Unpacking your shoulds (a zine)
Choosing what belongs in your creative practice
Hi I’m Keila. Perpetual weird art kid. I write zines and articles about building and maintaining a sustainable creative practice.
This is your monthly zine about the creative process.
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It’s embarrassing how many creative journeys I’ve found myself stuck on. Endlessly trying to make my creative work something that wasn’t because I felt that was what I should do. For a while, it was clean, flat, designerly illustrations, then making work that would sell in markets, then insanely photorealistic work that showcased technical skill. I don’t even want to think about the awkward DeviantArt pieces that are floating around somewhere in the bowels of the internet.
I by no means regret the work that I’ve done over the years. I’m in the camp that making something is better than making nothing. I chose to do work like that mostly because that’s what I thought I needed to do to be an artist. Whatever that means to me at that point in my life. It does break my heart to think about how I never sat down to notice or question those rules that dominated my creative life. I never thought about who the person is handing out that validation or permission. Why is this work more about how it’s perceived versus how it makes me feel while I’m making it?
Where do we pick up the rules on what our creative practice should look like? I think about the endlessly aesthetic art desk photos I’ve consumed online. The endless polished work I’ve seen on social feeds. The endless amount of “habits of successful artists” content I’ve read. Thinking “that’s what I need to be doing”. Let’s be real, it’s hard in a society that constantly tells you what you should be. Our everyday life is inundated with advertising selling you something to make you whole. On top of that, it’s tricky because some of these ideas we form go on subconsciously.
I’ve learned that we hold ourselves back by not questioning the rules we put on our creative practice. In fact, some of these stipulations we put on ourselves don’t even make sense when we dissect them. For example, you can go to a museum and find yourself thinking, “I can be a great painter if I paint like Van Gogh. Obviously, his paintings sell for millions of dollars. That means success, right?” You go get the Van Gogh paint set, all the books, and spend years trying to paint like him to make the big bucks. You may not realize that he definitely sold one painting before he died for about 80 US dollars.
We go through life picking up rules we put on ourselves. Maybe in school, an old art teacher told you that anime isn’t art, that poems have rhyme, or that you have to follow specific rules to make an A on your creative project. It’s the worst when I hear “I’m not creative at all” knowing they never give themselves permission to create anything. I think to myself, “I wonder where they picked up that thought?”
By the time we are adults, we are carrying around so much baggage. Sometimes, we fail to realize how weighed down we are. The creative journey is like backpacking through the woods. All the mental models that shape who we are go into our backpacks. By mental models, I mean internal representations of our surroundings that shape what we think reality is. The keyword is internal, meaning that it happens within you and may or may not be truthfully what’s going on.
You see an artist with a bunch of followers and think that is what I need to be doing. Throw that into the pack. You see a work of art in a gallery and think that is what you should do. Throw it in the pack. You see a feed of amazing work and think you need to be producing faster and harder. Throw that in the pack. But we need to ask ourselves, is this baggage keeping you from moving on our creative journey? Sometimes the bag gets so heavy with our shoulds that we find ourselves unknowingly stuck in the woods. Soon, we are in the middle of the creative process, wondering WTF is going on.
Now I’m not saying you can overnight rewrite these mental models you picked up over the years. All I’m saying is you are allowed to question your internal authorization in the creative process. The authorization you grant yourself to feel, think, or act in a certain way when you show up creatively. It’s freeing to know that you get to choose what is in that metaphorical backpack or not. You can decide if it’s worth carrying around on your creative journey. The beauty of creativity is it is so diverse that you have the agency to choose your own journey. Everyone has a different pack.
The next time you feel stuck, remember that it is ultimately you who is granting permission to what you can and can’t do. Ask yourself where you are going in your creative journey and what you are carrying with you.
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what a fantastic and relatable zine! I love the visuals and the idea of re-evaluating the "rules" we're holding ourselves to before creating
This is such an interesting article and I love your generosity and process ! I am new to zines - but have been creating art for years ! There is something so liberating about discarding old values related to art making and embracing your own path