Trying to find joy in creating again and rebuild my creative confidence

A long overdue catch-up 🙈

Hello hello, long time no see!

I haven’t been keeping my word, right? 🙈 I said I would come here twice a month to update you on my work, and here I am, more than a month later, with nothing to show for it. Truth be told, it started with a busy few weeks of preparing for and attending a creative event, which stretched into a mini holiday, and ended up in such exhaustion and overwhelm that it completely took over me.

It always comes down to this freelance style of working, it’s so inconsistent that whenever there’s a slight change in routine, it completely destabilises me. Then I find myself having to create a routine from scratch as if I never had one to begin with! It’s really annoying, and it happens every time, so in this fashion, May went by and finally, by June, I started reorganising myself and my routine. Now, in July, I can say I’m completely back at it! With that said, I need to do some amends here: let’s just say I’ll come here every once in a while, when I can elaborate on this inconsistent journey that is being a freelance illustrator today. But even easier than this, when I have loads of new work to show! More images, less text 🙏🏻

Anyway, now that this is out of the way: since my last newsletter, a lot has happened. The biggest event was Pictoplasma, an amazing conference in Berlin for designers, illustrators and animators all about characters. It was the best, I met so many creatives and saw a lot of brilliant work! I won’t go into detail about the conference because it’s been a while now, and I have shared a bit about it on social media already. But I have to mention my personal highlight, my participation in the attendee stage to share my original character with their audience! It was so lovely to share my work in such a welcoming place, everyone was really supportive and gave me wonderful feedback!

Overall, the main takeaway I took from Pictoplasma and that I’ve been trying to apply since is that creativity is a muscle that has to be stimulated daily, and creatives have to produce a lot of work - an amount that I don’t think I’ve ever done. So this was the homework I gave myself after this conference: create, every day. To accomplish this, I thought it would be a good idea to challenge myself to start and keep a sketchbook practice by drawing every day for 100 days. And to my surprise, I’m doing it! Yay! Here are some pages of it:

I always struggled to generate ideas for sketching, and this is basically what always stopped me from keeping a sketchbook practice, so what I’ve been doing to avoid this creative block is having my Pinterest open and just drawing things that I like or that I would love to translate into an illustration in the future. Sometimes my sketch turns out different from the reference I’m looking at, sometimes it’s just registering the reference as it is, so to have that idea available for future reference, without worrying too much about it. It’s been working really well, and it’s generating ideas that I will soon start bringing to my portfolio. But most importantly, it’s bringing back joy in creating and building my confidence again.

Being a creative doesn’t feel like other jobs, where you can turn up and do your hours, log out and go home. Confidence is so important to keep going, and having small wins every day impacts the ability to continue the work the next day. For me, knowing I created something - anything - during the day, reminds me that I can do it, I can still produce new work, even when I’m not particularly in a very productive streak. As well as confidence, hope, or the lack thereof, can be paralysing, and make everything seem pointless, especially when there’s no work coming your way, but building confidence boosts hope that you can believe in your dream. And this hope is what makes me wake up every morning and create!

Now that I had regained hope, I was able to work on some new illustrations, based on sketches from my 100-day sketchbook challenge! I love how they turned out and can’t wait to create more of those.

I also joined Inkygoodness Collective in their 21-day Pitch to Paid Challenge. It’s a challenge where everyone who joins spends 21 days working on their pitches to clients together! This challenge came in such great timing, because reaching out to clients was exactly what I’ve been struggling with this year, mostly because the illustration jobs have been so scarce, it’s been the most difficult to know where to go and who to contact. But not only that, this challenge is helping me place myself better, define my illustration work in a much clearer way and rebrand myself. I would definitely recommend it if Inkygoodness launches it again in the future! You can keep up with the collective’s news on their Instagram.

In the next few weeks, my main goal is to continue working on my pitches and branding, and to develop new illustrations based on my sketches! I hope you stay here to see them when they are ready 💖

If you are still here, thanks for the catch-up, hopefully the next one won’t be so long, nor will it be so far in the future 🤞🏻

Stay creative & hope to see you next time xx