#anyway i'm very proud of this piece!! it's kind of a redraw from one piece i made for mayblade?

[artichow]

[mayordea]

huzzah! 2023 art review!

it’s almost the end of the year, wowzers! i always do one of these art review thingies since i always like looking back at the art ive made :> last year i posted the review on my other account and left it at there, but this year i want to actually review each month and notable pieces i made… just for fun!

this post is very much just for me lol, but i hope someone out there enjoys it. month-by-month review + previous year in reviews will be under the cut! 🩷

(also, shoutout to tumblr for going rouge and posting this way way earlier than i had scheduled 😍 luckily tumblr post editor is weirdly based and kept all my embedded links when i pasted it from the old one? hell yeah)

Jan: started off the year with a painting of my beloved ocs after ending last year with one! (and i will be talking about my older year in reviews, rest assured). this was my obligatory cute shared scarf art, and i wanted to try attempting to render something more involved like two characters and draping cloth. i don't think the result was too shabby, though this was before i discovered my favorite rendering brush for procreate, so in hindsight, it looks kinda flat and boring now. where's all the crunch? ah but anyway, starting a whole year with your art in a mid place compared to what you made later on is par for the course.

Feb: probably the month where i had the least art to put here, i remember scraping a little to find one. this was a chrobin piece i made in my sketchbook! nothing too noteworthy... i think i tried doing a slightly different approach to coloring with markers (applying the color before the lineart) and incorporating paint, but i remember this one giving me trouble. first of all, the size i drew this in was really small (it was in a small sketchbook and i decided to mask the margins with comparatively wide masking tape), and second of all the paper was absolutely NOT built for gouache, so it ended up a kind of wrinkly and muddy mess. i mean i'm still not the best with gouache now but still, not my best.

March: a redraw of a robin piece i made back when i was still on amino. i probably won't share the old versions because they're crap, so just trust me on the redraw part. anyway, the last iteration of the concept was in 2019 i think? and while i was proud of it for a while, its luster finally faded and i decided to try doing it again in procreate. this was when i discovered my love for the soft chalk brush in the jingsketch basics brush pack. for a while i've been using the hard render brush in that pack to render, but this one's texture and chalkiness totally changed the game. i was in love!! also tried to be a little more crazy and vibrant with how i applied the base colors, using saturated colors across the board. this process didn't consistently stick, but i think it yielded some neat results here. another hit from this month was my piece of grandmaster robin, since i'm really proud of the detail here!.

Apr: guys, april was MY MONTH! i remember making so much art in just a few weeks, something just clicked in my brain i guess. i chose my drawings of hagane rin and len since this was when i truly began to get comfy in my lineart era (after the grandmaster drawing). this month was full of detailed line drawings at that, but this one was what made me both enjoy the process a lot and do more of it. hell yeah. other hits: vocaloids at mcdonald's (i drew a background omg!!!), alice in ny fanart (just the euphoria of finally nailing a composition for this piece after struggling with it in november was great), and the end-world normopathy fanart (it's a line drawing, and a traditional one at that. i was happy with incorporating gold accents into my typically monochromatic style when it comes to my line-focused drawings as well as getting tamari's mechanical details nailed).

May: hell yeah. evil power couple time. this one was another line-art heavy one since i thought it fit the vibe. the softer colors in the background i feel like could have been executed a little better, but i do like how this came out, especially the armor (good god fe armor is a pain to render, but i think i've gotten better at it this year! middle school me would be so jealous). not much else to say here. Other hit this month would be my alice of human sacrifice fanart, another line-heavy traditional drawing. i think it turned out nice, especially for a crammed composition lol.

Jun: another end-world normopathy-centered fanart. i mentioned it in my og post but i was trying out a slightly different painting style where i did a black-and-white base first and then added colors as an overlay (also in the initial upload of the post i was so fucking meek about posting fanart of mariyam's alternate design teased at the end of the mv?? 😭 sorry about that, i've edited it out but it's still in early reblogs. kind of cringe on my part). i didn't end up committing to this consistently cuz the beginning process was kind of tedious (plus i'm too inept to pay close attention to values anyway), but laying down all the colors after the long rendering process was rewarding! it's a nice alternative with i get bored with my other method to yield basically the same-looking result lol. this month featured some more pieces that tried using this process, like the one with my oc alice, lucina and dark pit hanging out, and f!robin's resplendent design from feh.

