491 - Determining Your Current Creative Stage and Shifting Focus with Illustrator Chris Piascik

0:20What is the most important thing to focus on in your creative practice? Is it about just grinding and trying as hard as you can to push it forward? Or is it more about letting it go and letting it flow? Do you need to focus on quantity and just pumping out as much stuff as you humanly possibly can? or is it about holding back, curating the quality of each decision and each launch and what you put out there in the world? What is the most important thing to focus on? Everybody has different opinions and I would say they're all wrong because it's the wrong question. It's not about what is the most important thing to focus on in your creative practice.

1:14it there's a question before that which is what season are you in what stage are you in because all of these things are important to be a top priority at different times in your creative process and the difficult part or the most the most top priority that you have is to make sure you know what stage are you in. Discern what is the most important by figuring out the season you're in because that determines what your focus needs to be. And that's a pretty big challenge. Now, today on the show, we have Chris Piasik. He is a buddy of mine. He's a podcast guest that we had on just like seven years ago.

2:03He's an illustrator I've known for a long time. He's also ADHD, cut from a similar cloth in some ways, and then in a totally different fabric as well. I always have a great time chatting with them for that reason. Chris did a super long daily drawing project where he was posting a new thing every weekday for a long, long time. And then And he's since moved on to posting YouTube videos and really a more curated release that is a little more sporadic. And last time he was on the show, we had a big chat about his daily drawing practice. This time we talk about moving from that stage into this current stage that he's in, how he knew it was time to switch, where his focus has shifted since.

3:01And I think that there is a lot in this conversation that can help you figure out where you are right now, where your energy maybe needs to be focused, and how to shift that when the time comes. had a ton of fun catching up with my buddy, Chris, and I hope you really enjoy the episode. There's a lot of stuff that inspired me and Sophie as we were going back and working through it. Stick to the very end for our CTA. Every single episode of the show, we try to give you something to do with the ideas, not just to feel good, but to do something with them. And usually the CTA, it's a call to adventure, a creative call to adventure.

3:42This time it's a little bit different. It's a call. No, it's not a call. It's a choose, choose your own adventure. It's choose the adventure. And we're going to give you two prompts and they are going to be determined by which stage you're in. So if you're in an earlier stage of your creative practice, you might do the first one. If you're in a later stage, you might do the second one. And hopefully it will get you thinking about and acting with the priority of the season that you're in. All right, let's get into it.

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6:21I was watching a bunch of your videos. Oh, thanks. One of the things, and they're great. I mean, I love it. I love what you're doing. It's awesome. Thank you. I really appreciate that. And it must have been an old video and you were just talking about getting it. Or maybe, no, it wasn't. Maybe it was, I listened to the podcast episode we did years ago. Oh yeah. Talking about getting up at nine or 10 AM, drawing on the couch with your dogs. And I thought, I bet you're not doing that anymore. Yeah. I thought, oh man. nine nine or ten o 'clock feels like three o 'clock in the afternoon at this point yeah i figured i figured that was true yeah man totally like i'm still trying to adapt my lifestyle because it it was just so wildly different yeah it's hard it's a hard shift i mean we had the benefit of never having been adults without kids really yeah i did it a long time.

7:22Yeah. So also, you know, makes us less prepared parents. So that there's definitely pros and cons to that, but we didn't get used to a lifestyle. We like, you know what I mean? Yeah. That was the hardest thing for me. It's tough. It's actually kind of related to the main thing I want to talk to you about, but we'll get, we'll get to that bit later. one thing is i was before i go here how's things in general other than being sick and and being i actually um things have been good they feel crazy right now just because there's been so many non-workable days because like i can't do anything when my kid's home yeah so you know i just feel like i'm very behind on a lot of things but aside from that you know things are things are great i I feel like throughout my entire life, like career life, I keep accidentally doing things that help me.

