Life is fucking short!

Life nowadays is literally too short to fuck around and postpone your own projects. 

Like many of you, I have a list of shit that I would like to do one day. For me it's mostly personal work-related stuff, (I am a workaholic this is the only thing I have control over, and I need that, especially in these days). My projects, especially the personal ones, is what keeps me going.

Characters or toys I would like to create, tutorials that I would like to record and blogs that I would love to write.

But because of the "Normal Life," I always used to find excuses. Once I finish this project, once I make enough money, once I acquire that skill, once I finish this course, once I feel confident.

Or my favourite... wait for someone to tell you that your work is good "This piece is so good you should do it, man!" why do we do this? 

My head is literally littered with the phrase "Should I" as If we need permission from a higher source to live our life or creat stuff that we always wanted to create. 

"A finished piece is in effect a test of correspondence between imagination and execution." -Art & Fear

I'm a decent sculptor, and I know my tools. However, I was always reticent of illustrating, I doodle and sketch. Still, I do it for my projects as a guideline, and then I use the tools that I know I am good at to bring my ideas to life. Sketching is great, cause you can sit down for an hour and try stuff just to see if you have anything to work with. 

Last year after I designed Telos, I got more confident about illustrating some of my ideas and even finish them as an inked piece traditionally. 

Jump to February, and this whole corona apocalypse swallowed our entire lives. It's times like these that give you a demo of how your last days might feel like. You ask yourself "I can still work now, I can draw I can even think clearly, and most important of all I'm still breathing, but when I will be old and sick I won't be able to do any of those.

The moment we went on lockdown, I went through all the stages that we all go through. Fear to anger to being pissed off at my wife at my own kid, honestly I got pissed off at any fucking spec of dust that dared to fly in front of me. 

I don't know if people who don't have kids know this. There is this meme or a saying "I never realized how annoying I could be until I created a miniature version of myself and started arguing with it daily." And yes I argue with my 5-year-old daily, and first days of lockdown she was doing that every day with either her mom or me. 

But at the same time, she inspires me (I know it sounds like a cliche). Still, whenever my daughter is feeling down or pissed off, she sits at her table, and she draws, and when she is done, she is feeling great as if nothing happened. And I had to try that, cause if it's working for her and she is a mini-me, then it should work for me, right? Well, it does. I have sketched many characters and idea that were floating my sketchbook or my head, and I have gotten better.

"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" -Howard Ikemoto

The other day I sketched a kid version of Clark Kent. Then inked it and digitally coloured it and shaded it and I loved the entire process. It felt so good to have this idea out in front of me, here is the thing I have been carrying in my head for almost 4 years now but I didn't have the courage, to do it. Just goes to show how fucking scared we are in trying new stuff and give ourselves the option to fail. Honestly, I think we are afraid of success, cause if an idea works, and you and the people around you love that idea it robes you from that excuse you were hiding behind.

I am done sitting on my ass and overthinking, I'm done listening to my inner voice, always starting each idea with "Should I?" 

I'm going to be illustrating, designing, sculpting, painting, and releasing art for me. And for the friends and the people who love the same shit, if it brings in some money that's amazing if it doesn't I still made something! And I can move on to the next item on the list and keep doing that until I can't breathe. 

"We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one." -Confucius