Accept and learn from criticism
I believe the old saying goes, there are no wrong answers. Well, that’s wrong.
Of course there are wrong answers! It’s the yang to the yin: You aren’t going
to know or understand what the right answer is if you don’t stumble upon the
wrong answer. It’s probably odd to suggest that there is a wrong way to draw a
manga or comic, when it’s such a subjective genre in and of itself. But as you go
along your artistic journey, you’re going to encounter times when you work on
a piece of art, take a step back, and you (or someone else will) say, “Well, that
didn’t work at all!”
It happens. Not everything you create can be a touchdown. There will always
be instances when you throw an incomplete pass or worse yet, fumble the
ball. (You can probably tell that football season started at the time of this writing.) I think, more than anything else in this book, that ground rule needs to be
established because (hopefully) that will help you as you try to push your
artistic boundaries.
Criticism is one of the things that you face when you create art for public view.
For every one person that likes what you make, there’s someone that hates it
and dissects every little nuance that’s “wrong” with what you’ve done. It comes
with the territory. Some are going to be harsher than others, and it can be very
easy to get discouraged when you get a scathing e-mail or message board post
stating that you “stink.”
When that happens, you just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and decide if
there are any nuggets of information within the criticism that you can use to
learn and improve from. Of course, I could be completely wrong about this.