I’ve always been relatively creative. I can picture a lot of things in mind, and entertain myself with daydreams. Unfortunately that didn’t come with a natural talent to turn the pictures in my mind into something tangible.

Everybody is their own worst critic, and I’m no exception to that. Growing up I didn’t have the encouragement I needed to keep trying when it came to art, and I’m self aware enough to recognise that if I did I wouldn’t have listened. By the time I was in high school and drew a portrait of Barack Obama that looked more like Adolf Hitler I’d given up on being creative.

With my interest in tattooing I still spent a lot of time looking at a lot of successful artists creating amazing artwork, and continued to tell myself that I wouldn’t ever be good enough to produce something that I’d be happy with.

When I actually started to get tattooed something in my mindset changed. Maybe it was spending time in the studio for the first time and seeing the huge amount of art on display at Riverside Tattoo. I’ve always been good with technology, so why not get an iPad and give digital art a go? No need for a huge amount of supplies, and it was portable.

This turned out to be exactly what I needed to start getting back into being creative. I ended up doing a lot of digital colouring – tracing around images to colour them, or using stamp packs in Procreate so I could colour them in. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with this, I still had a lot of ideas in my head and no way of translating them.

I decided to do things properly and go back to pencil and paper, but I didn’t want to be drawing random shit. So I decided the best thing to focus on as a beginner was Japanese koi…

I’d been tracing and colouring them a lot on the iPad, the scales were especially satisfying to get filled in. But drawing them from scratch was a completely different challenge, which brings us back to the title of this post.

I really hate learning to draw… but not really.

I’m at that awkward point where I’ve been doing the same thing for a while and I’ve hit a wall, seeing minimal or no improvement. Not at all helped by the fact that it’s extremely easy to look at successful artists and put yourself down. I’ve had a lot of help and encouragement along the way, but it’s hard to keep that in mind in the moment.

I reached the point where I knew I needed to go back to the basics, but couldn’t bring myself to grab a pencil and paper and do anything with them. So I’ve not done anything since April (after trying something different in February and being happy with the result). It’s not the way to make continuous progress, but I needed the break.

Taking the time off to reflect on things has helped me to identify more what it is I’m not enjoying, so that I can focus my energy on the right things. Being a tattoo artist was my dream job for a number of years, so there’s part of me putting an excessive amount of pressure on myself because of that. If I can’t learn to draw then I’m blocking myself from reaching my dream…

I’m going to start trying to relax a bit, stop comparing things to artists that have been drawing as a job for the past 10 years or longer, and enjoy the process more instead of focusing on results all the time. Just because I can picture something doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to draw it every time I try.