Jul: ah yes my typical flavor of "improvised oc art that i invent new symbolism for on the fly that i apply meaning to after i'm finished". kinda just wanted to paint something again because i've been doing a lot of line drawings lately and to go back to my old painting process again. honestly, i mainly picked this one because i wanted more oc art and non-lineart drawings to be in this chart lol. art i made this month that i'm real proud of is this family pic of some young cryptonloids (i really like how the colors came out on this one!) and my birthday drawing for miku's sweet 16, which was originally completed this month. i opted out of considering it for my july art to avoid confusion. also also, this very whack pathological facade fanart (plus some doodles i didn't post) opened my eyes to the beautiful world of NOISE and HALFTONES and just slapping crazy textures onto my art like nobody's business. hell yeah.

Aug: ok this one is kind of another piece i picked to represent this month that isn't quite my favorite but i chose anyway for the sake of variety (in this case, i wanted more traditional pieces and non-vocaloid stuff). for once, i used my bigger sketchbook to make a big n detailed piece for my boy's new brave alt in feh (that game has zero significance to me outside of cool alt costumes for my faves). my actual fave from this month was young miku/meiko/kaito chillin in their house; i'm real proud of the background and lighting! but i still like this robin too ofc, big fan of how the colors came out ;3

Sep: another traditional drawing! felt compelled to draw kandy again, specifically her evil miitopia great sage incarnation :> this one was pretty standard in terms of process, and not much was really done to experiment. just wanted to draw something cool of my girl for my sketchbook. other fave from this month is this sketchy miku i did, i like how loose it came out and how the colors pop.

Oct: pretty palutena!~ i think i went into this trying to do something a little different with my painting process (i think it was to try incorporating more colors in the shading like the blue in the dress or more saturated colors near the focal point, but i can't remember LOL) or try rendering a more detailed character w/ a background (even if the background was pretty vague). i like this one! especially the color cohesion, it's pretty swag imo. other faves from this month was fanart i made for the song "orbit" since i also like how the color cohesion came out for this one, and the maid dress/crossover drawing i made for cringetober. no other words needed to explain why.

Nov: another digital painting! it's yet another ghost song, this time "uncanny". i really loved the aesthetic of this song, especially its bold colors and simplistic shapes, so i wanted to try capturing it in my style. i really love how the colors turned out on this, though i've yet to truly recreate what i like about this particular painting again? regardless, it's one of my faves, deserving of one of my favorite ghost songs. few other highlights from this month would be my obligatory purple robin drawing for the month, my sketchbook drawing of my luka design, and my fanart of utsu-p's song "ga". i like how i was able to do a couple of my different "styles"/processes this month rather than just sticking to just one. they all have their own feel to them that i like to play around with depending on the idea.

Dec: and finally, we're at the end. like july, we have another heavily improvised oc drawing with symbolism i came up with on the spot. that's just how i do things. anyway, this turned out really good in my opinion! i tried to stick to a color palette i saved in procreate a long time ago, and damn is it a fine palette. it helped me get a little loose with the colors and solely focus on creating a strong composition with colors and contrast rather than get hung up on sticking to typical color palettes. i also really like how i did the background by essentially using the liquify tool to swish all the colors around and then polished it a little on top. made for a really cool effect. other notable work would be the companion piece i made with my other oc that had a similar style since i liked the process of this one. there will probably be more as of when i'm drafting this (at the beginning of december) but i just wanna be finished w this post already bro

all around, very satisfied with this year. there was kind of a lot of song fanarts (something that i am somewhat guilty about because it feels like i'm unoriginal or something, but i swear it's cuz i'm really passionate about vocaloid music and need to act on what my braincells do when i listen to certain tracks), but overall i'm happy i was able to maintain some slight variety in the art i made this year through my chosen mediums and "styles" or processes i use.

