Nuki News #71: Shifts in Anxiety

This week I’ve taken on another round of 10 commissions! By December I’ll have done this for a year- and while the year seems to have gone by quickly, there’s been a change in me from when I started doing art as my living and now- a change in feelings of anxiety in my life!

When I was starting, January this year especially, I was relying on the income I got from my art commissions for the first time. This brought about the natural anxiety of “Will people hire me, or want to commission me?” And “will it be enough?” to a lesser extent(mostly because I calculated my expenses and priced myself accordingly, and had last year’s data to work from). Every month, on the 10th I’d be anxious about opening and not having anyone want to hire me for art commissions- but the more times my queues were filled, the calmer and less anxious I became.

Around June/July, I noticed the shift, though. I didn't feel anxious anymore if people would buy my art. The anxiety I felt manifested into another step of the process- actually delivering on the art promised & paid for! You could call it ‘blank canvas anxiety’ but it was more the realization that, even as the artist, I had no idea how I would fulfill all the commissions. And I don’t mean logistically, because, well, obviously I’d done hundreds of art commissions already! It’s more that, there’s so many ideas, characters, prompts, and references I have to synthesize and transfer to a canvas. It’s wild and intimidating to consider bringing out something from nothing. Then the anxiety of showing what I’d made to the commissioner. Was I way off the mark? Did I screw up? Will they hate it?

The saving grace here, and why I haven't crumpled up, is because of my experience and strong process I’ve developed for these commissions. I’m able to calm myself down because I go “Yeah, I don’t know how these pictures will go; but by the end of the month somehow, some way, I’m going to end up with a bunch of great pictures the commissioners will enjoy.” I just have to remind myself that I don’t need to know the end result in order to get there. And I’m not alone in that journey either- the commissioners are working with me to see to it the picture they want is made.

Noticing this shift(and the reason I write about it this week)I believe there’s a natural evolution of this anxiety and I think it’ll eventually graduate to a new form in the future(at least, I won’t be surprised if it does). It started out with a What - “Will people hire me for my art?” and it seems to have shifted into a How - “How will I make this happen and fulfill the requests?”. So I anticipate somewhere in my journey, it may become an anxiety of Why. Such as “Why am I drawing X and not Y? Why should I keep drawing? Why haven’t I gotten to where I wanted to be?”

Fortunately, I’ve recorded down my ‘Why’. So I won’t ever forget. It was the 7th Nuki News post I’d done, too, haha. If you’ve joined me here this year, you can check out that post over here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/nuki-news-7-why-34606352

Being able to notice when I’m feeling a certain way has been important to stop problems from getting overboard or to the point I'm actively getting bogged down. Maybe you can relate to this, I thought I'd share. It's nice I'm confident people want my art now, that's for sure. I just need to work out the fear of not delivering which I don't think will be too difficult.