Saturday my wife and I traveled to New Mexico to spend the day and evening with her family. My wife’s parents are pretty much exactly like us, geek loving fun people, so it’s pretty much always a given that we’ll be watching some Dr. Who whenever we are at there house. This time was no different except for the fact that this time the comic below piped in my head and wouldn’t leave until I’d gotten it out.

Since I was mobile all I had at my disposal was my Kindle Fire, Wacom stylus and the Sketchbook Mobile app. So I want to work and in the course of the exercise I learned a little bit more about the app than I knew. I also toyed with the Copic markers features in the app as well as worked with other apps to do some color correction. Obviously I’m still a very long way from ditching my traditional desktop and laptop computers for tablets, but I’ve taken the first step toward that path, maybe. At any rate I had a lot of fun making this comic, so enjoy and spread the word

Today is Monday so that means a New Art Monday. This week I’ve posted up the redesign for the title character of the comic, Robot Friday. Actually, this redesign came about because I was interviewed over at www.drawmearobot.com so I took the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone on this one and I gotta say this redesign came out pretty darn well.

When I first created the comic I sort of rushed designs on both Robot Friday and Thomas, mainly because I wasn’t even sure how to design characters very well at that point. But over time I’ve sort of refined both their looks, but I’ve stayed away from doing very many strips with Robot Friday just because I’ve never really been that satisfied with his overall look. So, when the opportunity came along for me to sit down and draw a robot I knew I needed to do the redesign as well.

I’d been toying with his redesign for a few months anyway, so I kind of had an idea of what I wanted, but it wasn’t until I saw the short movie Paraphernalia that I finally hit on the design you see now. So, rest assured that there will be new strips coming with Robot Friday in them shortly and enjoy today’s new art

If you follow my Twitter or Facebook feeds you will know that about three weeks ago or so I drew all four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on a lark and they have been met with amazing positive response. So much response that I have now decided to draw the Thundercats and a whole list of other stuff that I have always wanted to draw but just never got around to it.

At the same time, as I’ve been doing more drawing, I have really settled into this style of drawing and am having a lot more fun with it. I am having to fight myself to keep my drawings simple and to the point rather than add in a bunch of fluff that isn’t needed, but I am feeling real satisfaction for the first time in a long while about my illustration now.

As I neared the end of the turtle run I had a lot of demand for Casey Jones as well as the other turtle’s cast (who I will draw as well, I promise) so Friday I had to knock this drawing out too. In the process of this drawing I really started to understand how well designed the whole TMNT cast is, they are just pure joy to draw!

One final thing before I wrap this post up. I’ve been thinking a lot about the comic update schedule and how my offline, real life schedule have been playing out this year and I am nearing the conclusion that I may begin updating on Wednesday’s and Friday’s instead of MWF and rename Monday as New Art Monday! This isn’t set into stone just yet, but I am really considering it. New Art Monday would basically consist of exactly what this post has been; a new piece of art that I have never posted on the site before, but post it in the blog. I’m thinking it might get me more into the habit of blogging and keeping the blog fresh as well as the comic. What do you guys think? Would you be cool with a two day a week update schedule on the comic and once a week new art post in the blog? Of course I’ll be posting art and other stuff in my Twitter and Facebook feeds as well as to here. So let me know what you think in the comments section and keep spreading that comic word

A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday, I lay awake in bed, in the dark and frustrated. I hadn’t had the best of days drawing or doing anything creative really and it had pissed me off. At this time I’d been struggling for a while with what felt like creative burnout and I was trying to figure out how to push through it without just shutting down for a while (which I won’t do because I lose momentum when I do that and then it’s just that much harder to start back up again than it is for me to just suck it up and push through it, but I digress).

Anyway, I decided to just unwind a bit with my Kindle Fire and just sketch digitally in Sketchbook Mobile with my Wacom stylus. Just mindlessly draw. I had never really tried to draw the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before so I thought I’d give one of them a shot, but just have fun doing it and not over think it. So I drew Donatello, liked it, posted it to Twitter and felt good about myself and went to sleep.

The next morning I awoke to a ton of positive response about the sketch so I inked and colored it that night and posted it to a sketch group I’m a part of on Facebook this time as well as Twitter. I got even more positive response (more than anything else I’d ever done) so I started to think I might be on to something here. I started to think I might should let this style (a style I had sort of adopted about 4 years ago in the early days of Robot Friday) dominate for a while as well as fight myself on getting too knit-picky and additive with my work.

So over the course of two weeks I kept drawing and posting and people kept loving them. I became happier and less frustrated and I’m even having fun drawing again. I’m really excited for the future of my work now. I’m going to draw the Thundercats next and morph the Robot Friday comic into this style as well. So if you dig these turtles let everyone know and share them about and keep reading and spread the comic word about Robot Friday too. It just gets better from here

Confidence comes from experience. Experience is froth with mistakes. The sooner you stop fearing mistakes the sooner you’ll gain confidence.

