I haven't been posting here for a long time, which seems to be a recurring theme in my older journals as well. I haven't given up art at all, not in the slightest! In fact, I think I've actually become much more productive than I ever have been before, and have become better and faster at digital art as well.
In the time I was gone, I've worked on many things.
I made many comic strips and artwork for TwitchPlaysPokemon, which is around the time I stopped posting things here
I started taking requests for quick sketches of pokemon, which were uploaded to a separate pokemon fanblog, but never here
I made sporadic fanart of a variety of things
For the first time, I started visualizing character concepts from stories that I've been working on forever
And drew characters that belonged to good friends as well
Drew World of Warcraft comics for reddit
And finally, had an attempt at the 2018 Inktober challenge
So why didn't I post any of it? I guess it was because of a certain type of insecurity that goes hand in hand with the "every artist is their own worst critic" phenomenon.
My DeviantArt profile has a certain theme, and it's always been that way. It has dragons, monsters, and creatures, mostly done with traditional media. I never posted any OCs, I didn't post fanart, I didn't post any humanoid designs. There's no real reason for this, it's just what I enjoyed drawing for a long time. But after a while, I started venturing into other territories. Digital art, comic pages, OC designs, human characters, etc. were suddenly things I was spending time on, but I chose not to post them here to not upset the homogeneous theme of this page. I thought those things would look out of place here, and people who followed me because they wanted to see dragons would be bored by them, be disappointed, and ultimately leave. I had so many different styles and every piece looked so different, that I got insecure about not having a style of my own at all, something that defined me as *me*. So I just didn't post the things that felt like they looked different from my usual deviations. Which eventually meant that I didn't share entire projects that I was working on, and this DA page was left forgotten. This was the same for my other art pages as well: my pokemon fanblog started to be neglected once I moved away from pokemon and started working on OCs. This not only meant that I was unhappy with my style and my content, it also meant I started distancing myself from the people who wanted to follow my work. After all, pages that aren't updated mean nothing to its former watchers and followers. I was so worried that people might not find my work enjoyable if it looked different than usual, that I silently pushed my audience away by not updating at all instead. And after a while, this started to make art feel like a lonely hobby, and made me unhappy.
Recently, I started missing these art pages. I've been creating art, but for what? If nobody can see it because I don't show it anywhere, what's the point? I look back on these last four years with good memories. I've learned from all the projects and drawings that I made, so maybe they *should* be part of my public art pages, even if I'm worried that they'll bore people or won't look as good as other things I've made in the past. Participating in the art community always brought me joy, so I'm thinking of spending more time updating my online presence again, including spicing up this DA page with some of the artwork that I've made in the past 4 years that was never posted. Instead of predicting peoples' thoughts and assuming they won't like my work before I've even posted it, it's probably much less paranoid to let them see and judge for themselves.
A big Thank You to the good friends who talked me back into this, haha.
