Why It's Important to Paint Outside Your Comfort Zone

I recently gave myself the challenge of painting 30 days of character illustrations. For those of you who don’t already know this about me - I HATE painting people. After years of avoiding my fears, I’ve finally decided to face them head on. My original hope in starting this series was that I would simply improve my figure drawings skills. While I’m only on Day 8, I’ve learned a very important lesson.

What I’ve realized in this short time is that it’s not actually about “getting better” at painting people. Painting people is not much different than painting plants or buildings. You look at what you see, and then you do your best to paint it. It’s about me getting comfortable with the uncomfortable. It’s about shining a light in the places I used to be afraid to go. At some point, I just decided that painting people wasn’t something I enjoyed. I’m not sure when and why this happened. When it comes to painting everything else, I’ve always had total confidence in myself. When it comes to painting people, I’ve simply lacked that confidence.

I realized that I’m the only one who can give that confidence back to myself. I’ve learned that “getting better'“ at painting people simply means building the case that this is something I can do. You build the case through repetition. Every day that I paint a new person, I prove to myself that I’m capable. I didn’t implode. I didn’t pass out. I did it, and the result is never as bad as I expected.

They say that practice makes perfect. I’ve learned that practice builds confidence, which gets us as close to perfect as we’re ever going to get. I realized I can only do my best work, when I truly believe I’m capable of doing my best work. This lesson has been worth so much more than any technical skills I’ve learned along the way. Over the past week, I’ve grown so much more confident as an illustrator. If I can paint people, I can paint anything.

I’ll be sharing all of my illustrations once I’ve completed the series, so stay tuned!

Day 2 of Series

Day 3 of the Series