8:23Because with the growth of my YouTube channel and everything that goes with that, it's really making up for client work being slower than it has been in the past. And I didn't intend for that to happen. I just have stumbled into these things over and over again throughout my career. And, you know, I mean, one of the things you talk about a lot that I completely relate to is just trusting your curiosity. And that ends up kind of carrying you a lot of the way. There have definitely been some times where I needed to, like, step back, really rethink some things or take some strategic action. Or I had a lightning bolt of insight that helped me make a shift.

9:13but a lot the majority is the that curiosity thing of just making sure that's why i think adhd people are naturally creative is just because they get bored so they have a natural thing of like looking like oh i wonder what's that like let me go that way and i think on top of that too it's like that you hyper focus so you take it more seriously yeah so like you don't just like dabble in all these different things you like lock in on some things and you just like focus on it and give it like all this extra attention. And it's, you know, when you put a lot of effort into something, you know, there's so many good, good and bad things about that.

9:50I've thought about how many like little tangents I went on and thought like, what if you were able to just put that into a master's degree or a PhD? What if you could have just lined up that sauce alongside doing anything other than just you read 10 books on that topic and then you never wanted to think about it ever again. You're like, yeah, yeah, that there's that that's true. Yeah. Um, but in the creative practice, if you can channel it in there, it can be a pretty powerful thing. Yeah. I feel like the, for me, it seems like the times where it takes me off on a tangent, it's usually like smaller problems than like longer scale things.

10:36Like what do you mean? But with making videos for YouTube, I'll be like behind and I'll be like, oh, I need to record a video or something like that. And like, I'm still learning that I need to plan out better. But like, I'll be like, oh, this is something I can do quickly. And then I like start changing it. And then I, it gets so complicated and takes so long. And I have no idea what's happening. And I'm like, well, if I just thought about this for more than five minutes, I would have known. But I just, you know, went all in without planning. but it's yes and i get i mean that's the way i do most things but i also think that the more i learned about like i think about these two ways of being creative like puzzle strategy strategy i was gonna say strategic strategic creativity that's much more like create with the end in mind where it's like a mystery and then there's like the exploratory improvisational you're you're you don't know what's happening.

11:36The more I learned about the strategy side and I got better at that, then I had to really force myself to go back to doing it the way you just described, which I would think more of as improvisational because when I would write long form and really not control it, the most interesting things would happen. So much of it is a waste of time. Yes, yes, for sure. And it's tricky because I struggle with that whenever something feels like, I don't know, one of the things that feels like the hardest thing for me is time and it just going away all the time. So when I spend time doing something that doesn't relate to, like doesn't benefit, it just feels like I get so frustrated.

12:23But, you know, those kind of things are necessary because it helps you come up with new things. That's one of the reasons why diversifying your creative practice in a few different ways, I think, is so essential because wasting time, and I really believe this, and I think there's all the evidence in the world to support that wasting time is one of the most essential parts of creative practice. And yet, if you live in a society like we do and you're a parent and this is your job, everything is against you wasting time, which the researchers call it playing with the problem rather than trying to solve it.

13:06Playing with the problem is messing around. like yeah you have and so i i'm like obsessed with getting into that space figuring how do i get into that space in pockets that i have that i will create for it because everything else is trying to get me to do the opposite of that it's really hard yeah i feel like i feel that in so many different like i fully believe and it's still so hard to not get feel like I'm wasting time. Like, even though I know I am, but like, it's important. I also find that I get into this weird mindset where like, I'm like, Oh, I can't do my creative drawing stuff right now because I have to do important business stuff.

13:52And I'm like, but that's what you do. So that's the, that's the important part. I'm like, I can't do this. I got to send some emails or like, you know, do something else. Like for what? I'm that's the making stuff is what I, do. Otherwise I'm just a secretary. Yeah. And the funny thing is there's the, the, you have this, this, uh, myth as you're coming up that when you go full time, then you can like guilt-free waste time making stuff. No, that's what you can do when you have a job. True. Exactly. Again, goes back to why it's good to have a few different ways that you make money and the more consistent, the better.

