art insecurity clubhouse

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I'll post some serious bad art later, but I don't want to deal with my scanner right now...

stop lying to me



(ok reyweld)

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because SOME of the people i'm talking about made/are making stuff involving *their original characters* and is not fanart

yes they did fanart and probably got their audience from it, but they have their own fanbases centered around their original work too. i know that their fanbase was most likely gained from their fanart. but that fanbase STUCK AROUND

can we stop talking about popularity contests now and start addressing how i don't feel like doing stuff anymore
i swear everyone only ever jumps into this conversation to tell me to stop wishing i had a bigger audience

Well, comparing yourself to other artists is a surefire way to make yourself unhappy and we don't like seeing you sad :c

Anyway doin' stuff is really hard and like i've said before, really reminding me of myself now and even more so before i was getting treatment for depression. Now that i'm out of that hole things are a lot easier in general but being popular and making popular art are easier than they seem? It just takes persistence, tbh. I know i've spent a lot of the past year or two trying to release some of my hang ups around art and return to where i was in early high school, when i filled countless folders with bad ocs and doodles of random characters and situations and just? So much stuff? Because while i did care about quality i wasn't so caught up in making everything perfect and worthwhile

So anyway i bought some cheap shitty sketchbooks and terrible paint from the dollar store and watered it down so it was less obnoxious to use and started chucking shit on a page. I doodled the characters from an old story that i doodle everywhere because they have v simple character designs and decided to reboot it, and i'm not posting it anywhere until i either finish it or have a buffer of at least half the story. That built my confidence up enough that i've moved to better paper and paints and using quality materials and stuff again, but i'm still in this nice mindset of just shit a story out and hope it goes okay? It's work and practice and it feels like i'm just having fun, which is the important thing. Sometimes i'm literally bedridden with depression and can't summon the eneregy to do it, which is fine! No one is waiting on me or relying on me, and sometimes i get a huge burst of energy and work on it for 36 hours solid then collapse, but its worth it because i'm making myself happy and getting things done. My self worth is less tied to my work, and that's good.



and i'm slowly building up my folders of art again :v

Here's some of my earlier work when i started, btw:




I made a bunch of shitty autobio and played around with adding colour with the paint, working up to more complex stuff



Then managed to make and print a minicomic :v



It's totally doable and you'll get there! Don't push yourself too hard, its okay to just move along at your own pace.

I'll also note r/n that since those starting comics? I've been published once, made my own mini (that i gave to one of my local comic heros and he said it was rly good(!!!!) have 2 comics in books that are going to print early next year and just did a really nice skype for a vlog with another local comic artist about my work and stuff. And it's mostly been through finding more comic people both locally and online? Everything is connections, tbh.

The guy who complimented snap actually made a comic about that very topic


Anyway i know saying that you'll get there eventually etc etc isn't very helpful; i got told the same thing. But the first step is letting go of a lot of anger towards yourself for not being up to making things, because you're not your art and you can't measure your worth by it.

spent the last couple days mulling over that post
sorry plaid, i kept reading over it and legitimately couldn't figure out what the point you were trying to make was
even though it's very clearly "don't be mad that you're having a tough time, just keep working through it"

i don't know, it's hard. "i'm not my art and i can't measure my worth by it" but my art skills are easily one of the most okay things about me. at least, when i think about it, they're the only thing i truly like about myself. i understand and agree with the sort of "inherent worth as a living human" thing but i have a really hard time applying it to myself and i kinda feel like i don't deserve anything, unless i work for it, either through a job i don't have or through my art

all i want to do is draw and eventually make games and music. now i'm in a state where i'm doing very little of any of those things and it's frustrating, because i'm not doing anything ELSE with all this time i have

btw "Everything is connections, tbh" is very, very uncomforting. i'm not good at making connections with other artists, and i've recently built up a strong habit of avoiding artists who interact at all with a certain small handful of artists i don't like for varying reasons. and then i avoid artists who interact with those OTHER artists who interact with the people i don't like, and it's just a spreading web of people i don't want to even try to connect to. the corkboard in this picture:

is only a joke in that i don't physically have a corkboard dedicated to this. i essentially have one mentally though. please stop me

sorry to reply so negatively, i know you're trying to help

The point was very vague and meandering tbh

The connections part wasn't really meant to be comforting? Its an unfortunate part of most industries and especially transparent in art, but i guess i was just trying to poke at why you dislike some of these successful artists and i guess explain why they got where they are? There's a combination of factors (also including luck) that determine how you get to where you are, and beating yourself up over not hitting that perfect storm of conditions/resenting others isn't much fun.

