petitpotato:

This is something I wanted to turn into a comic for quite some time.

There’s no shortcut to becoming a good artist and there is no one magic skill that solves all of our art problems. Instead, there are tons of tiny skills – sometimes they go well together and let us create things we like. Sometimes, nothing seems to fit and we feel like we can’t do anything right, even though we put so much work into learning those skills. Some skills connect, some don’t. Some suddenly fall into place once we learn one particular missing skill. Sometimes we don’t even know what skill we’re looking for, until we manage to learn a bunch of others. And in the end, we can tell apart skills that looked like a colourful mess when we just started out, looking for easy clues. 

Just like a puzzle. 

(The painting in the comic is Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876 by Auguste Renoir, who in fact is the gentleman)