(13) growing pains

↤

the last few months have been kinda nuts but i'm glad i'm able to sit down and write something for once this afternoon. i've been doing a bit in the meanwhile, mostly getting caught up in a lot of work and personal life stuff. been playing a lot of video games, sometimes i get those phases, and time has felt difficult to manage.

artfight is coming up and i hope to participate in it more than i did last year, for sure. i don't know if i'll make it in time but i wanna have references of at least five of my ocs ready for artfight. been working on actually scraping together references, but it's something where i find it hard to focus when i'm not drawing something that interests my brain in a specific way. i actually made some progress on reference sheets, but suddenly i want to redo the one and half of them i have so far because i want to figure out how to stylise stuff better...

which leads me into my current art crisis haha. it's been like 5 years of drawing but i still don't really feel i have figured out how i want to draw. there's just so much i want out of my art and it's difficult to tell what i'm looking for. i don't think i've made much progress figuring out what i want in the past few years, only a lot of work on inching towards improving my art.

i think i need a mindset change of some sort to figure out what i'm really looking for. i struggle a lot with identity issues in my personal life too. i don't know why, but my gut instinct tells me the two issues with identity are strongly connected, and once i figure out one, the other will resolve too.

i've been trying to be more experimental after a period of not really drawing. so i've been trying to become more open to the idea of drawing loosely and not refining/over rendering things too much. i think it's sometimes hard to sit down and draw because i know in the back of my mind that when i do, i usually commit 15 or more hours to a single thing. i don't really want that to continue being the case. i'm going to do my best to complete what i start within one or two days of it and get comfortable with illustrations that don't have hours of finish attached to them.

after a few years of drawing, it's only now starting to become evident to me that i can't latch onto a drawing too much. i think it's an important skill to know when to give up and separate myself from something. but it's going to be a weird journey getting to a point where i can consistently do that. posting some half finished drawings also helps me with that. most of the things i posted this month did not turn out how i wanted them to, but that's okay. they're still things i made and i feel better for making them and moving on.

playing so many games for so long does take a toll on me, so maybe i am approaching burnout with that. i hope that means i'll be able to focus on drawing and ocs more in the incoming months. i think the rest of this year is going to be good: i'm hoping to do something about my work situation, there's a big project (i talked about this a while ago) that i can't wait to reach completion and share, and i even got custom nendoroids of my ocs! there was some trouble behind getting them here, but they did finally arrive. so i am gonna keep my optimistic outlook alive and well and keep at it!



↤