#depression+artblock+school-the will to live

[sparrowhawk-station]

It’s her birthday 🦐🎉

[mamuzzy-creates-stuff]

35. if you had one piece of advice to give your younger artist self, what would it be?

aaand

10. how do you deal with artblock?

:)

35.

To my younger-self,

Don't go to art school

Kid. It's okay to disappoint people. I know that you had to desperately reach out for every morsels of kind words or listen to the soothing silence of other people's satisfaction.

But sometimes when you go after your own heart, it is inevitable that you will disappoint people. Your teachers. Your parents. Your friends. Maybe everyone. Maybe the whole universe. It's okay going against the stream, because eventually you will find the people who will accept you for it.

Do your little comics for fun, it's okay if you don't become the next michelangelo, it's okay if you realize during your school years you don't want to do art for living.

Art teachers thaught you a lot. They thaught you the basics. They thaught to you how to stay in focus for hours. They were kind and patient when you were so tired when you literally fell asleep over the drawing board.

But never-ever let the teacher's (and other people's in general) own personal preferences and subjective opinions about art define your goals and dreams.

10.

I realized that my artblock usually happens the same time as my depressive/manic episodes. So I just let it have its way and not fight against it. ^^

It is really hard not to beat up yourself for not being productive while you feel you let everyone down. But like I said: It's okay to disappoint people. Life is happening, mental illness is a thing. "i don't feel like to draw" is also a perfectly valid reason not to draw.

I try to be kind with myself during this time. It's hard. Allow myself to do something else instead, something completely different. Watching movies. Reading. Sleeping more because I'm overwhelmed. Playing my comfort games. Sometimes even changing from one fandom to another, returning to my old stuff. There is a good chance that I get a sudden surge of inspiration from these activities.

If you listen to your body and its urges, you will feel it when it's time to grab that pencil again. And it will be satisfactory.

[luischocolatier]

That was entirely projection! I was never a gifted kid, was relentlessly bullied, dropped out at 14 and spent my teenage years alone in my bedroom with undiagnosed mental illness. My sister, gifted since childhood, is an Ivy League graduate with an excellent job in a major city. I can’t get hired as a waitress in my home town. Being gifted does not cause any of what you described. Neurodivergence does.

Projection? I ended up going to a local gifted kid association. Out of the seven people around my age I met there:

-One took his life.

-One has had crippling depression for years and several suicide attempts.

-One became a severely problematic student that has ended up in prison and lost contact with him.

-One entered college for math and dropped a year later after failing every single subject, spent several years finding himself and then started quietly a computer programming smaller degree, took forever to graduate and now is looking for a job.

-I have taken over 8 years to graduate from a 4 year easy engineering program and with not very good grades. Now I live in constant artblock unable to do any project.

-One entered medicine school two years earlier than anybody else and that's all I know because I lost contact and I don't know what he's doing rn.

-Last one was a mildly successful Judo competitor and a bioengineering student. I think she's rebelled against her mother and is travelling around and going all crazy and having the fun she hasn't had during her childhood.

[rnilkpuzzle]

The demon of artblock by °Abyss

We had a huge artblock and confusion that kept us from creating art for a long time. Here, we'll write what we observe that causes artblock to us. By reading, it might help you find a way out too.

Being bored: You want to draw/write/create but you are bored. Listen to this, boredom is a little devil you have to fight in order to get your gears move. Just make a start, before you even think of it twice, and when you get to it, it will flow nicely by it self.

Draw with less thoughts: You have the urge to draw/write/create something, but you don’t have a specific idea, feeling etc to express? Try make fanart or re-make an old work of yours. That way you won’t need to think too much.

Save the ideas: Keep a journal/ memory book or use your phone. If you come up with a nice idea, and you can’t create it right away, write it down quickly, exactly as you feel it. The next time you read your note, you’ll be receiving the feeling of it too. High chances there are that the idea will evolve into something better, by the time you re-read it.

use the things you love: To love your art, create things you love. Choose themes that express you, that carry memories and feelings pleasant to you. Depressing themes/ feelings, means depressing art. To create pleasant art to you and being inspired by your previous works to continue create, you have to draw things that are pleasant / truthful/ inspiring to you.

use music: Not a playlist! Every song has a different meaning. Listening to a playist will make you confused. Choose one song to make your start, so to help you concentrate in a specific essense only.

use ASMR ambience sounds: By choosing the ambience sound that fits your mood/ ideas, it helps you get mentally in the world you want to create.

simplify yourself: Keep only the things that really matter to you. Clean your space, clean your life, clean your pc, clean your posts, clean yourself and clean your brain and all the things you don't need, discard them. The more useless things you keep around, the more obstacles you create.

concentrate back to yourself: Close all devises and go for a walk outside. Go see nature, go to the park, go feel the sand at the beach, go smell the sea, swim, go to the mountain, feel the air, touch the greens, see some animals, stare at the rain, watch the clouds, watch the sunset until it turns to night. If possible have a close friend with you, do all these things together and talk about them and talk about you, your good qualities, your bad habits etc. Just do it! This helps you remember yourself and the other human that appreciates you, that you are just fine and that you feel a bit down because you are a little tired. And that is humane. And once you feel refreshed again, you are good to go!

