enter the talentless artist
Since your drawing ability didn’t grow naturally, you don’t have a specific artistique uniqueness that comes naturally to you. You work hard to learn everything from scratch and diligently refine your technique and knowledge, probably putting in more work than your more talented peers who might admire your effort and knowledge. Yet when you see their work you notice that there’s something missing in your own art. A sense of effortlessness. Originality. Something for people to connect with. A world that feels genuinely real yet unfamiliar and exciting.
It’s the type of art that inspired you to take this venture in the first place.
Yet after years of crawling your way through tutorials, art books, courses and sketchbooks filled with practice you find yourself not much closer to your goal. You might have focused on the wrong thing. Got lost along the way. Probably in a constant rollercoaster of over and underestimating your ability but eventually you come crashing down to reality. Maybe you never had the potential to be this type of artist in the first place.
All of this could be the case. But maybe the breakthrough is just one or two corners away and you’d miss it all by giving up now. Let’s just take this famous artist’s course and analyze the shape language of these character designs you really connect with. After all, you still dream of creating these fantastic, unique worlds that inspire others, just the way it inspired you back then. You’ll just keep trying, eventually it will happen. Right?
Still, there's a difference between a natural inner drive to express yourself and the attempt to forcefully develop this drive.
Don’t get me wrong. There is reason to pursue such a goal. Nothing can stop you from becoming a fantastic draftsperson, storyteller, cinematographer or whatever it might be. You can master anything. But will you be able to find something that is truly yours?
You don’t have a unique sense of art that naturally comes out of you but there are still drawings you enjoy making for yourself and those you make for others to enjoy. You wish this wasn’t the case but from your current understanding, there's no way around it. Having a product that people like consuming, working for clients, feeling insecure about posting meaningless drawings that have no industry use whatsoever. Just another sad looking character just standing there looking your 20 year old interpretation of “cool”. All that plus being surrounded by artists who’s work is full of meaning, satire and nuance. Artists who create art to tell a story, not just to draw a character doing nothing, looking slightly annoyed.
Anyway, hope you still like the drawing.