14:34And actually I'm actually going to do, I think I'm going to do an episode about going part-time, like that being the goal. And there's a bunch of different reasons of what or how I mean that. I don't even mean like doing anything different than what I'm doing right now, but like, what is the thing I'm creating space for that is for me only? Because I always had that when I was like trying to level up my creative practice and trying to get paid to do things that nobody was paying me for. And I always had that for a long time. I had this blip of time where, oh, all the things I wanted to do are part of my job now.

15:14And now I don't have anything that I'm like, oh, I'm doing this because I want to do it. Ooh, that's bad. That feels bad because you lose like, you really lose why you're doing it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's sort of why I started the Daily Drawing Project a million years ago. Really? yeah because like my whole you know childhood in like high school and college was like just getting to this point of I want to be a graphic designer and I want to do all this stuff and then like getting that job and like realizing after a couple years that like the only drawing I was doing was just like sketches for projects I was like wait a second I'm not doing this anymore I need to uh draw more and that's not enough for me to actually commit to something.

16:01I have to like, I need to put in structure rules or, uh, I need to hyper focus on it or it's not going to happen at all. So. Yep. I totally, I totally get that. And yeah. So, uh, I love one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was I love this stage that you're in. It's very fun to having been peers and, and friend, friendly friends online, friendly friends for long it's just cool i you know this is a complete aside but i just want to say i just had a sense of as we're watching so many things get automated and i i saw this like long list of comments from illustrators that i've known for a long time and i just thought man i even if even ones that i'm not like a particular fan of I have a sense of who they are because they make this work and they've like crystallized a thing and they have an identity and I just love it.

17:01I just love, it's so cool. I don't know. I had a weird step back moment. I was like, that's so cool. If I think about this person, that person, like I have this sense of they've been practicing for a decade and they have this like, this is who they are. And it's, and knowing you for a long time, I have the benefit of like watching that and you being in this new stage where you've been doing YouTube and all that has just been so cool to watch. Oh, thank you. Yeah. I just think it's awesome. I mean, it's mainly your fault too. You're the one who told me that I should do it. I don't even remember saying that.

17:38I swear to you. You said, you know, you really need to try to get yourself in front of the camera more. And like, I don't even remember the context, but I think about it all the time. Yeah. I think that I'm like, how did he know? Because like, yeah, I don't. Yeah. I don't, I don't remember saying that specifically. It was on Instagram. We could probably find it. It was in a DM. Was it? Yeah. I remember the only thing I can remember is, uh, I'm guessing it was something about maybe Skillshare videos or like your Skillshare promo or something. And I just, I just thought your editing was good. It was funny.

18:16It was dry and it just, um, complimented your work. Well, I, and it, and it was something that maybe I knew from being around you, but if you just followed you, you wouldn't have seen, you wouldn't have known that. And it just kind of made it feel more three-dimensional to me. But yeah, I mean, I, you, you know, you've done even crazier things and cooler things than I would have imagined. Well, I appreciate the push. Yeah. Um, one of your, one of your recent videos, I believe you're talking about, um, kickstarting your illustration practice. And one of the things I wanted to see if you just talk about a little bit was, um, the, you called it draw stuff you like.

19:08And I want, could you, do you remember what you said about that? Yeah, for sure. About that a little bit. Cause I, I just think there's some, it's deceptively, uh, simple. Yeah, it's true. Powerful. Well, so I think, you know, for me, and I think a lot of other people, when they're like starting out and you're like, how do I start getting work? Like, how do I get hired to do illustration work? You start like looking at people who do illustration work and who are successful. And then you start to think like, okay, well, I need to make this kind of work or like, I need to like, think about what someone's going to hire me to make.