I posted this quote Friday on my Twitter account. I think it pretty much sums up the process behind confidence. As an adult looking back over my childhood, I feel like I had a pretty good amount of confidence in myself in everything I did. Of course as children we are pretty much clueless to a lot of things and I think my confidence, then, sprung from ignorance more than anything else. But the fact remains that I was pretty much fearless up until around Middle School.

Something in my changed in Middle School (as I am sure puberty is apt to do to all of us) but I became a lot more sensitive to criticism and began to let it dictate the way I felt and acted in many instances. I was still pretty confident in myself, though, thanks to great parents and friends but the feeling of not being good enough at things still sat there in the back of my mind.

I was decent enough at sports, but not really great. I was decent enough at hobbies, but didn’t really excel. And so it went through my High School and College lives.

Socially, however, I did pretty well. I’ve always been pretty good at conversation and storytelling and just talking to people and listening. But still, that feeling of not being good enough was still in the back of my mind.

When I entered the workforce I did anything anyone needed or wanted, artistically, so that I could gain experience and move up the ladder. I felt like I didn’t know ANYTHING at all about what I was doing and it really was a struggle for me to just send out resumes a lot of the time. But common sense told me that I had to make some effort or nothing would ever come of my career. So I sucked it up and pushed forward every day anyway, terrified, that people would see me as I did, a complete fraud!

Over the first decade of my career in the production art and printing world I just struggled through the fear. I learned a lot about the career I was trying to build and about how reality is a whole lot different than what they had prepared me for in college. Soon I begun working for companies as the only person in the company that new anything about art, in essence becoming the entire art department. Any confidence that I may have gained in the first 10 years of working in the business was pretty much crushed at this point. As the only artist in an organization I felt like I had no one to fall back on. No one to help em out, to teach me, to back me up. I was alone and lost and terrified.

But I muscled through, making mistakes and learning the best I could as I went along. I did pretty well and started gaining more confidence again, but still fighting with that feeling of not being good enough still. I was working long hours with low pay because I always felt like I was just lucky to be working as an artist because I always felt like a fraud and if they just knew how little I did know they’d just get rid of me on the spot. So that fear started to turn into anger. I was angry that I hadn’t been able to learn more than I had. I was angry that I didn’t have the other careers others seemed to have. I was angry at myself for not being braver. I was just angry and that anger won.

In 2007 I quit my job of  eight years to be a full time freelancer. To finally have the career and job I wanted. To finally do what I thought I knew better about the business. It was going to be great. I’d start my own design studio eventually and life would be sweet. Reality is that none of that stuff happened or was true. I stopped being scared because I didn’t have time to be any more. I wasn’t just the art department any more I was the whole business. Marketing, management, art and everything. If I felt like I didn’t know anything before I worked for myself I sure as hell felt like I didn’t at this point. But I just had to keep moving forward to survive. Just to make ends meet.

By the end of 2009 I was out of money, the economy had really gutted a lot of my clients and I was exhausted from working all the time and just barely getting by and feeling, still, like I wasn’t good enough. So, I took a full time job for minimum wage and left freelancing behind.

What happened next was pretty surprising, though. When I reentered the workforce I immediately noticed I had a lot more confidence in many more areas of the business than just art now. My confidence in my art skills also improved by leaps and bounds. I no longer felt scared to give my opinion on anything art or design related because I knew I was right, on a fundamental level if nothing else, more often than not. What had happened? Why had I changed?

After being back in a full time position now and making far above minimum wage again I’ve done a lot of thinking about my change in outlook on life and my career and have come to the conclusion that my new found confidence has everything to do with my life experience. I always had the skills and the confidence to do what I wanted to, I just never realized it until I was forced to do it. My constant drawing and working on art skills as a teen and young adult was what got me into college and the business. My position of being the stand alone art department in the companies I worked at got my confidence level up to move into freelancing on my own and my experience as running my own business gave me the insight and confidence to understand why businesses run the way they do. Knowing that last part made it a lot easier for me, as an artists, to be confident in my recommendations or opinions when it came to art in relation to the overall business of the company I work for.

I still look back over the last 20 years and wish I’d have made more mistakes earlier in life. That I’d gotten angrier earlier and went it on my own sooner. I’d have experienced more and failed faster and that would have built my confidence just that much sooner. Of course my life is pretty great now. It’s all working out for me, but I feel like I wasted a lot of time in the process by being scared and not living.

So, my advice to you in building confidence is to make mistakes, go it alone and live the life you want to live and don’t fear mistakes you might make along the way. We all make mistakes no matter what we do or don’t do, so get them made sooner and move past them and be more confident than you ever thought you could be. Because trust me, you’re already that confident person right now, you’re just not giving yourself a chance to show you that you are!