Monday, January 10, 2011

The inevitable post-submission spiral of panic

I SENT IT I SENT IT I SENT IT

The sketchbook is safe in LBC and ready to wing its merry way westward. Now I'm finally allowing myself to look at other people's work.

And I'm flipping out.

I haven't completed a project in so long that my massive inferiority complex, dormant these many months, has come roaring out of its cave again, ready to engage.

I mean, look at this stuff. Just look at it. Alina Chua's beautiful watercolours and pen work. Nicole Deyton's idea for an epistolary narrative with illustrated articles straight out of alternate-universe issues of Popular Science. Rossana Bossu's sensitive, wondrous illustrations. And that's after 15 minutes on Google.

I mean, I'm happy with a lot of my work, I just can't shake the knowledge that hundreds of people are going to be thumbing through it, thinking hmph, I've seen better. And that's normal, and part of being an artist, and it's actually true and something I have to deal with unless I want to live in a cave for the rest of my life and never show my art in public again.

But I don't have to like it.

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Will be posting the last of the notebook and thoughts on the process of creating it, soon.

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