Take some time also, to write down your thoughts just for you to see them. Write your feelings and complains, relief your self from everything, write what you like, what impressed you, anything. This will help you self portait yourself once again. Let this practise be traditional, in your space, when you are alone. Not online. When online, you are not alone, you might feel uncomfortable for some things and so you will not be honest. Only when you are alone and calm in your space, you can trully be honest with yourself.

Life matters: Mostly when living with others, it's harder to concentrate to yourself and create art. Plus the working/ school hours which really mess us up with stress and responsibilities. This is where you choose what's important to be done and time managing. Discard unnecessary things completely and keep only the things you feel they are important. Make your 'yes' and 'no' as clear as possible, so to avoid any confusion with the ones around you and set your personal space and time, clearly.

Be honest to yourself: Search and understand what is the real reason that prevents you from sitting down and concentrating to your personal, beloved and stress-relieving art. Why do you create art? To express/ relieve yourself or to impress others? Are you seeking to become famous with lots of followers, haters and critisism or to just enjoy your art with your friends? Are you happy by your work until now? Do you feel there are things that can be changed for a better future? What do you think is beautiful about your art? What do you feel it might be missing? Ask and anwser straightforward questions to yourself, until you are stabilized and sure of what you want.

About online life and creativity

Inspiration and good mood for creativity are drained dry when using social media. We all get online to get inspired. But online, the info is so much, that the amount of things you receive in your brain and heart, drains you completely to the point you need to get rest. There's not really any control of what you might come across. Viewing too many artworks at once, kills your mood for creativity. ♦ You feel other arts are better than yours. ♦ You feel you can't do good art within the amount of time you have. ♦ You become confused by the too many options of ideas and concepts and their secret meanings. The time you’ll end up scrolling in social media, will be just lost and no inspiration will be received. That makes you depressed and kills off the mood for creativity completely. The nature of social media is to take your mind away of everything and fast. You must have the perfect self control to stay loyal to the reason you got online in the first place. But who has that? xD Creating art for likes and views and all the sort, is the most unhealthy thing you can feed your creativity with. It's like asking premissions to create, from a completely random audience and this is getting really chaotic. If you can't express in art yourself to yourself, by yourself at home, internet won't make you an artist. Likes, views and digital numbers, real or not, are for people who try to become famous. Not for us who are just trying to make beautiful art for us and our friends. You don't need to upload everything you create.

[ Just to be clear. Social media is not a bad tool, as long as you use it mindfully and it doesn’t kill you or your happiness. If, once you close the apps, you feel unhappy/ stressed/ depressed/ disapointed, that means you should take bigger breaks from them or, if possible, not using them at all. ]

Solution, was to keep away from social media and it really worked for us. We tried one week break and it really did the trick. We'd watch some youtube videos to relax, things that have an end. It ends, you close it, you concentrate to yourself and your lifestyle and eventually to your artstyle. We learn to enjoy it, not to be messed up by it. If artblock hits again, we take some break again. It helps to clean the mind of all these unnecessary images and sounds and infos.

As we metioned before, this list are things that help us with artblock, after observation. Nothing is set in stone and it doesn't mean it works for everyone. Nevertheless, we hope it helps you observe your personal obstacles closely and find solutions to any artblock that bothers you and your precious art! ♡

[not-futon]

「 」

I-I wanna draw my OTPs, I wanna draw Kaiju, I wanna draw Homire, I wanna draw more Art Club stuffs, I wanna make a 手書き (?)

And not just YS stuffs, but the other fandoms too. I still wanna draw Ryukyo, I wanna draw Natsume too, I wanna draw Mitsuri and Shinobu, I wanna draw Mafu and Neru and Kairiki Bear and MARETU's song, I wanna draw my bias wearing áo dài, I wanna draw more Vietnamese things, I wanna do collab with someone, I wanna meet more people has the same OTPs, I wanna redesign my mascot, I wanna draw faster, I want more depression things

I-I want so many things, so much that I can't do it all, so much that I don't even have enough time to do all of it.. I started getting scared to see people I follow posting new things because I can't draw anything when they're too productive. They're disappointed with me and I can't do anything about it. I have exams every week, and extra classes every single day. When I'm at home, I keep fall asleep when I tell myself I have to draw something. I'm being artblock, I draw too slow, I have no idea what to draw, and I don't have much time left. From now until the high school exam has only 1 and a half months, it's too difficult to continue living, but dying is scary..