this was the first year where i really wanted to have a fully rendered piece i'm proud of to represent every month. now, i wouldn't recommend this since forcing yourself to make art is not a good mindset to be in (sometimes, with how early i pushed some pieces out in certain months to get the monthly quota over with makes it seem like i'm getting paid to have a pretty year-in-review LOL). i was pretty lucky to not really have much burnout i guess?

~~~

ok now that all that boring stuff is out of the way, here’s my previous years! this is the sixth year i have made an art review chart.

lightning round review time! (probably just gonna be more boring stuff)

2018: ok, so this was the year where my prime art hosting platform was… amino… specifically smash amino. as much as i could rant about how much i hate that place now, i cant deny that it got me creating a lot of stuff. also it was an actual date archive for my traditional art because i never got in the habit of dating my physical art 🙃 uh don’t mind the absolute horrid graphic design on this one. i grabbed a template which was probably saved from a bunch of other places from amino and… didn’t really know how the formatting was supposed to work. first of all, i edited this in picsart on my phone and the chart wasn’t transparent, and second of all i didn’t know you were supposed to crop only the main focus so it could fit and be a little more clear. hence why its such a visual eyesore. i've been meaning to remake it to make it a little less bad (once i get my hands on the traditional pieces again), but i guess its shoddiness adds to its charm, much like amino. but anyway, 2018 was a bit of a turning point year for me in the smash amino art biz. on amino, i mostly made copies of official artwork from smash (character renders and so forth), and this year i actually tried experimenting with my own original ideas and scenes (my copying roots were still around at this time tho, seen in the november drawing which is based on ssbu’s mural art. i mainly moved on to copying artwork from feh). this was also the year i got my ipad and finally got into making digital art. i didn’t have the knowledge of digital art that i have today obviously, so colors and lighting were usually on the plain side. i also hit my stride with making more ambitious traditional art that incorporated backgrounds and such, and they’re pieces i’m still really proud of!

2019: so, i actually made this chart some time in 2021 or 22 because i didnt make an actual chart in 2019 officially (i forgor). which bums me out because i deleted my amino account by then, so a lot of dates for traditional pieces were flushed down the toilet the one time i needed them. so, to compensate, i tried scraping any digital piece i could to fill in some spaces, which is why some are more underwhelming than others. but yeah since this isn’t fully accurate to my art progress that year, 2019 is a bit fuzzy. main thing of note that year is midway through i got really REEAALLY into fire emblem: three houses and drew a lot of art of the characters (not shown much on the chart because they were mostly sketches and whatnot). imo there’s not much improvement or stylistic changes from 2018 in this year to note. 2020 on the other hand…

2020: if it wasn’t clear, this was my jojo phase. i got into jojo at the end of 2019 and my downward spiral into jojo hell bled into 2020 :p as such, i made a lot of jojo art. and because i made a lot of jojo art, this was the year where my style shifted drastically. i feel like it’s a common phenomenon for artists getting a total stylistic makeover after getting into jojo. whether it’s to imitate araki’s style or just trying to accommodate the characters’… features, i ended up facing the same thing. gone were big round heads with tiny mouths and in were tree trunk necks and higher effort placed in learning anatomy, both for the full body and well as the face. it was around may of this year i got procreate and moved on from ibis paint for digital art. while i still have my personal hangups with procreate, im glad i ended up investing in it since it really just works for me!!

2021: around summer 2020 in peak pandemic mood, i decided to indulge in some nostalgia and listened to some old vocaloid tunes from my middle school days. and then i kept rediscovering more stuff, and then i ended up browsing producers' individual discographies, and uh yeah i am still suffering the consequences of my vocaloid renaissance to this day. while it wasn't prominent in the 2020 chart, it really started to leak its way into my art subjects in 2021. however, i still primarily stuck to my roots with fe/"smash"/jojo fanart. this year was mainly trying to find my style again i suppose? i had already learned the ropes of procreate, its limitations, and the options it has to aid with the art making process, so it was just a matter of flinging a bunch attempts at a ~style~ to see which one i liked the most. i did try finding a painting/rendering style a lot by way of copying (mainly guessing based on speedpaints) other artists' styles and process with digital painting which ended up growing into my own thing. i know they all sort of look the same, but march, april, and october of this year all had slightly different ways of doing all the shading n rendering for painting that i liked experimenting w/ in the future.

2022: by this point, i had fully gotten used to procreate and the methods i used to make art, and the vocaloid train had no signs of stopping. i think the main thing of note this year was that i was able to break out of the "5 million overlays of pink and purple color vomit" box my digital art was set it. while it used to amuse me when i first began abusing it in my art, i guess i just sort of grew out of it? it ended up making a lot of my art look homogeneous, and it took out the fun trial and error of picking the colors to match the atmosphere myself. i also tried to get more experimental with my compositions, mainly in trying to make them more dense with Stuff as well as finally get a little more comfortable with drawing backgrounds. besides those things however, i remember feeling my art progress was very stagnant this year, with not much noticeable change from january to december. perhaps i've gotten a bit comfortable with the state it's in. regardless, still a good year all around.

