A reader emailed me this week asking why I make art. It made me sit with the question for a while.

I started making free art as gifts for my friends to get their reactions. When they liked it, I felt amazing too, but when they got busy and stopped responding, I just paused drawing for a while.

It was fun though, back then I didn’t take any of it too seriously.

The hollow foundation

Drawing to get love and attention isn’t a bad place to start, that’s where most artists begin, and the problems only really happen when you try to build a career on top of it.

External validation isn’t something you can control. If you post something and it does well, you might feel good for a day, but then you have to keep feeding the same crowd with the next piece, and when something performs badly, the motivation disappears because that was the whole reason you were drawing in the first place.

You’re basically giving away control over your creativity to other people, because you can only feel good about your work when someone else agrees first. I tried this approach and it doesn’t work for long.

The next level

My new why is financial independence. I realize that I can help someone go through the same learning steps that I already went through and actually get paid for that. This is exactly why I’m moving towards teaching.

There’s a bigger pattern here too. Life moves in stages, and if you put serious time into something, one day you wake up and feel completely done with it. You’ve outgrown that stage and you need something deeper to keep going.

For me it was about 4 years of drawing for fun before I started doing commissions, and now moving towards teaching. Each stage built on top of the previous one once I’ve outgrown it.

Find your next stage

If you feel like you’ve lost that drive that you used to feel, and you feel kind of lost, try this:

First, be honest about whether you’re actually avoiding the work. If you haven’t drawn seriously in months and you’re also avoiding other responsibilities in your life, that could be a different problem.

If you’re genuinely done with this stage, take a real break from your routine. Read something new, listen to podcasts, let your brain wander. The next idea will show up on its own. You’ll know it’s the real thing because it will feel like something you have to do.