I did that thing everyone warns me about, twice. the first time it didn’t go well and I almost fell into extended art burnout again. This is my story.

When I first got into art I was convinced that foreign online art classes were a revelation. They seemed so much cooler, so much more fun, so much trendier than american online art classes. I still honestly think that’s true and feel hard pressed to find anything that good stateside. During the wild west of internet course years, Class101 was so unbelievably goated, along with Domestika, though now I’d have a hard time recommending either, especially if you’re a beginner, because the backlog of courses is awesome but I think if you’re just starting out the version differences between apps and programs for digital stuff is really hard to get past.

During that period of time I became obsessed with Korean and Japanese art educators (though now I’m super into Chinese contemporary digital artists like Enze Fu — you can get a class from them on Coloso). One of my idols for manga style anatomy and rendering was MMMMONEXX. They are still super popular, especially on youtube and patreon.

Art skills always feel like a moving target to me. Whenever I feel happy with my skills and start having fun I always feel like I should be pushing myself harder. Actually I quit art “for good” last summer. I was getting blasted at Queen Street Tattoo in Honolulu and talking to my tattoo artist Jessico Serano. I asked him how he’s able to do art every day, because at the time I would fall into these feverish, manic states where I would be doing art from sun up to sun down for months at a time, then get frustrated and not pick up a pen or brush for months. He asked me if drawing is even fun for me, and it wasn’t. I couldn’t remember the last time I had fun drawing, but I was able to remember all of the effort I put into selling prints, showing friends and family my art, and the deflated feeling I would be filled with even as I was achieving all of these milestones as an artist, because I was pretty much just doing it to show people that I could, not out of any joy or passion. It was pretty much a passion for showing off.

So, I swore off art for almost a whole year, then with a randomly renewed fervor to make use of the skills and talents I’d built over the past several years, decided this time would be different! I was going to take art seriously again, for real! And I was going to do it with a mentor!

I’d been thinking about getting a mentorship with MMMMONEXX for years through their patreon but could never really justify it to myself. I bit the bullet and did it this summer and it was pretty much a horrible experience. He just had me drill and drill and drill and I guess I’m slow but it took me hours every day to finish the drills. And like ultimately what’s the feedback going to be — drill more?

After just a few weeks I was already back in complete art burnout. But that made me remember my conversation with Jessico, and a switch flipped mentally to quit dicking around and focusing on all this crap I don’t care about like anatomy and manga art (I love manga but becoming a mangaka is not on my hero’s journey) and becoming the best artist ever who can do everything, right now, from memory, with a ROUND BRUSH. And just do what’s fun to me. Like doodling, making animations, 3d sculpting and modeling, and most of all drawing on the go in flipnote studio 3d. And like my TCM practitioner, Xavier Staub says, if you won’t do it for yourself, do it for me! He says that time you have an urge to do something, that’s your qi trying to move you into a position in the time space continuum, so more qi can move through you, and so on. So far, that’s going pretty great for me.

So, I would say “don’t meet your idols” is the abridged version. In full, don’t meet your idols if you’re not ready to have your reality shattered and be real with yourself about why you’re idolizing people and what you actually want out of life.