~~~

whew. THAT'S finally done with. if you made it to the end of this very me-centered ramble, congrats. i will probably make reblog additions in future years to continue this little saga. idk if i'll be as detailed as i was for the 2023 lineup, but we'll see.

[gothamcityhistory]

Detective Comics #27

Where it all began

Cover:

This is a great cover to start things out! It's iconic!! I always love seeing the redraws of this!

I got this screenshot of the cover from the Batman: The Golden Age Vol. 1 which you can tell from the fact that the words "THE BATMAN!" on the cover are black and not red like the original cover from 1939. For the rest of this post I will be using screenshots from an old digitization of the comic except for a few which I got from The Golden Age Vol 1. which I use at the end. Even though it says "64 pages of action" on the cover, The "Bat-Man" story is only 9 pages long and I will only be focusing on that. (Sorry Slam Bradley fans!) Now to get into the issue.

It starts off with this title page where they introduce the "Bat-Man" to the reader. It's very nice!

It's very strange to see him labeled at the "Bat-Man". I'm just not used to it but anyways they drop it fully Detective Comics #30. (Also note that I read it like "Bat Dash Man")

It's also very sad to see The Batman only credited to Bob Kane. Bill Finger did mostly everything and didn't get recognition for it until 2015.

Anyway, Back to the comic-

Bruce Wayne and Commissioner Gordon are chilling out at Gordon's place when suddenly Gordon gets a call about a recent murder. They need him there right away and in the most laid-back way, he's like, "Hey, Bruce, buddy, pal, chum, they need me at a murder scene... Wanna come with?"

and Bruce is deadass like "Eh sure. Why not"

Everything was so casual in the 30s god damn.

Anyway, They rush over to the scene of the crime

and after "a thorough examination of the scene of the crime" they decide to talk to the victims son, who is the current murder suspect.

He's like, "I didn't do it, I only grabbed the knife when I pulled it out of my dad's chest!" And, weirdly, Gordon doesn't press any further on it. He's just like "Yep okay."

Also, he could've stayed alive if you didn't pull the knife out dummy. But I digress

He then responds to Gordon's question like "Dunno, Except these 3 guys"

Also the comedic timing of that- I made a joke to my friend when I first read this comic that the reason why Steve Crane was excited was because he bet Lambert a hundred bucks in 1939 dollars that the threat on his life was real- I know excited back then meant having excessive emotions but I just thought it was funny.

You sus mf. I SEE you Bruce. If that even is your real name.

I also love this panel.

After Crane gets shot the murderer/robber escapes with a piece of paper.

When Suddenly...

The Bat-Man shows up and beats the hell out of them and takes the paper. Then Gordon and the police arrive to Steven Crane's house as the Bat-Man runs away. Gordon then finds out Crane has been killed and decides to go to Paul Rogers house

Also look at my little man

He's so proud of himself.

I also love the fact that he drives off in Bruce Wayne's car from earlier in the issue. He's so silly

Meanwhile, Rogers goes to his friend's, Alfred Stryker's, neighboring Laboratory where he encounters Strykers assistant, Jennings, and gets smacked and trapped by him.

I thought this panel was hilarious.

Like Boi! What kind of guinea pigs are you experimenting with that you need to a jar that can fit a human inside and also why are you gassing guinea pigs???

He then seals the chamber but not before the "Bat-Man" enters, plugs the gas-jet and breaks Rogers out.

Speaks for itself really. Styker then finds out his assistant failed at killing Rogers and tries to kill him himself but the Bat-Man, who had hidden, jumps out and prevents the Stryker from killing Roger. The Bat-Man explains why Stryker like Velma at the end of an episode and then Stryker breaks out of The Bat-Mans hold and then

The Bat-Man straight up kills him and is like "Good."

Bro is so sus. No one acts this way. And then what's more is that Gordon is like "Man. bro is so bored all the time."

Look at my silly dressing up in his bat fursuit!!

Can't wait for next month!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sorry I basically recapped the whole story. It was very short but every panel had something interesting happening!! I definitely recommend it!!

Things I liked and found interesting!!

I found it interesting how they have text explaining the situation instead of just letting the photos do the talking.

Thought It's probably like that because they only had 9 pages to tell the story.

I liked Commissioner Gordon's fit in this issue.

It's a very nice Zebra-like suit that would allow him to fit in with the the weirdo 248 issues from now. It's just so snazzy!

