 Hello there, it's Sandy and I'm going to be working on a graphite drawing today that took me about four days to do. It's quite the epic thing. It's a half sheet of watercolor papers. It's quite large and it's in graphite. I'll be not sharing a step-by-step tutorial, but I will show you a bunch of real-time footage shot across the several days. And at one point there's an eraser that I was using this drawing to test the eraser itself, which is going to seem ironic when you get to the small parts that this eraser did, but I'll stop and talk about that when I get to it. What I really wanted to discuss today is something that I brought up on social media recently, which is imposter syndrome, and it's when you feel like a fake or a fraud, like somebody is going to find out you don't know what you're doing. I remember as a little girl, I couldn't wait to be an adult because adults knew what they were doing, and I wanted to have the confidence of knowing what I was doing. And I never have gotten fully to that point. I've always felt like somebody's going to come along and realize I'm making it all up. And I think that's a feature of life. And if there's anybody who doesn't have this issue, then you probably aren't learning very much because you already think you know everything about whatever it is you're doing. If you're somebody like me who loves to learn, then you realize how much more there is that you don't know, and you can get fixated on that. And that makes you feel like, oh, I only know this one tiny bit, so I'm no kind of expert on any of this. I have suffered through different bouts of it over different areas of my artistic life through my half century. And I've come up with some ideas that I think might be helpful to you if you suffer with any of these as well. I've had some success with some of them. Some still plague me. It's just the nature of being an artist and sharing your work. You're putting your heart out there, and you're trusting that people are somehow going to react to it in a positive way. And you're worried that they're not, so you start talking to yourself. There's a lot of self-talk that happens in our heads that is not true, but we believe it. We buy into it, and we need to stop doing that. A lot of it leads us right into imposter syndrome. You feel like somebody's going to figure out that you don't know what you're doing. Well, I was doing some research because I wanted to see if anybody had looked into this any more deeply. And yes, I found a website that had something that I thought was really interesting and wanted to share. I'll put a link to it in the description down below. And they listed five different types of imposter syndromes that have manifested themselves. And one is a perfectionist. It's somebody who's never satisfied. They fixate on any of the flaws or mistakes in their work, and it leads them to a lot of self-pressure, a lot of anxiety. If you're resonating with this, my advice to you is to stop comparing yourself to others. That is the root of this. You're trying to be someone else, and you need to start to become very comfortable in your own artwork. Realistically, assess your abilities as if you're looking at someone else's work. What would you tell them about it? Would you pick on that one thing that only you know happened? Or if you were somebody coming at it who had no idea you struggled in a particular area, you wouldn't comment on that. You wouldn't worry about that. You would think that was great. Look at your work independently and honestly and dispassionately. And then celebrate your accomplishments. When you do something well, applaud yourself for it because you need to get that kind of affirmation from yourself, not relying on it entirely from other people because other people are unreliable. You need to be your biggest champion, and you need to stop being your biggest detractor. Yes, there's plenty to grow in. There's plenty of areas you can improve, but you really need to get that perfectionism under control. And I have had times like that in my past when I've stressed about perfection. Now it only comes up when other people pick on the fact that I drew one little thing crooked or I missed a button when I was coloring something. But aside from that, I am over it on my own work. I don't tear apart my work in that kind of a way anymore. Number two is my biggest area of struggle, which is the superhero. Someone who's feelings of inadequacy compel them to push the limits and work really hard, like just really pushing at it. And that is where I am currently and for a long time have had a struggle. And my solution to that that has been working, I've been taking steps forward in it, scheduling time for good self-care. Get your exercise, get your sleep, work on your relationships, and make sure you're a healthy person, and not just focusing entirely on your work. Now this goes for people who are working on artwork or working in your job or whatever it is. You don't want to push yourself so hard that you can't do anything well anymore. And that can be an outcome of imposter syndrome. You're just pushing and pushing and pushing. So my dogs get more walks now. I get lots of naps in. I give myself permission to take naps because I have insomnia a lot of times at night because as ideas start bouncing around my head and I give myself the ability to take naps if I need it because we need to take care of ourselves. We need to meet the needs of our bodies in order to create in any kind of a good way. Number three is the expert. Someone who's always trying to learn more, which is good, but they're never satisfied with their level of understanding. And I don't mean somebody who's resting on their laurels at that. You don't want to be that person, but you also don't want to beat yourself up just because you're not at the level of so and so. You want to honestly look at your work and see your achievements, see where you've come from, and see how much progress you have made, knowing you've got more to go, but don't falsely underrate your own experience because you have things you do really well. And if all you're ever doing is tearing yourself down because you don't know more than that, then you are just discounting every step you've made in the past. And the solution that I have for that one is to nurture friendships that are gonna provide you with that accurate and honest assessment of your work and encouragement to take the next step going forward. This may not be your best friend. Your best friend is gonna tell you you're awesome no matter what. They're gonna tell you your work is great and they're not going to potentially offer you that honest critique, that honest feedback of where you can grow while celebrating what you have already learned. I recommended on my social media post and you can see that, I'll link it down below. I recommended that people find someone in that list, someone in the comments who they resonate with and just go ask that person, could you look at my work and tell me what you think my strengths are? Just ask somebody for that. And if they respond, if they are willing to give you some feedback, you may have found someone who is willing to do that without being your BFF. You don't necessarily want someone like that. You want someone who can give you that honest feedback and there's lots of ways. You can find a YouTuber, find a blogger and ask them for their feedback and you may develop some relationships that