Thirty is the age of “adulthood for real, this time.” Even if you screw up in college, it’s still far enough in the future that it looks like a perfectly reasonable goal, to get back on track toward your lifetime goals.
In one sense, it is a reasonable goal. In theory, five years is enough time to reinvent yourself, if you do in fact commit to taking all of the necessary steps. If you do still have at least five years until 30, by all means adopt a five-year plan based on your goals, and execute it.
Ultimately it’s an arbitrary number. What you really want is to stop wasting time, and find a way to get yourself to commit to the things you would prefer to be doing for a living. And you want to see results as soon as possible.
I’m not going to contradict the standard wisdom on launching an art career. But it’s easy to fall into a trap, with a little bit of education, where you find that you have enough knowledge to criticize your own work to death. And then the joy is gone. Your standards have been raised so far beyond your own level of performance that you can’t doodle for fun anymore, let alone take a project and see it to completion. This isn’t a problem that can be solved by taking more classes. First, you have to unclench. Make the process of creation fun again. Then go back to school, figuratively if not literally.
So, that’s what I’m doing here, and it’s the reason I went ahead with getting a domain name. It’s an investment that I now have to justify. While I’m not going to immediately plunge directly into a comic book project, I’ll be doing some short strips and writing about the creative process, building up to a book in the near future.
When did the future begin?
Whimsical Sinkhole: Art by George A. Freeland 