It Took Me 15 Years to Learn These 50 Illustration Secrets

After fifteen years of navigating the freelance illustration world, I’m still struck by how many little lessons accumulate quietly until, one day, they become the backbone of your creative process. In the video, Chris Piascik shares fifty of these lessons — a mix of mindset shifts, workflow tweaks, and artistic habits that separate “doing illustrations” from “making illustrations that matter”. Whether it’s the reminder to lightly sketch without judgment, or the insistence on balancing client needs with your own creative voice, each secret carries a weight that only years of practice can reveal. If you’re an illustrator — or even someone who draws for fun — these aren’t just tips you try once and forget. They’re habits you build, day by day, project by project, until they become the quietly but firmly rooted undergrowth of your work.

After years of drawing, designing, and stumbling through the creative grind, you realize something funny — it’s never the big failures that make you quit, it’s the little ones that bite at you. The doubts, the tweaks, the comparisons — the fleas. They’re tiny, constant, and kind of unavoidable. But the truth is, every creative has them. The difference between those who keep going and those who stop isn’t who gets bitten, it’s who learns to live with it, scratch when you have to, and keep drawing anyway. Watching that video reminded me that mastery isn’t about eliminating the irritations — it’s about building a life and rhythm where they can’t distract you from the work. Because in the end, the only way to get good… is to keep showing up, fleas and all.