I mean i don't know what to tell you except to try not avoiding people so hard? It's going to hamstring you so hard here and its virtually impossible to avoid someone so thoroughly that they're totally erased from your life, especially on the internet which for all it's size is pretty small

Sometimes you've just got to say welp, i don't like this person and ignore them for the other shining stars they're standing next to

i dont really have a reply to that. most of it makes sense. but it's really hard to tell if i'm not the kind of person to make art for a big audience and stuff right now, considering i'm having a hard time just making art for myself. its something i'll have to think about more later, probably.

at the moment i just want to shout because ghdghdhfghfhfg artist who makes me deeply uncomfortable getting recognition bbbbhbhbhbhb there's more detail to this that makes it sound less jealous and more understandable but i don't wanna get into it

edit: i'll be a little more clear about one little thing
when this artist shows up in my tumblr/twitter feeds, it's because someone i follow has reblogged something this artist made. i pretty much only follow friends who i regularly talk to, and artists who i DO like.
recently i've gotten to the point where seeing someone i like and care about, share art by this one artist, makes me uncomfortable to the point of my heart suddenly racing and my stomach feeling sick and my hands shaking slightly, making me typo a lot

i don't 100% block that artists content tho. i need to know when my friends share their stuff. so i know which of my friends i need to talk to about them. because they're a bad person and i don't want to ignore them if any of my friends are looking up to them in any capacity

someone's gotta do it

i'm not even gonna bother mspaint illustrating the rest of this post.
and that's partly because i'm not even 100% sure what i'm feeling upset over.

i guess it's mostly just that i'm not doing as much art as i want to be doing. other people are getting more work done, getting paid for it, and they have much less free time than i do. i stay at home all day every day, i have no excuse to be doing so much nothing

and then i look at what other artists are doing that they're getting paid for and i realize that partly why they can get more done, is because they're working faster than me. they have a workflow established, or they simply know when to put less time and effort into something when it's already good enough, and i don't? i'm doing something wrong and i don't know how to change.

whenever i make posts like this in here, i refresh to check for replies almost as much as i check for notes on a new art thing

i don't know why besides i guess just hoping that i'll be validated in my self-loathing

or maybe i'll finally get an answer that's not only good, as all your answers have been, but also something i at least FEEL like i can work with

tbpf it sounds like most of your issues don't come from art or art insecurity or the art community so much as broader problems in your life. the kind of wide-spectrum self-loathing and social anxiety you've got going on seem like the sorts of thing that have to be addressed before the more specific anxieties you're talking about can be.

but, like, I don't know you or your life! maybe I'm projecting or just misunderstanding your situation

yeah, you're probably right, but i still don't know how to fix those broader issues.
the stuff with the specific art insecurity is just like... stuff that REMINDS me of my issues or something
and i feel more immediately upset about them because those smaller issues feel more like they should be in my control

i really wish my solution to feeling awful wasn't just "play videogames until i get distracted enough, so that i just feel nothing instead of loathing"

and that instead it would be like

"actually do something"

tbpf it sounds like most of your issues don't come from art or art insecurity or the art community so much as broader problems in your life.

I think this about sums it all up.

I'm sure you've heard art is a reflection of oneself or a way for the artist to express themselves, and yeah it is true and all but i feel like what's really important to realize is that one's perception of what creating good art is changes radically when you don't hate yourself or your life. It's not the actual piece of whatever craft you create, is the fact that you're able to do it, loving your own work is something very intimate and spiritual.

Shitty emotions will always suck everything good surrounding your life, it fucking sucks, but until you're able to sort some of your daily life issues you won't be able to really appreciate your art for what it is, no matter how much someone tells you how cute and round and expressive it is.

Btw I'm not blaming you for not accepting compliments, i understand your situation and i hope you're able to make it better even if it's just a little bit

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Sure just fix the grammar and typos

only about half a month more until i can see the doctor about fixing my brain issues
i don't even know how that will go, i can't be sure that my usual doctor will even help, and asking dad to take me to the hospital for a vague office visit will seem really strange

but i'm still looking forward to it
because in the meantime i can't even imagine what it would be like to actually work hard and practice drawing stuff.

haha wow, something must be really wrong when i see someone else compare their old art (approx. 5 years ago) to their newer art (approx. 1 month ago), and all i can think is “i’m not improving at all. my art’s still the same as it was, compared to the level of growth here.”

everyone else sees those kinds of posts as inspiring, like, that's the intended purpose even. "don't give up, keep doing art! you can always grow, just look at how much i grew!" and i'm sitting here like "yeah, good job. you're way better than me, actually, why am i trying?"

hhhh i can't change it. i can't change the way i view this stuff. why is it so hard to be positive.

edit: UGH how did this topic get to two pages.

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You could always look at in in a positive sense, in that you have consistency. When i was working on Wintergreen the improvement was so fast that in 20? pages it looked like a different artist made it, yikes

what a nice thread i never got to read until today because i was trying to remember kitten eater's tumblr url