Hello friends, I hope you’re all having a wonderful start to the new year, and a peaceful January.

This month, we had a new moon in Capricorn, among many other planetary movements, and it should encourage the pursuit of new projects, given the workaholic natures of the astrological sign. And while energetically the month was a little chaotic, I still tried to take advantage of this new moon by giving myself a deadline to complete illustrating a full deck of Lenormand cards (36-card cartomancy system). It was my way to kickstart my creativity for the new year.

As someone who can’t really sit still, I’m always looking for a new project during my off-time from work. In December, I needed one that had enough boundaries and limitations that I didn’t need too much brain space, yet gave me the excuse to creatively explore. Since Lenormand cards are illustrations of a single object, it became the perfect exercise for experimenting with digital illustration.

While painting and other analogue artmaking methods were an intuitive process that was tactile and grounding for me (even watercolour, with all of its flowy and spontaneous glory, was grounding), I’ve always struggled with finding the same tactility and intuition in digital painting.

And though I’m definitely far from being done with the project (it’s only the 12th of January at the time of writing this), the few friends who’ve seen the works came back with the same comment:

“You changed your style.”

Yet I was immediately thinking “I’ve never had one.”

Anyone else also in a functioning creative slump?

In the past year, I thought that I had still been pretty productive despite everything that’s been happening both locally and worldwide; I had been able to continue painting and drawing things, churning out projects and attending to things at my day job, as well as write several short stories that’s tucked away in my notebooks.

But looking back, while most of them seem to belong to several ‘projects’, none of them were actually things that I wanted to create at my core. I realised that I wasn’t proud of the products, but merely proud of the fact that I had managed to churn out at least something to show for, so that I didn’t have to feel like a lazy bum in the midst of my world burning down. In a way, it was almost as though being productive was a lifeline I was holding onto so I wouldn’t get lost in the waves of anger and frustration.

One of these projects included the remaining 16 cards from the tarot deck I started on in April 2019. But the end of February this year, I had technically completed 4 of the remaining cards but the set didn’t sit right with me. I was productive, but none of the work I created matched my vision of what I wanted them to look.

And slowly, I began to hate my work.

For weeks, I struggled with the possibilities; should I reboot the Minor Arcana design so that they matched up more? Should I just release the Major Arcana as a deck and ignore the Minor? Should I redraw the court cards on a larger sized paper so I could get at the details? Should I just finish what I started even though I hated it? How would I print them? Could I print them? Would people even like them?

I even wanted to reboot the entire deck, including the first 22 cards I exhibited just so I could have a clean slate and start all over again.

It wasn’t until a conversation with coworkers and a very uplifting podcast (Creative Pep Talk by Adam J. Pizza) that reminded me how this was part of my creative process; that I will always have self-doubt and that there will always be a crazy mismatch between what’s in my head and what’s on paper because the alternative would be the end of me.

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I snapped this photo this morning while I was blow-drying my hair, getting ready to take the hour-long commute to work. And I’m sharing this image featuring two versions of the same painting side by side to remind myself that it’s fine to decide that certain pieces aren’t good; to reboot the things you don’t like and improve on it; and to abandon the projects that don’t sit right.

But it’s not okay to hate your work, no matter how crappy the quality is, and pretend that they didn’t exist because they are part of the process and they are the stepping stones and mistakes so that you can do better.