19:45And then you just start trying to just make stuff based on that. And that's not a very creative place to make things from. It's like, you know, So yeah, like you see also to like the assignments that sometimes you see that even great illustrators do. Generally, the art director saw something else that they made and they just sort of wanted to adapt it to this new thing. So maybe that original thing was more interesting and it was maybe about something else entirely. but for me, the biggest thing in realizing this was, you know, the stuff that I made thinking that it would get me hired to people would see, like, didn't really get much attention.

20:24And when I started drawing and like illustrating and making stuff about stuff that I was interested in, not only did I have more fun doing it, so I'd like spend more time on it and I would enjoy it. And it would just, I would also have this like deep knowledge about what I was making too. And that allows you to like make it even more interesting because you can like put in all these other special things or like maybe a little inside jokes or just, just lots of little things that make it unique and special. And then when you put that stuff out there, it's going to appeal to a broader, you're not just like making something that you think an art director is going to like, you're making something that you like.

21:03And then the other people who like that are really going to resonate with it. And if it's great illustration, those are, you know, people who might hire you will see it, but then it's going to get in front of people who maybe don't even care about illustration, but they care about that thing. And then that's going to spread it out. Yeah. I mean, it's a good example of this is a long time ago. I drew like every bike that I've ever had. And people who weren't into illustration, but are into cycling were like, oh, I remember I had the same bike and I love this and telling me their stories about it.

21:32And it just like resonates on a deeper level. And then it ended up, you know, getting picked up by bicycling magazine and then just, you know, led to a bunch of work within the bicycling industry. Cause and I feel like if I tried to like make something for an art director to see, that's like, it would have never thought to do that. And you, you know, if you thought, Oh, it looks like there's tons of good jobs in the sneaker head world. I'm going to start drawing sneakers, but you don't actually give a shit. It's not going to, it's like people's BS detectors are finally attuned. And it kind of reminds me of how, you know, sci-fi books like the Martian or three body problem are written from these people that have tons or they're scientists, science bad guys that are really knowledgeable.

22:21And then, you know, it doesn't, I don't know anything, but as I'm reading it, I can tell that this stuff sounds right. It sounds now. And there's just something about the way that you're drawing the bikes or when you did the cars. Did you mention that one? In the video I did. Yeah. What was that one? So one of the other things that I've always been interested in is like cars, like I do track and autocross racing stuff. And I just like weird old quirky cars. So I was drawing a whole of different cars and um an art director at hot wheels saw them a while back and was like oh i really love these maybe we can work on something in the future and a couple years later they did this series of these like exaggerated features cars that look sort of like the ones that i did and they asked me to do the packaging for this limited edition set so it's like a perfect little circle i remember seeing draplin in my early days talking about this kind of idea of he would just be making stuff that was to do with just kind of random things that he liked, like estate sales and mustard and just weird things.

23:27And initially thinking like, I don't even know how you train your brain to think like that. Um, even notice the kind of things that you like like that or why that would matter. And then later I've kind of realized that, Oh, people really need something to grab onto like a noun, like artists talk about their work in adjectives, you know, whimsical, colorful, that kind of stuff. But people think about nouns like they, so for me, like when I did the dream journal, I did that because I just love dreams. And I never thought, I never thought, oh, this is going to turn into a getting hired to do a picture book for someone who's a dream, you know, it's a dream picture book and these editorials and all this stuff.

24:13And I realized like it's much easier to be the, uh, to, to stand out, not in the drawing world or the illustration world as like the best, easier to be like the best drawing illustrator in the dream world or in the podcasting space, or, you know, it, there's, it's a different way to differentiate yourself too. That's also a two things you said that are super important to the whole drawing, which you like thing is like standing out and differentiating yourself. And if you're someone starting out and you're trying to like you want to like you said break into the sneaker world or something like that you're looking at this stuff and trying to make your version of that kind of thing and one you know that person was hired because they they're they've mastered it you know what i mean and you're just making like a bad version of it or like okay version but like it just it's not going to stand out it's going to look like that thing and even if that even even if it doesn't turn into work, we still, it helps people have a three dimensional picture of you.

