This was a subject I've been thinking about writing for a while now, but because I spent most of my online time on twitter, I didn't really know of a good way to share what I've discovered of working from home. Being several weeks into COVID-19, it's little bit late to be topical, but folks will always start the journey of working from home regardless.

Disclaimer before I go further with this intro, this is mostly stuff I wish I read when I was leaving college and starting my career in comics working from home. I know some of these tips don't work for everyone but I hold the belief that every piece of advice is worth listening to--implementing is another story, but that's a different topic for another day.

Going back to working from home, I'll start with bit of a background: I've been working from home since I was on my way out of University in 2015. My internship was even done at home. At first, I didn't really have a schedule that I stuck to, and I often waited until the last minute to get things done before their deadline. Each week, I would promise myself to work better, but that didn't happen for a while. After almost three years, my bad habits caught up to me and I burnt out, hard. I was starting to dislike my job to the point where I was jealous of people with day jobs. They were able to go home and not be concerned with work for the rest of the day. I also remember telling people--quite frequently--that I would give my left leg for a week off.  "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" quickly turned into "Do what you love and you never stop working." 

When I burnt out, I took a long, hard look at my career. I was working the job of my dreams. How could I possibly hate it? Am I in the wrong field? That was my worst fear: that I worked so hard on this thing I thought I loved, only to hate it. I thought about every opportunity that I turned down in order to pursue my field, and worried I made the wrong choice each time. 

Thankfully, I had the resources (namely, the emotional and financial support of my significant other--so I acknowledge that I'm in a relatively privileged position) to take a few steps back and figure out what I needed to do to make my job a joy again. It took me roughly a year and a half to get to where I am today. I have a routine that allows me have equilibrium with work and rest. 

Here are the three main ideas that made me love my job again, all of which I'll make a separate post in the upcoming weeks (and will link as they are posted in the next upcoming Fridays). 

• A joyful work space
• Clocking in and clocking out
• Dedicated work hours for productivity and improvement

To quickly summarize these, I firmly believe you cannot work well unless your space, using Marie Kondo's terminology, 'sparks joy'. If the idea of sitting down at your desk fills you with dread, it's possible something about your space could be improved. Improving your physical space improves your work. 

Office workers clock in and clock out. That shouldn't change just because you work from home. It is important to have a routine to start work, but it's even more important to stop work--both regarding the end of the work day and weekends. It is so easy both procrastinate starting work and get so caught up in it, you don't stop. After a certain amount of time is over, work for the day must end. This is especially difficult if your job is your dream job--the work is so much fun you almost don't want to stop. Stopping is not only important for your mental and physical health, it's also important to step away from your work.

Organizing what you do each day is also important, and the most recent discovery of mine regarding my career. Time dedicated to "career maintenance/improvement" is just as important as the time you put into your main gig. 

By now, you can probably see why I'm splitting this subject into multiple posts, so this concludes the topic for this week.

The first meaningful post on the blog (accompanied by updating this website)!

There's that old saying, "Do what you love and you never work a day in your life." It's a great, starry-eyed expression that I find holds some value. That being said, "Do what you love and you never stop working" is more true--at least for me. I my career at this point is very close to my ideal, dream job. Is it true that I never work a day? ...Let's just say I've been so burnt-out before that I got jealous of office workers--simply because they were able to go home and be free from work until the next day. I'll dive deeper into this subject another day.

I spent the better part of thirteen years doing art after work was done. When I went home from school, I drew. When was done with homework, I drew. Of course I did other things here and there, but most of my spare time was spent drawing. I loved drawing so much it was as essential to my being as breathing. However, I found out about two years into my dream career that even I had my limits and needed to cap art making after a certain amount of time. But what do I do? I can't draw. That's what I do for my job, and I need to take time to rest and do other things.

I spent a good deal of time strictly limiting any art or drawing to work hours. I was to do no art during my time off. This was good in theory, but remember how I mentioned that drawing was as essential to my being as breathing? In other words, my free time felt pretty empty. Sure, I had a good time playing video games, watching YouTube, and going out, but my free time still felt hollow. More recently, I allowed myself to draw if and only if it was for the fun of it. This was challenging, since it still felt like working. It was a lot of fun, but so is my job, and I was still at my work desk.

Luckily, James Gurney released a great video, announced via email with the subject, "Now is a great time to learn to paint in gouache". This caught my attention because I've been on-and-off relearning traditional paint since I left university, and gouache is one of my favorite mediums. Needless to say, the video lit fire under my feet. I pulled out my paints and cleared off a small table--one I put in my office specifically to do traditional art whenever I got around to it--to do the first exercise in the video.

Admittedly, I got a bit overzealous and missed certain objectives of the exercise. I was satisfied nonetheless, considering it had been years since I painted anything with traditional media. As I know from my job, good enough is fine--do better next time. If you ask me, the next time I did just that. 

After waiting a couple weeks for some more paints to come, I did the second exercise in the video. I took what I learned from the first painting and applied it to this one: being sure to allow the underpainting and transparent layers to shine. 

Either way, it was such a joy to make these paintings, and I certainly would like to pursue it more. Obviously, my first passion is comics and narrative art done in a traditional animation-esque style, but painting is quickly turning into something that I look forward to doing during my time off. The analog nature of painting versus the digital nature of my comic work makes it a perfect activity to do in my free time. It satisfies my need to make art without feeling like I'm doing my day job. I still have a long way to go with painting, but what thrills me is that--given the nature of hobbies and free time activities--it's less about what I end up making and more about the activity and learning. This best captures the spirit of when I made art growing up. I was excited to learn, to do, without the obligation of work. 

So if I gave you--or even me in 2018 during the peak of my burn out--some advice about what to do during your time off if you work your dream job, it's to find something to do that's still what you love, but different enough to feel like you're doing something else.  In a perfect world, it should be something that could take you outdoors. Thankfully, my paint set up is relatively portable, and I'm looking forward to taking it outside sometime.