Click the flag for some music to set the mood... I'm getting tired. Part of it could be school starting, and how I have to do actual online college classes in high school. Part of it could just be growing up and having things changing. But part of it could be coming from... someplace else. I'm tired of drawing. I know that people go under things like artblock every now and then, but this feels a little bit more lasting than that. When I started drawing stuff, I did it because there were things in my head, things, places, stories, that I wanted to store somewhere, somehow, and drawing seemed to be a way of doing that. I know that learning drawing, and art in general takes time but... It's been over a year. And I still haven't drawn down any stories. Sure, I've made occasionally consistent things across my drawings, but I haven't used them in a significant way. And... When I try to draw the characters in my head onto something, I can never get it right. I always get something wrong. And not just a stray line or eye, but that I lose focus of the entire character and parts I wanted to draw the moment I try to focus on drawing it. I can't seem to get a grip on basic details of characters to make them noticeable, to make them stand out a bit past being generic. So I fail. Every time. Sometimes, when I fail, I simply erase it or erase a part, but most of the time... I just draw something else around it. Taking whatever went right with what I wanted to draw, and replacing what went wrong with whatever seems to pop into my mind, or just trying to polish it over. So, I make something... But it's not what I wanted to make. There are times when I just draw silly little doodles, like with my one little orb character and some basic pencil sketches, and some other more detailed things for practice. Those usually turn out how I want them, and they feel fine, and they can be fun to make... But they're not the reason I started drawing. And when I think about that, that I have things in my head that I can't fully put into existence in a drawing... It makes me feel like I get dragged down a bit. And the stories in my head don't last forever. When I think of new things to flesh out as a story, it starts to fade away existing things. And I start to lose them. Lose the things that I wanted to make in the first place. ... When I made my first drawings, I did something fairly stupid. I unshared my old things on my profile. I did this so that they wouldn't weigh me down, but now they're just lying there, untouched, as a simple memory of the past. I did this to rebrand my profile for drawing. After a while, I got a good-sized follower base, (or at least, enough that a few people view my projects regularly) so at that point drawings were what people expected. And I feel like I can't do anything else. Like as if I tried doing anything else with this account, like trying to learn to make small games on here, people would just be confused about why they're on my account and ignore them. I feel like I have to do drawings, in part to post them, which feels like a restriction on the things I can make, and in part because I keep telling myself that I will be good enough one day to do the things that I want with it. But I haven't gotten good enough. I don't know how to do anatomy, I don't know how to set up a webcomic on here, I don't even know how to draw the characters stuffed in my head... ... And I'm starting to get tired of this place. It's not about anything any of you did, so don't beat yourself up about it, it's not your fault... But this site is getting at me. I feel like I'm in a daily cycle that I trapped myself into, where I check my messages, continue any conversations I was in, then go check out some things on here. But when I do... I see things that aren't supposed to be here. Projects filled with blood and gore, ads on every featured project, spam on chatrooms one moment, and drama the next. Not the simple, friendly, welcoming place I came to love. I've tried everything I can do to make this place better again. I've reported projects, advertisements, spam, I've talked about everything happening on the site right now, and even though it does help... It's not enough. It's never enough. I feel like I need to take a break. I need to take a break from here so that I can go through life a bit without thinking about checking my messages every day, and having to go through reports in a futile attempt to make the site better, without worrying about what other people think about what I make, and so that I can focus on school... Music: Flooded Ruins (by Nightmargin)
