A Fist Fight With My Brain

I have come to the realization that, for the majority of my creative time in 2026, I have been engaged in a fist fight with my Brain.

Let me attempt to explain.

Generally speaking, I have been struggling to get what is in this lovely Brain of mine out through my fingertips. It’s not necessarily a new problem, but sometimes it’s a lot worse than others. I’d say this year has been as bad as it’s been in a long time. I started the year returning to character designs for my Plunger Monkey graphic novel project. I had four relatively simple characters I opted to work on, since they are just literal fur balls. I figured it would be quick work, I’d feel like I made a bunch of progress in a short span of time, and I could move on to other characters, getting closer to actually drawing pages.

Despite their simplicity, I ran into challenges with some of their facial features, so I decided to brush up on my 3D modeling skills (which I didn’t really have) so I could have some reference models. It’s something I want to do for all my characters eventually anyway, and this was a good excuse to learn more about 3D modeling. That snowballed into months of tutorials and noodling and scrapping things and starting over before I finally said “good enough for now” and jumped back into 2D work. I soon realized that I’m terrible at drawing hair/fur (which I’ve known but ignored), so I spent more time reading and watching tips from various artists and mostly redrew the same things dozens and dozens of times. It became creatively debilitating and the lack of any real progress has been insanely frustrating. Speaking of insane, that old trope about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results sure felt pretty accurate.

Over the years, I’ve experienced something I’ve heard other visual artists talk about: your critical eye and your artistic skill don’t level up at the same pace. When you’re lucky, they overlap at least briefly. You produce a creative work that you can look at and you kind of impress yourself. But that feeling is usually fleeting as your critical eye improves and you start to identify mistakes or weak areas of your current technical skills. I’ve said before it’s a major head trip and I think it’s probably why so many people in creative fields lose themselves to drugs or alcohol (not me, fortunately. Never have, never will consume any such stuff).

When you are a creative person, not only are you compelled to create, but it’s a driving passion of your life and it’s also a large component of your identity. “What do you do for a living” is one of the most common questions we ask each other (after exchanging names) and is just another way of asking “who are you, why are you important, what do you contribute to the world?” Well, “I’m an artist.” When you routinely feel like a hack or a failure or that you’re incapable of doing what you want to be doing and producing what is frantically trying to get out of your head because of that discrepancy between your critical eye and your skills, it bleeds into your self-worth and self-esteem. Time brings some perspective, at least; simply by living long enough and not completely giving up you recognize the cycles. You create, it feels good, you’re happy with what you produce. Then you see the flaws and mistakes, you feel incompetent and worthless, you hate everything you create. You struggle, you persevere, your skills level up, you create, it feels good…rinse and repeat.

Those are all observations I’ve made before and I’ve lived through that cycle many times. I recently had a new revelation, though, and it’s been staring me in the face pretty much my whole life, I just didn’t connect the dots.

You may have noticed I have fun with the way my Brain works when I create. I crack jokes about the absurd things it comes up with (that’s what those PMD Brainisms are, among other examples). I refer to my Brain with a capital B because I treat it like it’s a separate entity or something. In fact, Plunger Monkey is basically a manifestation of that concept. I have always recognized that my Brain kind of straddles two worlds, and I’m not sure if it’s unique or very common. We all have two physical hemispheres of our brains, one tends to deal with logic and problem solving and all that, and the other half is the creative bit. I think most people tend to have one more dominant than the other, or maybe lots of people are equally distributed, but I often feel like both are dominant in me. They’re both vying for control.

It appears to be a problem sometimes.

I think this is kind of the way Da Vinci’s brain may have worked…not that I am at all putting myself in the same category or even comparing myself to him. Just, no. However, I have always admired him and his work has always resonated with me. He was famous as a painter/“artist” as well as an inventor. His brain did both. I mean, I guess you could say inventing “stuff” is a pretty creative endeavor, too, but it requires a different level of logical thinking and problem solving. It’s ultimately an objective activity: the invention works or it doesn’t (or kinda works, in which case you make adjustments until it works).

