Returning to your purpose as artist.
To be an independent manga ka can be so easy or hard as much as you see it as a hobby or a profession.
If you take it as a hobby, you know you can work on your pages at your own rhythm and update from time to time: “maybe I can update weekly…no, better monthly…what about bi-monthly…omg! It has pasted one entire year since I upload the last page!!”
If you take it as a profession, you make schedules, plans every page, chapter, dialogues, new characters with details, drawing pages, inking pages, screen toning or coloring pages, try to fit as much as you can to the update days, keep in touch with the readers… a lot of work! Huh?
Sometimes, the muse is at your side and you can do three pages in a night and others…not a single line in an entire week.
It demands a lot time, lot energy, lot compromise with you, with your work and with your readers. You don´t have a boss telling you what to do: you have to be your own boss, your editor, your critic, your entire team work.
Many times, the artist feels that gives so much and receives so few and, in this step, is when many projects are abandoned because it easy to lose motivation.
As any other artist, I feel in this step many times: I do not work only doing illustrations or manga. I have a very demanding work during days that makes me arrive home literally drained physical and mentally. To take the pencil to draw at nights is sometimes so hard as you say you will climb a mountain without energy and equipment. And in that moment, I feel the voice that says: “Give up! You are wasting your time!”
What could you do, when the temptation to procrastinate or give up are near of you? Remember your purpose! What was those that made you begin: tell a story? Just drawing? Have fun?
Connect yourself with that moment when you began to work on your comic/manga. Feel the energy of enthusiasm and the strong motivation you had! You will see like by magic, you will feel that flame burning inside of you again!
My motivation when I began to work on manga was to do stories that give to the readers a smile, laughs, that make them forget for a moment their troubles, and give a message. When the readers give me feedback and say my stories did it, I feel I have more energy to continue working and my motivation increases.
The auto motivation is hard at the beginning for those that never practice it before and search motivation of friends or other persons, but when you learn how to keep yourself motivated when you are beginning to feel down, you will see how your productivity will increase.
What does motivate you?
