kill kill kill your darlings! (Patreon)

this one goes out to all the patreon mail that never was.

above: reject of august 2025 postcard

I often go through multiple ideas when brainstorming the monthly mail rewards. sometimes I'll go as far as finishing a piece, deciding it doesn't work, and starting on something else entirely. maybe this seems reckless, or perhaps not reckless enough, but needless to say I wasn't always like this. for a long period of time I regarded my work with a great deal of preciousness. if I had committed myself to starting on a piece, I felt obliged to see it through. something being finished meant I had spent a non-negligible amount of time on it, which meant that not sharing it would be a waste. of what? of time? effort? other (always, in my mind, better) opportunities? it was a mental shuffle with my mortal existence and its limitations, of which produced great fear in me in my younger years.

^ reject of september 2025 postcard

something that has greatly changed within me this year, that was perhaps being slowly built to all along, is a reckoning with limitations. varying physical and mental capacities have shifted my focus to exploring subjects that enliven my curiosity and making pieces that I feel proud of instead of making things just to have something to present. if I only have so much ability, I want to try to put it toward making art that reflects something meaningful back to me.

^ reject of october 2025 sticker

there are a variety of reasons why I choose to abandon certain ideas, though they mostly boil down to a nagging feeling of not challenging myself enough or accepting that an idea exceeds my current abilities. it's a subtle barometer reading, but I can tell when I'm not pushing myself in any way or when I'm avoiding an idea that interests me but causes me to shrink in the face of its unfamiliarity. those used to be good reasons for me to play it safe or put things off, but the sun always rises and a new day comes and one tires of dealing with the same problems over and over again.

^ reject of november 2025 sticker

I think a lot of my past fear around abandoning pieces stemmed from beliefs of scarcity, that once an idea came around I had only one chance to secure and pin it down. better not waste it! but years of making art have shown me that ideas come and go like the wind, that they're plentiful, and possess a curiously circular nature. I've noticed myself returning to the same themes over the years almost subconsciously and there's something reassuring in the way these ideas seem to seek me out instead of the other way around. and something not working out in a particular moment doesn't mean a return is impossible. in fact, this month's postcard was done from a sketch I did back in 2023. sometimes things come back around, sometimes they don't, either way it wasn't a waste.

we learn something from every experience we have, be it good or bad, that's not really the point. every piece I have completed was born from the culmination of random sketches, abandoned projects, and finished artworks that I ended up deciding didn't make sense at the time. I hesitate to assign value to any piece in particular, because art has shown me that the process lives in composite, in moments of time that can't be quantified or neatly segmented into the scheduling of tasks. I kill my darlings accepting that they were never mine to begin with.