way. And I feel like now is the commercial break in this video, I wanna talk about that electric eraser. I did this drawing and chose to draw a squirrel because I wanted something with fur that I could use this for. And the electric eraser is battery powered. It has an eraser head in it and it spins really fast. I was playing around with, do I go left to right or right to left? Do you go with or against the grain of the direction it's spinning? Found that it was a little challenging to get used to and some of the portions here in the early bits, I didn't know what kind of pressure to use. So I ended up with these chunky ends on them and I wanted pointed ends on the strokes on each of those hairs. So I just went back in with a pencil to repair that. And then if those lines get too distinct, then I would fuzz over the whole thing a little bit and soften all of it with a cotton ball. Just lots of different layers in this drawing that kept growing and growing and growing. This eraser does get dull fairly quickly, you know, within, I don't know, 10, 15 strokes. It needs sharpened. And I had to look up how to sharpen one of these suckers. Very easy to do though, just press it on the surface of the desk and it wears down anything that's extra on the bottom. And then you can see that the edge gets sharp. And you can start using it again for using thinner lines. So let's get back to the discussion of imposter syndrome. Number four is the person who is a natural genius. They set very high goals, whether it's learning a new medium or learning, you know, some big thing they're gonna do. They're gonna do a giant project of some kind, but they feel crushed when success eludes them on their first try. When it doesn't happen right away, I'm a failure, I'm a failure, everything's terrible because that didn't work. Well, you need to start giving yourself rewards for just trying, for taking an action. Because a lot of people get paralyzed when they see something that doesn't work, like, well, I'm never trying that again. I'm never trying anything new again. I'm only gonna stay with the things that I know work. You need to get those positive feelings going about just trying. And if you need to give yourself permission to go get an extra yummy coffee or go for a hike to your very favorite place if you try this thing, whatever it is, do that. Because you need to give yourself some rewards for trying in order to get past this and getting past those lofty goals not being met every time. I rarely meet my lofty goals. I set all kinds of crazy goals, but I celebrate the fact that I even gave it a shot. Because there were times in my life when I wouldn't give it a shot and now I just know that I need to give myself that affirmation. And five out of these five, this is number five, is another one that I struggle with which is the soloist. Somebody who's very individualistic, they work well alone and they love doing that. But in this kind of a circumstance, your self-worth can stem from your productivity. And that is a struggle for me because if you know me, I put out a lot of content. Lots here on YouTube, lots on social media. And I'm always trying to, I don't know, do something bigger and better and more fun, more interesting and more inspiring. And I tell myself, it's because I wanna be more inspiring to people. But a lot of it is imposter syndrome. It's like, well, I can't do a bunch of pieces of crap that nobody cares about. I need to do really great stuff. And I need to get myself away from feeling like my self-worth is in that. It's fine to have that as a goal, to be constantly pushing people to grow more as artists because that's what I'm all about. I want to help you to be more creative but I need to do it in a way that doesn't demean my self-worth. The suggestion for this, which is something I have been working on is to build relationships. Look for collaborations and joint ventures. Recently, I was asked if I would teach in someone else's class on art journaling. I didn't know what I was doing. I am not like a natural born art journaler. I do that from time to time. But I thought, geez, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have any experience here. You know, I had enough experience to teach the thing I taught and that was good. And I celebrated that because I am now in a group of women who are teaching this class. And I'm gonna learn from them. And maybe they're gonna learn something from me as well. And I think that is one of those steps that's gonna get me out of that solo venture that I tend to live my life as an artist in my studio in the midst of a pandemic. I've also joined my life drawing group where I get regular interaction and feedback with other artists. We're working on things at the same time and we're just making connections. And that for me is really important. So if there's somewhere where you can get together with others who make kind of art that you make and join in something together, sometimes that's taking steps online, joining an online challenge on a blog or on a social media. You know, Inktober was a recent one that I participated in and tried to be part of a community that's doing something. And that can be a really big step forward for you as an artist to reach out, build relationships with other people. But in general, imposter syndrome for me, the biggest thing you can do is to get yourself into a pair or a trio of people who will give each other regular feedback. Because I have friends who do that with me. I give them feedback, they give me feedback. We're encouraging each other, we're sharing things we're learning. And we give each other honest opinions about what's going on and we don't let each other dwell in nonsense. We shake each other up when we have to. And I think that's really valuable. So for the end of this drawing, I'll tell you a little bit about where this went. I started by trying to make this big background. I wasn't super happy with the fact that it looked kind of cloudy even though it's relatively even. I was pretty proud that I got it this far. But I had this other idea, which was to put the squirrel on a throne. Because the squirrels in our neighborhood and my dogs can vouch for this, the squirrels think they are king. They are usurpers of the throne. And they love to drive my dogs crazy. So I decided to create a throne. And I could do that using an eraser with all of this graphite that I had on the paper. And it gave me a chance to test out all the different erasers and how much graphite can they remove. And this is a learning that's gonna stand me in good stead going forward. Had to do a lot of really working into a lot of areas over and over and over again to try to get this to work. It's why it took it four days. But it was, I think, worthwhile. So these are the survey of the tools I used for doing this drawing and the drawing itself. My crazy squirrel on a throne. God bless him. He's gonna be one of my favorite drawings for a while, I think, no matter what happens. Because it took four days. How am I not gonna remember this experience? And I think he's a lot of fun and I enjoyed the process of it. And that's what I wanna encourage you to do is to enjoy the process, whatever it is you're making. The process, a lot of times, is what's going to grow you as an artist. So revel in that, revel in what you're learning and the positive steps that you've made and you'll keep growing. All right, I'll see you guys later. Take care, bye.