I-I just don't know what I should do..

(Don't-notice-this-fucking-shit I begging you)

[laine-o]

(Not that I think anyone is actually gonna read this letter, but: warning, this is really long and sentimental and I’m allowing myself to be very vulnerable and I talk about my battle with depression, if you are not here for this or are not following me for this reason, please do not feel obligated to read this letter and let this serve as a trigger warning to the contents.)

To the SasuSaku fandom:

Hi everyone,

Today, I am another year older. I was feeling a lot of doubt about myself about continuing this art thing as time goes on since art is not and may never be my career.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s time, since I’ve been shipping SS since 2004, to hang up that hat and finally lay it to rest. But then I remember that it’s always been more than about me. Yes, it began by being about me, because I needed it to. As cheesy as it may sound, SS saved me from the world’s worst depression because I didn’t have it in me to draw anymore and I had severe artblock and a lot of self-hatred. And the more I didn’t draw or paint, the more and more I hated myself. Hated that I couldn’t do what brought me joy. Hated what I had become because I denied myself. I don’t know who that person was then, she had no personality and wasn’t alive. There was no vibrance to who she was. One day, I decided I needed to force a spark back into my life, because it was time to draw or time to die. So the first thing I drew that made me feel something again after the longest time in darkness was the OTP. I didn’t know what to draw so I said to myself “What the hell, I have never stopped loving them,” even after I had disappeared from fandom around 2008. Don’t get me wrong, I still drew here and there, but not regularly, not fully, everything was unfinished or lackluster or drawn for school newsletters. It wasn’t anything I cared about or was passionate about, in short, it just felt robotic and like work, an obligation. However, my OTP, SS, they drew me back in to drawing regularly and are why the love and passion I had for drawing came back after all those years of hopelessness, about 5 years of not drawing, to be exact.

That moment, brought back all my memories of when I was that awkward kid, a misfit (still am in many regards, but I’m trying and I’ve learned to love myself more), first encountering Naruto the series and of first falling into shipping SasuSaku, before I even knew what shipping was. My first foray into fandom, was when I drew Team 7 way back in 2003 and eagerly scanned my paper drawing into the computer.. and posted on my now long-forgotten and abandoned first DeviantArt account. My first SS artwork I drew in 2005. And I was able to recall Naruto telling me to always “believe it.” A message, I had forgotten during those 5 hopeless years of my life.

I started lurking on Tumblr in 2012 and slowly started to read the manga again. Finally, I made a Tumblr and I posted my first few SS fanarts in early 2014 (and I have to mention that my PSD, high-res files from 2014 artworks are all sadly gone because my laptop got stolen). Slowly, the light came back into my life. When I participated in my first SasuSaku Month that light grew and became almost blinding, not solely because of my happiness, that was only a small part of it. That small spark that I had forced quickly roared into a fire. From a like, to a reblog, to the odd tag screaming here and there, it began somewhat of a quiet force and took a life of it’s own, almost something beyond my comprehension and control. This fire took form from becoming a part of fandom again, it was joy I attained from making others happy with my creations, as trivial as it seemed. My followers and my mutuals, I cherish all of you. If I didn’t have you all that share in my happiness and joy, I don’t think I would be here today. My creating art for this fandom really has never been about me in the end. It has always been about you guys. I didn’t draw to become well-known or to make some kind of living from art, it has been about all of you and what I can create that will bring you happiness. All I really had to do was draw what I loved. When I can bring joy to someone with something as simple as a doodle even if it’s just one person or 100 people, then I’m happy. I can “live” with that. And that’s why I am still. :)

This is a testament to the power of fandom. At least in my mind.

Thank you from the very bottom of my heart for allowing me to be a part of this wonderful and loving fandom known as SasuSaku. You all have saved me as much as SS have and were fundamental in withdrawing that darkness from my world. Every single one of you deserves all the love and happiness in the world and especially deserves to find that someone where you both may look at one another the way Sasuke and Sakura do. I hope we’ll all still be under the same sky no matter how young or how old we are as this fandom ages. New fans, will always be welcome. Fandom veterans, whether still here lurking in the shadows or actively participating in the community, I raise my glass to you because you created this fandom and fostered the wonderful environment here. Sasuke and Sakura, thank you for being… just what you are, just perfect for each other and being here for all of us. As long as I am able to or still have the feeling within me and so long as time will permit it, I will do my best to keep Sasuke and Sakura and their love alive and I hope the rest of you will as well.

Here’s to another year. :)

Love, Laine-O