The most important thing you will ever do in your life is sacrifice. Sacrifice is necessary to grow. Sacrifice is hard though. Why? Because, there are things in our life we need to sacrifice that we think is just part of who we are. We think some of these things we need to work on give us "character." They don't. Just like partying every weekend with your friends doesn't make you a better friend.
What makes you a better friend is being there for people when they need you and working on your relationships outside of the party. The key word there? "Work."
This applies to Art and everything else. You need to put the work in to get better. Simply consuming media every weekend doesn't give you better taste or increase you artistic ability. You need to practice. You need to put the work in.
Why put the work in? So you can transcend where you are right now. If you really want to grow and get better you need to transcend your current state. You need to push and push and push until you become something completely different than you are right now.
Why would you want to do that?
So you can be happy.
We feel our best when we feel like we are accomplishing things.
Post Scriptum:
On a personal note I really wanted to get some sort of update posted in January. I don’t really know why, but I’m glad I did. I want to track my progress and make sure that I have it up and accessible somewhere. Anyway, the illustration comp features work already posted here, but the colors have been tuned to fit better. The arm study represents about 45 minutes of work.
