Drifting across the internet, I stumbled across The Artist’s Survival Kit by illustrator Keri Smith.

As she says, it’s ‘For the really bad days, for the days when you want to quit, when you feel like everything you do is shit, when you feel your self-esteem plummet, when you decide that you would rather wait tables for a living, when you start to think you will never make a living making art, when you are working on something and feel like you hate it more than you’ve ever hated anything in your life, when someone makes an offhand remark about your work and afterwards you feel dejected, when you wish you had gone to school for accounting, when you start to believe that maybe your family was right, when you want to lie in bed for a month and eat chips.’

You’ll find handy reminders:

Reasons why you just can’t do it TODAY:

Help deciding if you should take on a project:

Permission to fuck up card:

Your calendar for all the success that’s coming (be sure to upload onto Arteri’s event calendar when it all happens ok):

And lots more. The full kit is available for free as a 5-page pdf download here. Print out and use as needed. Share with that depressed artist you’ve been worried about.

What else would you include in an Artist’s Survival Kit?

All images belong to Keri Smith.