2011 - The Year I Quit My Day Job and Get Serious

“Lose some sleep and say you’ve tried.”
Ian Curtis

For the past two years I have been lucky enough to have been apprenticed to Sterling Hundley. During that time I have grown in leaps and bounds, not just as an artist but as a person. The shape of my life has been molded and refined over the last two years of hard work and study, a period that began when I attended the Illustration Academy in 2008. I had always wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t truly pursue an education until that summer at the age of 30. In two years I have gone from struggling on my own to working with an award-winning illustrator, sharing a studio with an amazing community of artists who I am proud to call my friends, having my work not only accepted into CMYK but winning 1st place for Illustration, and slowly getting a few professional jobs.

But I am not writing this to blow my own horn. A few days ago I was scanning documentation for Sterling and was blown away by the sheer number of awards and certificates of merit he has. And as I thought about it as I worked, it wasn’t the awards and certificates that made an impression on me, because you can’t truly control the recognition your work gets – what impressed me was the amount of work that it represented, the sheer numbers. For every piece that was recognized how many more must he have created? Everyone has a vision of where they want to be, but few people can break that vision down into the steps necessary to achieve that distant goal. That grand vision, making a living as an artist, can be viewed as a puzzle, and every piece of art produced is a piece of that puzzle. Not every piece that is conceived, or sketched, or half-painted, but every piece that is finished. Executed. As Seth Godin says, “shipped.” And Sterling over the course of his career has shipped.

When 2010 ended I had a sense of dissatisfaction with my work for the year. On the surface I had made a lot of progress, and had been rewarded with small and encouraging victories. What I realized as I scanned Sterling’s work is that, while I had worked very hard, I hadn’t shipped. I had not delivered product. So much of my work was studies, experiments – valuable for their experience, but they had become a crutch, something to pin to the wall, but they were not product. They were not finished illustrations, finished paintings, finished drawings. They were promises of finish, and I believe this is where my dissatisfaction stems from. I had expended a lot of effort, but I had not focused my energies appropriately – too much work was spent on things that seemed important but did not move me closer to my goal. My goal is to make a living as an artist, and this year I will document my journey to making that happen here on my blog. Within the next month I will be quitting my day job and all of my income will be art-related. It is time to commit. It’s time to produce. It’s time to ship.

Every Monday I will be posting a detailed update of what I have been working on for the previous week. Every Thursday I will be posting excerpts from my sketchbook from the previous week. I will be updating daily on Facebook and Twitter. My goal is to be completely transparent in my work and progress towards my goal, and to hold myself publicly accountable. I am going to make 2011 the best year I have ever had, and I look forward to sharing that journey with you.