The Secret to Being an Artist: Showing up — Especially when you suck.

Marcel Mensah | Eat More Spiders
12 minutes ago
3 min read

A story about fear, consistency, and showing up for your work.

Also published in The Creative Cult by Marcel Mensah (Eat More Spiders)

Identity Shift for Creative People:

The night I became an artist, I was hunched over my family’s old, round, wooden kitchen table in 2014. At the time, I was 16 and living with my parents in Providence, Rhode Island.

Around midnight, while sitting in the dark, I decided that I was going to be an artist — for real.

My family was all asleep. But I was still awake, tired, and drawing on the cheapest drawing tablet money could buy — which, at the time, was a used, blue Wacom adorned with deep scratches that would ruin your linework if you weren’t careful.

That tablet cost me 30 bucks, and I definitely got my money’s worth out of it. By then, I’d spent nothing short of 200 hours on that tablet, in that uncomfortable wooden chair. Sitting in the dark, working on my, frankly pretty bad, but earnest drawings.

But that night was different.

After many years of drawing and fantasizing about being like the artists I idolized, that night I made a decision. A decision about my identity. That night, I decided I’d be an artist. In the same way one decides they’re a ‘chef’ — and not ‘someone who likes to cook’. Or how one decides they’re a ‘singer’ — and not someone who ‘sings in their free time’.

It was an identity shift,

Eat More Spiders Drawings published to tumblr ~2017

And, with this shift came the determination that I would continue to sit in chairs, very much like the one I was sitting in that night, and try to bring as many interesting pieces of art into the world as possible before I died.

Even if the work wasn’t good (it wasn’t), and even if no one paid the work any attention (they didn’t for a very long time) — I was going to show up and make art seriously. Period.

A Commitment to the Work:

From that day on, I filled sketchbooks religiously, and took my first steps into publishing and marketing myself as an artist. I was staying up all night copying comic book panels from Dragon Ball Z, Naruto and Batman.

Then, spending my mornings scanning those drawings onto an 8gb thumb drive with our (painfully slow) family printer, to later be published on platforms like tumblr, deviant art, and art station.

And you know what? Nothing external came from it.

I never went “viral”, a majority of the comments on my work at the time were from automated porn bots, and my most popular post on tumblr got 30 likes (and I was PROUD of those 30!).

The real reward was internal.

See, 16 year old Marcel understood something about creative work that Marcel, as a young adult, thought he had earned the right to forget.

He understood that the result of creative labor isn’t what makes it necessary or important. What matters is showing up to get it done, as often and as intentionally as possible.

Being committed to the process — and finding time every day to move the needle forward. And, I’m not gonna BS you here. Teenage Marcel produced some of the slowest, painfully repetitive work a teenager could think up. And 90% of it SUCKED.

But, he also drew every single day for a long time. And, he published more creative work in that time than I have in YEARS.

It didn’t matter to me if the work was good back then. It only mattered that I showed up to get the work done, every day, without excuses. Now, over 10 years later, I finally feel like I’m getting back to that level of “showing up”, that younger me understood was a non-negotiable.

How This Can Help YOU:

If you’re someone that struggles with your creative work, try this out:

Decide today that you’re going to make something, every day, for the next 2 months. It can be anything. Drawings, songs, photos etc. Make em’ — and publish them on the social media platform that you’re most comfortable with.

The finished results can be unoriginal. The concepts can be lazy. They can (and most often will) be very unpolished. And that’s okay.

Commit to this process for at least 2 months, I promise you your relationship with your work will improve. If it doesn’t I’ll give you back the money you spent to read this post.