None of this, however, really comes close to what I've known for some time that I want to do in my career. The more I made it clear in my mind that I wanted to do more childish, cute and funny things, the more serious, realistic and dark my drawings became, as if I was deliberately trying to get away from what I wanted to pursue professionally.

Then, in between things, I stopped publishing: neither dark nor beautiful, I stopped showing my work. I almost stopped drawing at all. I did a lot of research on illustration styles, though. I wanted to decide what mine would be, how to find my style. I read dozens of articles, saw hundreds of illustrators. In one way or another they all said more or less the same thing: Draw a lot and your style will come to you little by little. And me? And me nothing, I didn't know how to stop being a style hopper. I hoped, in my naivety, that by making one drawing a week something would click in my head, the sky would open up and a voice would tell me "here is your style". Obviously that didn't happen.

Then a friend passed me a video of a Venezuelan illustrator known on instagram as Uh!Caribe talking about how to get your style of illustration. And, among the many things she said, something finally caused me to click: You decide your illustration style. You decide it and then you study it and commit to it for at least 1 year. If after that year you decide that's not it, it's not it. But during that year you're going to draw and draw and draw. Draw seriously, every day, no excuses and no buts. Click!

So that's what I did, I decided, and things are starting to flow. In two weeks, over 25 sketches have come out of me. Some small, some big, all with (more or less) the same style. Not all of them will make it to the final stages, but it doesn't matter: for the first time in a long, long time I feel like I'm drawing again without restrictions, without drowning in anxiety or stress because what I'm doing is good enough. For the first time (maybe in my whole life) I'm going to draw what I want, in a planned way a lot (because I can't stop being me) but I'm not going to self-censor myself. Not for style, not for quality, not for theme. The blockchain is free and so am I.