Does anyone else ever feel like they've lost creativity?
I don't mean like having art block in the sense of being stuck not improving, but sort of regressing in skill, almost.
For quite a while now, I've felt like I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know when it started. Part of me blames going digital many many years ago, but I know that's not completely true. What it's done to me is that doing something new and taking risks became almost impossible, as I got myself too used to being able to take things back when I make mistakes.
This has lead to me trying to fix and fix things and never actually finishing anything because nothing is ever good enough. That shadow over there is awkward? Well that's okay, it's on a separate layer so I can keep working on it, but because at the moment of drawing I lack the skill to fix it, I just never finish.
To fix that issue, I started relying more on reference. I looked up photos and tutorials and took my own reference pics as well. This has lead me to be basically unable to do anything without one, which severely limits me. I was just looking at old stuff of mine, because I was wondering if my feeling of losing skill was real or imagined, and I do think it's real. My old poses before really using references were dynamic and more interesting, even if sometimes awkward and incorrect.
This applies to composition as well. At one point I had a lot of "movie poster" style drawings, where the characters would be featured over the page in different sizes and such. Now, I tend to think I need to make a whole scene, which is bad, because I don't know how to draw backgrounds. This makes my drawings even less dynamic and interesting, because the backgrounds are too flat and don't seem to match my style.
I've become so afraid of making mistakes that I leave everything unfinished. I feel ashamed looking at drawings from last week. I didn't always feel like this. I used to feel proud I could make things and I'd fondly look at older stuff as well.
In part, I think it's because I used to draw things for my friends. A lot of my fanart had to do with inside jokes, or I'd draw based on conversations I 'd had. But I don't have any friends anymore. This is also how I wrote fics, but I stopped writing even longer ago.
Most of all what bothers me is that I simply don't have ideas. I don't know what I want to make. I start drawing something, it looks like shit, I sigh and feel all my energy leaving my body with that exhale and I become exhausted. I have lost joy in creating, because nothing I do is ever enough for me.
Drawing, sewing, writing, all of it.
What am I supposed to do with this?
Now, I don't have a lot of followers, so maybe I'll feel stupid in a week when no one wants to participate, but I propose a challenge to "post something really old and/or unfinished" every once in a while. Let's call it
"Art Cringe Exposure Therapy."
Because let me tell you a story:
I used to draw Ace Attorney fanart and post it on Deviantart. As mentioned above, I drew a lot of random stuff that was based on conversations and jokes with friends, so I'd consider a lot of that old art to be cringe™️ and would not like to post it because I can do better now.
One time, I drew a large group picture that had a lot of characters in it. It was based on some fanfic I never wrote. They all wore custom outfits and everything. Then, I started hating it. I thought they all looking ugly as hell and the outfits I came up with were ugly too, as were the colours and I felt shame looking at it. So I deleted it from my account.
It was weeks or months later, I don't remember, that I got a DM from someone. I didn't know them, they were not a friend or anything, just a random person, who asked me if I'd deleted that picture, because they had been going through their likes, specifically looking for that piece of fanart. I said yeah, sorry, I deleted it, and they were disappointed.
This was years ago, like the early 2010's maybe, but I still remember. I still think about how someone was thinking about my drawing, went looking for it, and I'd deleted it because I thought it was shit. I guess what I'm trying to say is that just because you think you're bad, doesn't mean other people think you're bad, etc, which should be obvious, but it's not.
Maybe this so-called challenge is a thing already, idk. I kinda wanna do it. I don't know if it'll help me with anything. Maybe I'll get more embarrassed about the older stuff. Will I keep it up? Possibly not, but there's at least one piece that I'm going to post.
And who knows, maybe that person who asked after it years ago is on Tumblr these days and remembers asking me about it. In which case, here you go. All the way from August 2010.
(P.S. sorry to tag a long, mostly unrelated post as Ace Attorney)
@noiryn, if you're still here. Because of the Ace Attorney lol.
