In part one I discuss the personal benefits of faith in overcoming challenges life throws at you.

Now in this second and final part, let’s extend that perspective to encompass the world.

Faith is Risky Business

Persons with high levels of personal mastery… cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head or heart, any more than they would choose to work on one leg or see with one eye.

Leaders and inventors don’t only focus on what is commonly accepted. Allergic to conformity, visionaries are strange with their habit of constantly challenging our assumptions. Their resulting insights, though beneficial to society, can be detrimental to those whose empires depend on upholding the status quo.

The very act of innovating means to make what existed before obsolete.

Innovation is only good for business if you’re the one innovating.

History has not been kind to most visionaries. The more resistant to change we are as a culture, the more they suffer at our hand. They lie in silent anguish, their works a well-kept secret. They are burned at the stake, exiled, or condemned to drink poision―a justly punishment for “poisioning the minds of youth.”

People with faith change things, and change is uncomfortable.

Those with faith are regarded as foolish or are met with concern, and why wouldn’t we be? We are standing on ground that doesn’t exist―yet.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

I am thrilled with the feedback from my last post—a tear-jerker for any who attempts reading it. It’s a story that took me two years to write… not that I was actively writing it the whole time. I desperately wanted to share my story sooner. I wanted to send it to newspapers, accompanied with my own rude political-cartoon style illustrations mocking the mental healthcare system, but I couldn’t do it. I was too angry.

I couldn’t let myself share my story until I let myself empathize with mental healthcare practitioners—the people I called and left countless unanswered voicemails for help—desperate cries drowned in a sea of others. I had to stop wanting to tear them down and instead see things from their perspective: the overwhelm and frustration that comes from needing to solve urgent problems with the wrong set of tools. You do your best to cover gashing wounds with band-aids, but the line of wailing wounded is going out the door.

I couldn’t let myself write about my experiences with family mental illness until I let myself empathize with mass killing shooters. It is a topic that you think I would be at the forefront of discussing—but until then—I could do nothing but look away.

I couldn’t let myself write my story until I let myself feel all of the pain again. My story has encouraged others to write about their experiences, and I am thrilled for this: we need all the perspectives we can get. But I warn you, this is not easy. The following outlines my writing process, along with common pitfalls that experience has taught me to avoid.

My illustration output and rendering skills have exploded these last few months; the above being the most recent piece I did. In this post I retrospectively share my work and resources I’ve been devouring on the quest to becoming a better visual communicator everyday.

For those interested in following the journey, every little sketch at a time, you can find me regularly posting on Instagram: @amandalynnelliott.

I am now also accepting commissions. Everything from simple sketches to elaborate complex scenes full of color. If you’re interested, message me here.

Alligator Ghostland

A big breakthrough I’ve had is embracing color and backgrounds. The above comic pages were heavily inspired by two things:

Ever since graduating high school and my decision to not attend art school, I’ve felt like I was trapped in an artistic desert. I kept going to networking events, and even hosting my own, in hopes of meeting an artist that I could truly connect with.

It wasn’t until I finally let go of my need to collaborate, and I instead focused on my own growth–on making myself a person skilled enough so that I’d become a desirable collaboration partner-that the door was finally opened for me to meet such a person.

Meeting Brandon was like coming home. After meeting at a figure drawing session, we talked for hours at a cafe. It was nice connecting with somebody that was so open to my alternative viewpoints and had the same creative lens through which he viewed the world. His obsession with bears is charming.

It’s interesting how the most valuable people in your life seem to present themselves when you least expect it.

For the list of challenges see part one.

Using see-through tracing paper for back-to-back fast gesture poses was educational in terms of movement. I’m glad with this one in particular because I did well sculpting the model out of the page with the aid of surface lines and I can feel her continued movement. It’s not static.

Caricature

Here’s a combination of caricature and relocation from my challenge list.

Once I got the model’s basic form down, I couldn’t shake the feeling how aristocratic the pose felt.