25:22Like when, you know, when we talk about, if I, if I was talking about when Waxahachie had this album out that I loved, it's easy to be like, Oh, that was the like sober one. It was like one where she got sober and you know, something to like grapple to like hold handles for this thing. You need that as an artist. So even if it doesn't turn into a job about cars or bikes or whatever, you still, people need things to be like, oh, it's this, this, and this. That's that person. yeah and I also think that's important too in like with all the AI stuff like the thing that makes us unique as humans is like us being humans and like that interaction and you know the people who are hiring illustrators are also people and they you know if they're looking at a lot of different work and one of these illustrators share similar interests and seems like someone that they'd want to work with you know that's gonna really play a heavy part in, in the selection?

26:26What I want to say, I don't believe is dicey, but it's just slightly here it comes as after that is dicey. It's not really, but, um, it may, it just made me think like, you know, um, I don't, the most like woo woo version of manifesting. I don't get down with that. Okay. That's not my jam at all, but I also am trying to be sensitive to people that do that. So I'm trying to be sensitive to that. However, this is a interesting, this is like an active, creative version of that, that has work behind it, that has like action and just, uh, energy behind it. And that's by, you're actually making something.

27:16So you're, you're taking those things that you love and, and, you know, not stopping there, but you're doing stuff with it. And it's turning into things in the real world. And it has like a creative generative thing. So I'm not saying that it's, uh, I'm not saying it's woo woo, but I am saying that it's like, it's a way to take some of those vision impulses and do something with them by like making this work about stuff that you love or, you know, there's like an active creating your life energy to like, also like all those cars you don't own. I mean, like there's like a, there's just a weird, does that make sense?

27:58Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And anybody. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm not, look, I'm not against which, which part of this was offensive. I'm just trying to pull that out. Look, look, I, you know, people are super down with man, manifesting woo woo stuff. Other people are like, you know, like, like, let's get those guys. And I'm just saying that this feels like an interesting marriage of letting yourself hope and dream and aspire. And that actually leading to something powerful and active and creative. And does that make sense? yeah it does and it also sort of i feel like there's a trick being played on me or something because right before this i was like dealing with a whole bunch of spam messages on my newest video where it was like about manifested manifestation and like manifesting but it was all like plugging like i was doing this until i watched this video by this person and it manifested this but there was like all these accounts with those like very same similar message yeah and i'm like trying to delete them all.

29:01And then I got on this call and you're talking about manifestation destiny. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. And it's just, to me, it's like, I think. Were you leaving those comments? It was me. I was actually an AI generative robot that was doing, um, create some fake sense of synchronicity. But I just think, I think I'm interested in when, when, uh, researchers talk about these kinds of things that the people that are actually well within the evidence. They'll talk about how sports players, um, athletes, some people call them, uh, well, gladiators, if you will, you know, uh, using, um, uh, what's it called the vision something where they're not just envisioning the outcomes they're doing that, but they're also envisioning the work that it would take.

29:55Like the, they're thinking about them exercising, they're thinking about them, how they're going to exercise, what their form is going to be. They do all that stuff and it improves their results. And so I'm, you know, I'm interested in things like where we get attracted to an idea, but we miss the point. And so I think that's what interests me about that. Isn't it just sort of like planning and thinking about it? Yeah. Just like dreaming and then yeah, doing something.

30:33Yes. I just, I just thought it was cool because I thought like, this is something where you're just like, um, I did a thing last year too, where in, as I was leading up to the new year, I thought I'm going to start, I'm going to do a painting of everything that I want to be happening in the new year. And I actually didn't even share it. I just put it, I made it my wallpaper on my phone for like a month. Yeah. Just kind of like this. It was just one step further than goal setting. It was, it was like, I'm going to create something that starts to make this real, you know, and I'm going to spend the whole time I'm making this thing.