So there’s this Instagram challenge thing going on for March. I first saw it on the Year of Creative Habits Facebook page (I’m not sure if that link will show up if you’re not a member of the group!), and then followed that to this here Instagram post. Basically, the challenge goes like this; every day this month there’s a simple topic as your guideline for what you write about, and it’s all to help people get to know the artist more.

I don’t think I’ll try too hard to have my photograph of the day line up with what I’m talking about, but we’ll see how it goes.

Here’s just a handful of the topics:

Feedback, Recommend a Maker, Milestone, Tools, Inspiration, etc.

Today is March 1st, and the topic is “You”.

*takes a deep breath*

Okay. So I’m not so good at talking about myself, but I’m going to give it a try. To be completely frank though, since deciding to do this whole artist thing just a few years ago, I’ve had to write a bunch about myself on various websites (like where I sell my work, for example) and though that never gets easier, at least I’m not completely inexperienced with this. I do have various life experiences that I can chat about though 🙂

My name is Robert Chapman, and I’m from Ontario Canada (I think every bio section I fill out starts with exactly this lol). I’m 35 years old (right? Yeah …pretty sure that’s right), and as I said in the paragraph above, I only recently became an artist proper. I mean, I’ve drawn things on paper for as far back as I can remember, I just never thought it was worth pursuing.

When I was at home I was playing video games, but when I was in school, I was drawing things on all my notebooks, constantly getting in trouble for it. I had a teacher that once threatened, very loudly, to break all my pencils right there in the middle of class. Granted, looking back I guess being completely ignored by a student would be upsetting to some. I ignored everyone and everything though while I was drawing.

I went through most of the past 20+ years filling notebooks and sketchpads with doodles, never really even considering making a career out of it. It was just something people would say “Hey, that’s pretty cool.”, and that felt really good. It was really the only “talent” I ever had. My excuse (and I feel it’s a valid excuse) was that I had no real examples of successful artists to look up to. None in the real world, my world, at least. It just wasn’t a thing I literally believed I could do.

Occasionally my dad might mention that I should learn how to airbrush motorcycles, or something random like that. He likely saw someone doing it on television and thought I could do it too. I guess I should be at least thankful that he was thinking of me.

To segue from that; something I’ve always had to figure out was “what am I actually going to do?” I wasn’t interested in painting motorcycles. I decided to do the artist thing many years after that, and I’ve kept plenty busy since, but am I not able to narrow things down to a single niche that I want to tackle? So far, that’s a definite “nope.”. I do a whole bunch of various digital artwork currently, and I’ve already been working on some web comics too. You never know what’s going to hit as “your thing”, you know? So I dabble in lots of creative things.

I have a Patreon page, where I post pretty much everything I do. I started my second Year of Creative Habits this year. This time for photography. Though I combine that with my digital art by drawing pictures on all my photos. Also, I have some fans and supporters that want to see me succeed 🙂

I just have this feeling that something has to come up, something new, and I have to tackle it before it’s popular and everyone else is already doing it. That will be my thing, and I’m just unaware of it right now. I’m not very business savvy, and I don’t feel that that’s really a problem. It’s not something I want to spend too much time focusing on, as that takes away from learning other creative things that I’m more interested in. Besides, I feel a business savvy artist is a little bit of an oxymoron, you know? You don’t want to be completely blind to how to market yourself and all that, but I’m certainly not trying to spend a thousand hours making it a strength of mine.

Anyways, I’ve rambled enough. This is me. I believe I’m a capable artist, but I’m also unsure of myself. Feeling this way helps keep me motivated to always try to get better at whatever it is I’m doing. You never know when things will take off. If there’s one single thing about me that I feel most confident about, it’s that I’m easily the most persistent person I know!

Thanks for reading 🙂