I was a pretty good student back in the day. Well, at least once I understood the concept of school. That wasn’t until, like, sixth grade or so. I didn’t understand why I had to be there or what was expected of me before that. I was too busy drawing and daydreaming, and those pesky teachers kept interrupting my ability to do that. I have vivid memories of my confusion and embarrassment in first grade (Mrs. Mansweto’s class? Was that her name? It’s almost definitely not how you spelled it) when my teacher finally noticed I hadn’t turned in any of the assignments or worksheets she had passed out during the year. If it didn’t require me to draw or color something, I deemed it unimportant and stuffed it in my desk. The day it came to a head, she came over to my desk (while I was probably drawing), bent down to look inside, then started pulling crumpled paper after crumpled paper after crumpled paper out, piling them on my desk and on the floor while the entire class looked on. I spent what seemed like the entire rest of the year inside during recess completing all those worksheets and assignments (which is probably inaccurate. The embarrassment coupled with my age and my life-long inability to correctly note the passage of time probably meant it was a few weeks at most). I even had to take some of the work home with me, I believe.

Did I learn my lesson? Not really. You’ll note I mentioned I didn’t get the concept of school until sixth grade, and this incident was five years before that. However, by sixth grade, I was locked in. I’m not sure what changed, but I finally started to understand what was expected of me and when it came right down to it, it was all pretty easy stuff to me. When algebra came around, for example, I grasped the concept quicker than my peers and was often shuffled into an adjacent room to work on harder stuff while the teacher worked with the rest of the class. When it started to click for the others, she would send them into the room with me and had me tutor them. From sixth to twelfth grade I was a straight A student (with one obnoxious exception from a gym teacher because I didn’t want to mess around and risk injury playing football with the gym-bros and meatheads during cross country and track seasons). I was in the National Honors Society and graduated in the top 10% of my class (I think I was 21ish out of 350). I enrolled in the honors program in college, which posed an interesting challenge because there were no honors art classes offered. I had to engage professors to do independent studies to fulfill the requirements. By my senior year, though, a bad depression had sunk in again and I came to the conclusion that being an honors art major wasn’t going to benefit me in any real way in the future compared to the amount of stress and extra work it required while in such a fragile mental state.

Anyway, I feel like I’m bragging or something, which I’m definitely not trying to do. There were plenty of people way smarter and way better students than I was. The point is, in addition to the daydreaming and creativity, my Brain was also pretty good at the logical/academic/intellectual stuff, too. To this day it feels like my Brain operates in different “modes”, and switching between them has become more and more challenging and time consuming. I still daydream (a lot), I’m still compelled to draw and create. But I also still spend a lot of time mentally tinkering with things, inventing “stuff”, problem solving. That usually manifests as working on my house and custom building things to solve a problem (or to fit in a very not-square or level space in a room), sketching out various exercise equipment or Ninja Warrior-type obstacles I want to build (but have never been able to get them to the top of the “to do” list), designing/dreaming up semi-permanent shelters for camping and alternative building-style dream homes. Even the functional fantasy (as I refer to them) sewing projects that I dream up and occasionally actually make fit in this category.

The thing that recently really started to dawn on me is that when I’m making art and engaging that part of my Brain, the intellectual half keeps butting in and demanding a 2+2=4 kind of objectivity from the very subjective activity of making art. Sure, there are some “rules” of composition and design, color theory and all that, but those rules can be bent for specific goals. A line or a mark can’t really be “right” or “wrong”, but that’s what half of my Brain expects and wants and sometimes demands.

I really don’t know what to do about that, but, as I said at the beginning, it feels like I’m in a fist fight with my Brain these days. Can anyone else relate to that or do I need a padded room?

Since you made it to the end of this ramble, here’s a look at something I’m currently fighting with:

I finally decided to take a break from designing the four furball characters that were frustrating me due to my creative mental block with regards to drawing hair and drew PMD expressing my frustration, only to become just as frustrated trying to render his fur.