. Do you know how gods get power?" "By people believing in them," said Brutha. "Millions of people believe in you." Om hesitated. All right, all right. We are here and it is now. Sooner or later he'll find out for himself... "They don't believe," said Om. "But—" "It's happened before," said the tortoise. "Dozens of times. D'you know Abraxas found the lost city of Ee? Very strange carvings, he says. Belief, he says. Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure."

Fenton Johnson’s At the Center of All Beauty:

The thing about living alone is that—exactly like living as a couple—after a long time it becomes either a habit or a practice. A habit is a way of living that you follow because it's what you did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. A practice is a way of living that you create and renew every day. A habit is a way of being that controls you. A practice is a way of being that you control—a deliberate (ad)venture into the unknown.

I think I’ve listed these in the order I encountered them, but I can’t be sure. I just know I read the Cameron passage and felt personally attacked in that good, awful way that means something true is surfacing. I love daily drawing challenges. Arguably I’ve built a whole career on them. But I also, deep down, know that they can become a kind of ego trap. Fortunately there are all these other rhyming passages that offer alternative paths and approaches. Johnson underlines a truth I’ve already folded into large parts of my brain: that there’s a fundamental difference between a habit and a practice.

Bonus Kicker: I read Zina that passage from Cameron and she immediately latched onto the etymology of enthusiasm. “Did you know?” she asked. And I had to reply that I did, because there’s a phrase rattling around in my brain:

“The Greeks said that to be enthusiastic was to be filled with God.”

Why do I know this? Why do I know it with this specific wording? It feels like something I know through repetition, like I’ve heard it read aloud many times or included in a talk. I dig around in the filing cabinets of surface memory and find nothing.

At 11:30 that night I finally find it: a single quote pulled from a series of small stories written by Frank Chimero in, as far as I can tell, 2010. I’d written it down in 2016 in an old notes document where I kept links and things to include in my newsletter. A quick spin through the archives suggests that I never actually wove it into an update, but every time I went to write one I’d skim through that list of quotes and links and there it would be: a phrase.

I suppose this is how we learn.