I tend to get bored easily. Not with life in general. I have more than enough interests to fill my time with things I enjoy. But each particular interest tends not to hold me for very long. I’ve described myself before as someone with circular hobbies. They come, they go, they come back.

I’m writing this on day 267 of 2026. I’ve drawn a comic for every single day of the year. I’m 37 years old, and I’ve considered drawing a hobby of mine for pretty much my entire life. Nevertheless, I’m fairly sure I’ve drawn more this year than in the previous 36 years combined.

I’ve never stuck with it like this before.

A couple of days ago, I discovered the Instagram profile of Dwayne Bell, an artist who apparently lives in Scotland and teaches at an illustration school. I don’t know much more about him except for this: apparently he lives somewhere where taking the bus is the best way to get to work, and he uses his commute to draw the people around him.

He’s been drawing those people on that bus for years.

Not two years.

Not five years.

He’s been drawing and posting them for 10 years. More or less daily.

I scrolled through his entire profile, and it felt a little like looking at a cliff face where years of geological history have been compressed into visible layers. The bus stays the same. The people stay the same. But everything around them shifts.

One layer is fountain pen. Then, after years of drawing with fountain pens, Bell decides he wants something less precise. Suddenly the next layer is chunky pencil. Same bus, same people, but softer, rougher, heavier. And then he keeps drawing them that way for months and months. Scroll a little further and another layer appears.

You can almost see time accumulating.

And I think that’s what fascinated me so much. Not just the drawings themselves, but the sheer endurance of it. There were stretches where his motivation seemed to wane a little, but he always came back. There are some wonderfully cheeky captions in there too, joking that his 82nd fountain-pen drawing of an old guy didn’t get enough likes, so perhaps the 83rd drawing of the same person will finally bait the algorithm.

And somewhere along the way, I found myself wondering what it must be like to sit on the same bus every day with this recurring cast of characters. To watch people appear and disappear, hairstyles change, faces become familiar, drawing materials come and go, while the bus just keeps moving along the same route.

Maybe Bell’s work struck such a nerve with me precisely because sticking with things has never come naturally to me. I know what it’s like to become obsessed with something, move on, and eventually circle back to it months or years later. So looking at seven years of someone returning to the same bus, the same people and the same act of drawing feels almost unbelievable to me.

There are 267 layers in my own little geological record now. Some are better than others. The materials have changed, the drawings have changed, and I’ve changed while making them. But underneath all of that, one thing has stayed the same: every day, I came back and drew another comic.

Ten years still feels almost impossible to me.

But 267 days used to feel impossible too.

Behind the paywall, 10 more artists I find inspiring. Perhaps it would be better to make this section public, but so much unashamed gushing and fanboying can't be good for my brand.