#Silly lil doodles made during a not so silly lil storm-

[arsonistmoth]

So have yall ever seen that one John Wayne clip of yeeting a kid in a river? IF YOU HAVENT PLZ. ITS HILARIOUS. Anyway Nari is such a great grand-dad to Baal's kits. Teachin em valuable life skills young >:3 Ft: @circuscountdowns 's lovely Narinder and lamb and my silly lil Baal kit, Ender. Bonus doodle because I drew all this with severe thunderstorms, tornado warnings, hail, all that good shit goin on behind me- So last night's storms eh?

[antivanbrandy]

this is... very long. read more at your own risk xD

honestly that addition to that post is really shaking me up because like, holy shit, this is something i have been beating myself up over for a long time. and in before any assumptions, no i do not begrudge these kids their skills or their success, it’s awesome they’re doing so well, and yes i support them, and no i don’t see them as competition! but i am absolutely my own hardest critic and i am constantly disappointed in myself, constantly disappointed it’s taken me 30 years to even start to find the right paths let alone head down them, it’s taken me twice as long to be half as skilled. i don’t have to be competing against others to feel let down by my own lack of progress

it never occurred to me before that i didn’t have a fraction of the readily available resources or support systems of today during my formative art years

i lived in a very strict household. there were two sets of rules there; the ones for everyone else, and the ones for me. i wont go into the guts of it, save to say that my stepfather saw me as competition for my mother’s affection and got satisfaction from taking it out on me

anyway, back on track: even in my earliest memories, i was constantly drawing. all day, every day. but my mother was poor and we didn’t have much. i drew what i could remember of the characters in the disney movies i’d seen, and i had two on vhs, aladdin, and the beauty and the beast. i watched them over and over and drew my lil heart out, but had no real references

when my mother met and married my step father in the mid 90s, the vhs’s were taken away. i was no longer allowed to watch movies, i was not allowed to watch tv. we didn’t have the internet at home, and we had no books. i wasn’t even allowed on the front lawn on my own, so when i say i had no references to draw from, i’m not exaggerating. but i kept on drawing, kept on trying to draw those characters i loved from memory. i did my baby best

in the early 00s i made a new friend at school, and she introduced me to anime. i fell in love with it. she would tape card captor sakura and digimon and bring them into school so i could watch them (we would get to homeroom an hour early and use the tv and vhs player in the room before the school day began). my art style turned into a lanky spiky terrible tryhard anime mess, but i was living. i continued to draw my little heart out, and fill my days with escapist self insert daydreams about my fave animes

this entire time, through both the disney and anime phases of my life, i was going through roughly an entire 500 sheet ream of printer paper every month to two months, as that’s all i had to draw on. i’m not exaggerating when i say i drew a lot. every spare moment i had was devoted to it, and i had huge folder upon folder upon folder full of my drawings

it didn’t affect my grades btw, i was an A&B student

a year or so into this anime phase, i got my first job, and used my pay to buy myself one of those terrible ‘how to draw manga’ books every other payday. i poured over every detail in them, absorbed them like a sponge. they were all i had to reference, all i had to grow from

bloody fucking hell, if i could only go back and slap those damn books out of my stupid, desperate, impressionable little hands, i would. they were poison. they taught me terrible clunky, wildly incorrect habits and practices. they helped crystalise so many bad anatomy habits that i am still to this day trying to unlearn. there’s no doubt in my mind that they, and my naive lauding of them, helped me stagnate and lost me years of potential progress

my parents wanted me to draw realism, but didn’t seem to understand that to draw realistically i needed to... you know... have references to draw from. i was not allowed to draw them, and i was not allowed to leave the house, and i was not allowed to buy any more books. they saw my inability to pull photo-realistic portraits from my ass memory as a personal slight against them

early-mid 00s i found deviantart through the school’s internet and got my first taste of community among artists, and i was instantly enamoured. i didnt have any art friends at school, it was just me. but suddenly, there was art at my fingertips! i made friends, made small progress toward improving. and then my stepfather found out, stormed into school, and demanded they block my access to the site. they did

i was banned from drawing at home. he took my shitty how to draw manga books away and was set to punish me if i drew. i was also at this time being threatened with being pulled out of school and sent somewhere ‘i had no friends'. i was barrelling towards graduation and my part time job took up most of my free time after school and on weekends, and i no longer had my fun hobby and stress relief outlet in drawing, or my art friends on deviantart. i drew when i could, like in a friends school diary, or on receipt paper at work, but my stepfather had a way of knowing everything and punishing me for all of it (this goes well beyond the art thing, but like i said i wont get into the guts of it because it's bleak as shit)

i left home less than six months after i graduated high school, and i had a brief foray into drawing cutesy gory horror themed stuff, but by then i was so used to not drawing that i just... stopped. i was working myself into exhaustion, going to uni, learning to manage living out of home, partying with friends, and juggling it all with my first serious relationship. finding time to draw felt impossible, and because my entire post-stepfather childhood consisted of me having everything i showed interest in derided and taken away, i was used to just... doing without. i just shut down and lost interest to protect myself, because pining is terrible

i all but stopped drawing for about six years. the occasional geometric pattern doodle while i was on the phone, or an eye. no proper drawings

in the end, the thing that got me back into it was when skyrim released in 2011. and it was hard. i knew i didn’t want to draw anime or kitschy cute horror stuff any more, that i had to find my own style, but it was so difficult to develop. i was in my mid 20s at this point, my shitty habits and expectations felt fixed and i didn’t know where to start. i gave deviantart another shot, but it didn’t feel like it fit any more, everyone i knew there was gone i couldn’t find my place. i met some friends, moved over to tumblr. bought my first tablet for my 25th birthday. bought some anatomy books, loomis and hogarth, but to this day i’ve not read them properly. tried to follow artist’s whose style’s i admired. i finally had access to tools and support i needed to improve

six years later, i’m still struggling. it seems insurmountable sometimes. i know i’ve made progress in that six years, but it feels... too little too late. i struggle with wanting to quit every day, and even now i only draw once or twice a month. the amount of art behind me could fill several landfills, they do make a sizeable chunk of at least one. but the road ahead is so overwhelming, and so long. i don’t know where to really start to get better. i know i should study realism, but at this point, even though i now have the tools, the references, at my fingertips thanks to, y’know, being an adult with internet access, i feel trapped by that little girl who kept getting all her attempts to improve shot down. i still feel like that silly little girl who wasted time and money on learning bad habits and bad anatomy. i feel held back, which is foolish, but i do

to wonder what i could have become with access to all this back when i was a teen? with a little support? i can’t even imagine tbh

but realising that i still managed to make it this far despite being cut off and isolated from any kind of community during my formative art years is comforting, in its own way. the thought of where to go from here is still so daunting, but at least i have access to the means for the time being. and who knows? maybe one day it’ll all click, and i’ll be able to make sense of the mechanics of all this. a girl can hope