A little late for an end of year recap, but better late than never. This year I decided to not go with the traditional 12 month recap and just pick out a few of the pieces I liked the most.
It's strange to say out loud, but my relationship with art has changed. When I started drawing, I expected that I would always have the same relationship with it. It was my daily stress relief exercise. However over the last few years it has been my stress. I've mentioned it before, but prepping for cons is both fun and energy draining. Making a product to sell is fundamentally different than making art for the pure fun of it. It was not creatively fulfilling and it was suffocating me in many ways.
The other aspect of cons/myself which I didn't like was the competitive aspect of it. Inherently you are competing for the limited disposable income of the con attendees with other artists and even with pros. I was raised to aim for the top, to be part of the best of the best. Not being able to do that through sales and artistic merit really bothered me. Of course, it's not fair to compare my art and my sales to those of professionals or my peers. Regardless, I sometimes feel like I have "lost" and my efforts were meaningless.
I have consistently gotten art block for the past few years as part of the "post-con blues". This is partially due to the two things I mentioned above. But I think the real issue is that art is not fun anymore. As a beginner everything was fresh and new and fun to learn. But somewhere along the way I realized I learned about 90% of the fundamentals and all that was left was practice. And then practice became work and was tedious. When I started the unknown was fun. Yet now, from my place of comfort, drawing posters for cons, the unknown is scary. Both of these feelings are completely false and irrational, but this is how I feel right now.
When I look back and what I have been doing these past few years, I feel like I have been chasing the wrong things. I want to spend this year getting back on track. I want to make art which makes me happy and not chase things like sales or follows, likes, favorites, or any other type of fake internet points. I need to take a break from drawing posters and do something else. Anything else.
Two of my long time goals are: (1) to get back into 3d modeling and (2) to make a short comic. IDK which I will try to tackle this year, but hopefully I'll get to both this year. As you can tell my resolutions and goals this year aren't really that firm. All I can say is that I'll get out of this burnout phase... eventually.
One last thing, the elephant in the room. With Tumblr's recent plan on porn, it feels like there has been a mass exodus from the platform. I plan to stay, though I plan to shift most of my posts over to my Twitter. I'll still post on Tumblr but my main focus to shift over to Twitter.
There are a lot of other things that I want to say but I'll cut it off here. As always, thank you for sticking with me.
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