I also like how Gordon takes things at face value and doesn't do some deeper thinking like how I'd assume a police commissioner would. "Well obviously he didn't kill his father. He literally just said he didn't". "I just told Bruce something amazing and he looks like he had heard it before. He must lead a boring life"

I also love The Bat-Man costume in this issue

Purple glove Batman... My beloved <3

The art in this issue is great too!! I'll pick out a few of my favourite panels to show.

Thank you all for reading my first blog post!!

Come back whenever! Rarely the same Bat-Time but always the same Bat-Blog

[illym]

I posted 45 times in 2022

That's 37 more posts than 2021!

41 posts created (91%)

4 posts reblogged (9%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@butterfly-danna

@illym

@floating-far-from-earth

@kidfoundonstreets

I tagged 41 of my posts in 2022

Only 9% of my posts had no tags

#witch's heart - 27 posts

#witchs heart - 25 posts

#illym art - 21 posts

#whnoc - 13 posts

#wilardo adler - 8 posts

#ashe bradley - 8 posts

#claire elford - 8 posts

#whtober 2022 - 6 posts

#whtober - 6 posts

#genshin impact - 4 posts

Longest Tag: 22 characters

#marinette dupain cheng

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

WHtober day 5 - Ashe route.

I HAD to draw the ShortCake Project for this. I just had to. Anyway this took me a hella long time lmao. Tried to replicate Iz's hair shine, I'll decide if I like it in a few weeks.

Minute timelapse under the cut since the 30 second version moved at the speed of sound.

Claire's hand and arm is genuinely killing me but I'm kind of worn out from this plus I don't know how to do it better lol.

See the full post

16 notes - Posted October 5, 2022

#4

Happy Birthday (again) Claire !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! girl of all time she's my favorite character in the history of ever

this piece took me a few days and I'm pretty bummed I forgot to timelapse it. Very proud of it :)

17 notes - Posted August 10, 2022

#3

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WILARDOOOOO i spent like 4 hours on this and thats not including the tuneups i just did. love this dude. i think my issue with linearting lies in the g-pen, so i'll look for a good replacement for it. This is a redraw of one of the game cards :)

Timelapse under the cut :)

See the full post

20 notes - Posted October 26, 2022

#2

this one i actually like enough to post on its own.

22 notes - Posted August 28, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

For day 2, I drew strawberry shortcake! The frosting looks like fondant... But the strawberries look good, and that's all that matters. This totally counts, strawberry shortcake is the driving force behind Ashe's Route.

timelapse under the cut

i completely forgot about the knife and fork huh LMAO

22 notes - Posted October 2, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[openly-journaling]

Wrath: Friday January 20th 2023

Was in the middle of working on a mini animation and our last nib broke and we move in a little over a week now provided the weather is good. Kind of late to order more so now we won't be able to draw for two weeks unless we desperately pull out our old tablet and learn to redraw on that thing.

I'm sobbing dying inside because we finally got off block and got our creativity back after nearly an entire year it feels like. Like we really got back into it.

I never really realized how much of a coping mechanism art was until we fell out of after healing from a lot of our trauma and now are dividing back into it since we're we're staying in the town that legitimately gave us all our worst traumas. And then of course the creativity came back.

Does make me wonder if we ever get comfortable enough if we'll ever even somewhat give drawing up. I say somewhat because we do want to try architecture but at the same time I have a feeling there a couple people down south that may very well resurface a lot of trauma for us. Which, while we don't exactly want and definitely try to avoid, it's good for our art.

So maybe our trauma isn't all bad.

But I've also come to this realization that a lot of artists really hate their art and their art style. Which is odd to us because we've been in that same boat but not to such severity. If we make a mistake we hate specifically that mistake but let it be to learn from it in the future. I think the early gentle parenting growing up that our dad gave us before foster care shattered us helped shape our confidence early on. So we don't struggle quite as much. We rarely compare our art to others and when we do it's more of an obsession over their art that we try to even semi copy that art style or implement it into our own.

Perhaps the worst hate we put on our art is when something just isn't working perspective wise or the lineart isn't working. I suppose we have worked to be perfect but perfect to us. Which was almost always good enough.

The way the whole class would stand over our shoulder in amazement and watch us draw gave us a confidence too. It made us feel good and adored. Considering we didn't get a ton of attention growing up.

It became less and less impressive to people as we got older but there are still some people that absolutely go wild for our art. We've finally found a comfortable community that loves it! The furry community has been very kind to our art.

