— I never did learn to draw Spider-Man. No real surprise there. Because the truth of the matter is, I never actually tried all that hard.

Though I did talk about it a lot.

I fell in love with Marvel comics early and by the time I was in fifth grade I had decided I would become a comic book artist when I grew up.

So I studied comics constantly. Even bought books on how the top artists crafted their layouts, penciled their drawings, drafted the dialogue, inked the line art, keyed it all for color. I studied it all. Thought about it all the time.

Drawing X-Men comics professionally someday became my watchword. When asked “What do you want to do when you’re out of school?” now I had an answer.

Or thought I did. For a while anyhow.

Because a few years later when I was dropping by to spend an afternoon with one of my best friends (still one of my best friends, actually), I happened upon his drawings of Spider-Man. The Fantastic Four. Wolverine . . .

They were amazing.

Way better than anything I could draw.
I mean, way, way better.

This is when I learned LESSON #1:

Studying something and talking about it a lot isn’t the same thing as DOING it.

It’s not even close.

While I had been daydreaming about drawing comics and graphic novels, my friend Tom had been putting in long hours at night actually working at it. And that’s not even the right word. Because he wasn’t working, he was drawing, he was having fun.

And that’s where we roll in LESSON #2:

When you make something really, really big in your head . . . you often make it unnecessarily HARD.

I had spent so long daydreaming about a career in drawing comics, it had overwhelmed me. It had become SO big, so challenging, so filled with unknowns I had no way of navigating at that age, I ended up losing the joy of actually doing what it was I claimed I one day planned to do for a living.

In placing the end goal so high, how could I possibly endure my own pitiful efforts early on? Every time I started a drawing, it could only remind me of how inadequate I was compared to the professional artists I had been putting on pedestals my whole life.

My buddy Tom, unencumbered by any of that, was just having fun. And like I said, because he was having fun, he happily put in the hours. And putting in the hours, he got really, really good.

I never did learn to draw Spider-Man. But eventually I took up photography and then Photoshop. And some time later I was fortunate enough to launch Photoshop Artistry and bring together other photo artists from all over the world.

And it’s so exciting now to see just how incredibly talented (and how successful) so many of our artists have become. You’ve no doubt seen their work in our magazine Living the Photo Artistic Life, and indeed, the extraordinary images in this post are by some of our most longstanding artists.

But the thing is, each of these artists started the same place everyone starts. Yet over time they all became masterful. And I’m convinced it only happened because they didn’t allow themselves to simply daydream about it, and they didn’t make it all into something impossibly daunting.

For the longest time, they just had FUN.

And because they had fun, they kept at it …

Because they took delight in the act of creating, they happily put in the hours … and putting in the hours, they found joy in the act of creating.

And really, for anyone who dreams of becoming an artist, maybe that’s the most important lesson of all.

Indeed, this is precisely why you can do the same.

Fall in love with the process. Fall in love with the journey.

Just decide to enjoy it — while you do the work.

You can worry about the rest later.

~ Sebastian

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PS: All the images featured throughout this post are by AWAKE artists. Starting up top, they include . . . Marius Els, Jamie Suplee, Anna Czekala, Phil Clark, and Jim Laskowicz.

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