“Permission to suck”

Why has doing art gotten soo much harder? The tools have not changed. The process hasn’t changed. Back pain that I’m used to? Still there. 

I talked with a Friend last night about how angry I was that despite having a whole-ass Sunday to myself, that I was only 2% closer to getting my allotted artwork for the week completed. 
meanwhile for hours every week I trawl the social media circles of top artist professionals, and insanely gifted asian fanartists dropping Banger idea after idea 7 days a week. Just a ton of rapid fire work coming in an out of there. It hurts that im not even a tenth of their speed. 
I used to make a comic page a night back in the 00’s. As a young security guard at the time, I had free reign in between patrols to chill out in quiet with pen and paper, and turn out a fresh page through an 8 hour shift. I would take that paper home, scan it in, and fix it up nice in photoshop. That comic was known as Edenworldsaga (a bigger and more complicated fantasy robot story then the one im doing now.) Old pages are still looking great, but thinking back on the 6-700 pages I made, I wonder why it was Soo much easier to do then, as a pose to the comics I do now. 

Now Is a constant fight to focus, and deal with adult responsibilities. With just 2-3 hours each day left for myself, I can barely start anything before its bed time again. 
Fucking everything I wanna do advances the clock back to bed time and I hate it. 

I told my art Friend that “People can tell when the artist enjoyed themselves” that the love of art has to start intrinsically from within, and not to try and impress others. But Lately I haven’t felt this personal enjoyment of doing the thing. It’s just gotten so much harder, more depressing, more expensive. And If I may be honest? I don’t think about Robots or Airplanes much anymore. I don’t really think about much of anything now.  (My mood seems to fluctuate on this rather wildly, and who knows how I will feel next week ofc.) But people are going to eventually see something is wrong.

I got extremely upset at MHW last week because the boss I was prepping hours to face, kept kicking my ass, “wasting my fucking time”, and I just wanted to be done with the process. Faster, faster, onto the next thing, tic that box. My lack of time is just ruining experiences which are supposed to be enjoyable. 

You follow this up with the fact that your audience is almost non existent, and the links to the pages where your art gets posted are full of people making jokes about you needing to be killed for putting in the effort drawing the things you enjoy. It’s been a recipe for regret over the 25 year body of work I committed to.  Putting in “effort” has really started to feel meaningless. (This is without getting into the whole midjourney shit.)

So my Freind has to re-re remind me that “shitty one-off sketches are fine”, and that “YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO SUCK.. TO MAKE TRASH ART”.  Its important that artists like me get told this. That every picture doesnt have to be a huge 100 hour full post-production affair. I’m not competing with anyone. The stakes are already soo low. I need to keep from quitting altogether. I need to become like Dr. DJ from FA. and just make images for quick communication of ideas. Stuff commensurate to the amount of attention it actually receives as a whole. And If I decide to take it to full “regular polish” then that is my choice.