2019 kicked off with a new challenge for me. A challenge which pushed me into new waters and tickled my brain. It required a complete new way of working and thinking about my work.
Adobe reached out to me and asked me to join their january livestream session. Three live sessions, each two hours long, in front of +600 viewers. At first I was overwhelmed and nervous to accept this job. But after thinking it over and over, I gained a good feeling and even got courious to push myself out of my comfortzone. Sitting there, painting and talking about my work for six hours, in front of hundreds of people, made me feel different about my work. I tried to prepare myself for possible questions – which wasn´t really succesful, because I couldn´t predict them – was the perfect opportunity to deal with myself. Who am I? What makes me an illustrator? What are my goals and how can I understand the visual language better?
The time at Adobe gave me a perspective of what is possible, a new piece of the puzzel to understand the concept of trusting my own spirit and connecting thoughts to complete an artwork. I always thought I´m not able to perform live in front of an audience, paint and talk at the same time. But little did I know, how much I enjoyed to interact with people and answering questions, I haven´t thought about before.
This experience seems to mark a new step in my journey of beeing a freelance illustrator. Usually I rush from job to job, trapped in the circle of trying to pay my bills and enjoying the alternation between commission work and working on personal projects. But everytime I finish a project, it just stops there and I start a new one. But now I think about developing storys behind the canvas, spending more time with my illustrations and the character in it. I want to get to know them better and give them the attention they deserve.