To speak your truth you must honestly and authentically communicate your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. You must express yourself in a way that is true to who you are, without fear of judgment or rejection.
To draw or illustrate your truth you must communicate your thoughts and emotions visually in a unique way. To do so authentically you have to first identify what your intentions are. What do you want to express through your illustration, and why. It’s not about illustrating a “pretty picture” or one that might get a lot of likes on social media or better still, one that might sell — although as a professional creative that last bit is obviously important.
But approaching the work you put out into the world with integrity, authenticity and depth isn’t a bad place to start. But I’m afraid I have found myself stuck yet again in my pursuit of creating work that I love, feel good about, represents who I am as a person and an artist AND that I feel will find a niche market and actually SELL.
It’s a tall order. So the first place to start is to ask myself — what do I want to authentically communicate through my work? It is such a loaded question for me because I come from a background where I received zero support for being creative. So my head just spins at the though of asking the question and trying to answer it.
So I pulled a tarot card for some insight, asking my Higher Self to intervene and send me the card with the message I most need to hear right now….something to help me see my way over this boulder of “who the fuck am I, what am I doing here and why do I think I can create a successful creative career as an illustrator.”
(*hush Troll Voice. I’ve had enough of you today!)
The Page of Swords
Swords are about the mind, intellect and communication. In some tarot decks “Swords” are referred to as “Voices.” Pages are young or inexperienced. They can also be willful and stubborn.
The Page of Swords focuses on ideas and perhaps a big opportunity at that – one that could be causing a lot of fear. (Yes…that sounds right.) But I think the “stuck part” is that I’m relying too much on my intellect and logic and not enough on my truth – my emotions, feelings, experiences. MY truth. In other words, stop searching for THE truth, as though it is sitting somewhere out there in the world in a box, neatly tied up and waiting for me to find it.
There is no such thing here as THE truth. There is only MY truth. What do I want to express through my artwork, drawings, illustrations and pattern designs?