I think our problem for so long was trying to draw furry art in front of people that decided dogs having head hair must mean that's a horse despite the different nose and sharp teeth. That was annoying. Completely different face shapes. We drew animals in front of people that preferred human art.

Which, while we still enjoy doing sometimes, we are still heavily learning and even come to learn more how much happier furry art brings us. So.. we'll stick with what we love most, what we're good at whether people like it or don't. And eventually we'll find our crowd.

I'm just glad we don't have a huge lack of confidence in our skill of art. We can look back at the oldest shit and wonder how people thought that was good. And it makes us realize that we have come a very very long way. We're proud of ourselves. Really.

Next we're going to attempt to work on more perspectives. Like this piece I'm so damn proud of. Our first drawing where we're really trying a different perspective.

No actually, that's the second one. Now that I think of it, this is our first. Unfortunately so many people want to call it inappropriate though and it never hit off. Like I'm sorry that people legit have asses? I'm sorry for drawing it right? She fell that's the whole point of this piece was just to get a literal difference in perspective. It's not like I'm exposing her or giving you a full on ass shot in the face. My god. And that was before a signature change as you can see

Anyway. We've come a very long way since then and I'm just happy with all of it. Satisfied that we can do so well.

I guess I do sometimes wish our art style wasn't so set as it is because there are definitely artists that have art styles we're jealous of. But to be fair, if we all had the same style... I think art would get pretty boring. So.. I'm glad I have a recognized art style of my own.

It does change depending on the headmate but not always. I'm not arguing with that. Hell most of our headmates can't draw at all! I'm glad to be one that can.

[playa-pariah]

i can't assume to know what your goals are in art, so this might just be me sticking my head where it doesn't belong so please feel free to ignore this message if it ends up offensive in any way by me misunderstanding - but i do very strongly relate to being unable to improve in any kind of meaningful way that i can be satisfied with. i have plenty of artist friends who started off at around the same skill level as me, but have long since surpassed me in ways that i don't think i'll ever be able to compete with...however, i think as artists we are always harsh and honestly pretty unfair on ourselves when we self-critique. there are most definitely others who also hold their art up against yours and find themselves lacking, each person's journey in art is different. our goals, the steps we take, the ways we achieve results, it's all different and i think that's part of what makes it unfair to criticize our own art by comparing it to others. maybe i'm jealous of someone's landscape skills, but they're jealous of my character drawing, and so on.

one thing that i've found that helps me is to try and step back from how i'm feeling about my art in that very particular moment and try to see it from the point of view of myself 5 years ago, 10 years ago. my child self would be amazed at my progress even if my adult self struggles to find anything worth admiring, and i think resetting how i view my art in this way does work for me. i sometimes try to redraw older pieces as well, since that gives a much more tangible way of viewing that improvement. when my mindset about my art is bad, it's unlikely that i'll be satisfied with the redrawn piece but it forces me to notice the specific things that i've improved on even if they feel small as well as forcing me to admit that it's overall more technically skilled.

regardless, the end of the year is always rough with all the art roundups that everyone is posting. it's been a string of terrible years, so i'm dreading posting mine up, but it's still a good moment for self-reflection. take note of what you need to improve on but don't deny yourself what you're already good at and allow yourself to be proud of where you've gotten. and since i'm being pushy anyway, don't label yourself a "bad artist", the words we use to describe ourselves are important not just because it effects the way we perceive ourselves but because of how others perceive us. i follow you because i genuinely enjoy your art, but if someone labels themselves a "bad artist" then, well, if you're bad then am i wrong for enjoying your work? i know toxic positivity is a thing but - let's be realistic instead of falling either which way.

art is tough, and no matter how tough it gets there's something that just doesn't let us quit, isn't there? i wish you luck in your artistic journey, and i also hope that you can find more satisfaction in the process. apologies again if i've overstepped!

I really appreciate this- I think I needed a good talking to. Doing an art degree has taught me more about feeling inadequate than anything about art. I think being surrounded by so many talented people makes it really easy to start comparing myself and picking myself apart in comparison. Jealousy comes easy in that sense, not to mention, being an artist on the internet feels like a rat race. I’ve got lots of worries for my future 🫠

But I think you’re right. I need to focus more on the fact that I actually do improve and people do actually like my art and placing myself next to other artists to compare isn’t in any form productive. You’re a very kind person for dropping this in my inbox. I do really appreciate it. I am going to stick a work in progress at the end of this, as I feel an obligation to this blog to stay somewhat on topic 🥲