Monkey here.
I'm a big ol' grumpy puss today. I was going to try and write another inspiring post about the life and times of being an artist, but some days you're just not into it. I woke up in a nasty mood after waking up in the middle of an argument I was having in my dream with some sort of professor type person who was upset that I was arguing that the language of the question he asked the class was poor and offered too many possible answers.
To be honest, it's taking a lot to even write this blog post. I was up at noon thinking I was ready to fire something off, and it's taken me about four hours to even start. After various frustrating emails (both reading and writing them), I've come to terms with that fact that somedays we're just feeling off a bit.
Eve reminded me this afternoon that while Monkey + Seal strives to be an inspiration to other artists (people who don't know they're artists are still artists, btw), we're human as well. We have bad days when everything seems to go wrong. We get angry and frustrated and sit around in our underwear refusing to do anything really productive and just want to play video games all day. Today while I'm a big-ass grumpy Monkey, I feel the complete opposite of being inspiring. I want to, you know, maybe quit some stuff, commit a bit of arson, maybe shoot some arrows dipped in sewage into people's legs. Basically, there's that urge to be evil and depraved. I'm not going to do any of that sort of thing, and I'll probably end up just playing Zuma Blitz on Facebook for a while, but the natural feelings of frustration and anger and all-around negative emotions are what I'm dealing with today.
The reason I felt it was necessary to even tell you that instead of putting on some "you-can-do-it" supermask is that you will probably feel that way too sometimes. You'll doubt yourself, your life choices, you might want to strangle someone, or punch people in the face. You'll hate your job, your work, your life, etc. etc. etc. You too will have extremely craptastic days where nothing is going right and you just want to sit in bed and watch Godzilla movies all day.
Eve and I purposefully have posted some of our beginning work on this blog before, and plan to do so in the future. Why? Because we always end up seeing the end result. You buy a book by an artist and you see the good sketches, the final paintings, all the glorious hard work that they've done. You see the product of them busting their humps for years to build up the skills they have. You never see their first superhero drawing, or what they were like before they went to art school. You don't see their bad sketches, or the crappy early paintings, or the drafts that were rejected. You only see what they want you to se. It builds this image of immaculate awesomeness, and it's intimidating. We think "we could never do that" or something of the like.
Poop on that. Over here at Monkey + Seal, you get to see the real deal. So I actually just spent about twenty minutes looking for some digital versions of our old work, and I couldn't really find any (it's all archived someplace else), but believe me, I'm no stranger to showing you my old, craptacular work.
Anyway, the point is, is that everyone both starts from somewhere, and that everyone has bad days. It's fine, you're human, I'm human, and we all have crap days sometimes. Anyone who says otherwise is totally a robot and should be scorned.
So I hope that somehow you'll find this mildly incoherent post helpful in someway, if anything, to know that you're not alone. We all feel like poop sometimes, and unfortunately, it's just part of being human.
If that happens to be you today, let's work on getting out of the funk together. I plan on playing copious amounts of video games and proudly shirking my responsibilities for the day. While this might not be the most productive coping mechanism, hopefully I'll get it out of my system and get something done this evening. What do you do to get out of the funk? Post your coping mechanisms in the comments below and help someone else get out of the funk too!
