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Where I've Been ♥
2 years ago
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Hey cuties! ♥
I'm sorry I've been away for so long...That my art posts have slowed to a halt, and I basically disappeared. I've wanted to let you know what's been going on with me for quite some time, but there was a huge part of me that enjoyed the silence, the lack of feeling like there were people expecting content from me.
This is not a journal to announce I'm making some sort of grand return. It's a story about what happened to me and why I've been so quiet the past few years.
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In January of 2017, I started A Similar Weakness.
I was ready to take the jump and start creating big projects with my characters and their world. I felt it was the "next step" in my artistic journey, like it was something I "should" do now that I had been drawing for years.
The comic tore me to pieces.
Instead of creating for myself, I started creating for others. For an arbitrary goal I set for myself. I have made journals about this in the past, journals explaining in detail why this is a terrible idea for me....Journals I keep a link to on my front page for very intentional reasons.
It brought me so much unhappiness and yet I still trudged forward with my eyes on the goal of finishing it. I burnt myself out so much I lost sight of why I loved to create.
But I did take breaks from it to draw what I loved, straight from my heart, and between the self-imposed stress I made pieces I still adore to this very day. ♥
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Then in January of 2019, a dear friend of mine passed away.
After years of crying, hoping, wishing they would get better, they left us so suddenly.
The grief tore me apart. She was an extremely dear friend, a massive inspiration, a powerful creative motivator. I tried to channel my grief into a creative drive....One that wouldn't let them down. I dedicated my entire being to pushing out some sort of project, any project.
I buckled down and made my already fervent drive towards understanding and optimizing my art into a full time project in itself, in an attempt to get faster. If I was going to create comics, I couldn't spend a month creating each page. I pushed myself so hard to be my absolute best that I completely burnt out in the middle of that same year.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, the internet had become a very scary place to be. I became terrified of posting anything at all, and that fear compounded with the stress and anxiety I had put on myself to be great.
I started drawing some pieces just for myself, sharing my art only with close friends who asked to see it.
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But there's a few personal factors that lead to me not posting here, too.
Two "rules" I follow for my gallery is to only post art with a new character if I've taken the time to introduce them first, and I post art in the order it was created.
Because I was drawing doodles just for myself, most of them were far lower quality that I would have liked to share online because they were mainly theory-proofs to test my speed.
You must understand, my love for art, my world, and my characters never disappeared. ♥
I have been drawing new characters, musing about them, loving them, drawing art of them. Thinking of Tobiki and the beautiful world she lives in, the fun antics she and her friends get up to each day, and how they love each other so very dearly.
But the more art that piled up, the more I wanted to write about it all, the more I had to post.....The descriptions on my pieces were becoming so long I was afraid that's what my audience began to expect from me...My art and characters are like my diary. I didn't want to go back and pour emotion into older pieces in order to post them because they're no longer how I'm feeling, or the story my life is telling right now.
All of these cycles continued until I began to indulge in my own absence from the public eye. If I don't post anything, I never have to face the stress of catching up. No one can hate me if they don't know I exist. I don't need to face the self imposed stress of making a comic or getting faster as an artist in order to do so if I disappear entirely.
And thus my posting slowed to a halt.
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But there's one more piece of this story I haven't told. The best part. The happiest part. ♥
In the summer of 2022, I found myself in the world of VR and quite literally fell in love.
It has been such a blissful experience for me no words I write could ever do a single session of it justice.
I was hit with a new wave of creative drive I had never felt before in my entire life. I finally faced something that had been fueling my passion since I was young: I have always, always, wanted to be an animator. ♥
I'll be extremely frank with you all, if it's not clear enough by now...
I really don't like making comics.
The only reason why I pushed myself so hard for so many years to do so was because diving back into my real passion of animation would mean also being a musician, a voice actor, a sound effect artist, and I'd need to spend months learning new skills just to animate again, which was a gamble...What if I didn't like it?...If I made comics, I could merely take what I had already been doing for years and simply translate it into a different composition to create finished, published works. That's it. It was the easy way out.
School taught me that 3D was a nightmare to work with and I swore I would never, ever go back to it by any means. But seeing my visions realized in 2D meant basically creating what was essentially 3D rigs from 2D parts, which would have been so much more of a timesink it would have ate me alive, further fueling the thought to create comics instead.
The push I needed to finally chase my dreams was the drive to create models for VR. ♥
For a decade of my life I stubbornly stayed far away from 3D, only to get slammed in the face with a such a fiery drive to make my own VR avatar I began working in Blender in September of 2022.
I have loved every single second of it since. ♥
Finally a new skillset to sink my creative teeth into, ones I can apply what I've learned from years of illustration to make amazing things. It is completely separate from my illustrations, not weighed down by the plethora of mental quandaries that plagued my 2D works. The things I create in 3D can be shared with others! 3D is so collaborative, people can take what I make and modify it to suit their own personal expression, or use it to make amazing works of art themselves! That's so indescribably cool!! ♥
But the real fuel moving it all forward was....
...Finally, after literally a decade, I am finally chasing my real dreams. ♥
The burnout I was facing melted away when I at last let go of all the self imposed stress that wasn't serving me.
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I just recently released a fully finished avatar for VR, on sale on Gumroad.
Her name is Aria. ♥ She's a mouse and I adore her to absolute pieces. You can check her out here. ♥ There's also a public version you can snag from my booth in Furhub if you'd like to use her yourself. ♥♥
At the time of writing, she is my magnum opus. I have never in my life worked as hard as I have on this one single project (literally hundreds of hours), and I am incredibly proud of myself for sticking through with it until the very end. That's something I could never bring myself to do with a comic, even after 5 long years of struggling.
I spent 8 long, incredibly difficult but equally blissful months of this year making her. I hope you love her as much as I do, with all of my heart. ♥
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I again am so sorry I never told you all what had been happening to me in my absence. 3D and VR swept me up into a whirlwind of love and I have been spending more time than ever being creative, but because 3D works take such an ocean of skills and time to produce, I have had nothing to show for it here.
I'm debating on if I should even post 3D art here, or keep this gallery only for 2D works and make a new gallery only for 3D. Time will tell. ♥
I have wanted to draw so very deeply but my insatiable drive to create in 3D has kept my nose in Blender instead of Sai.
I love you all more than you can ever know.
Thank you for sticking with me even after all this time. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
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you Best try to come see me later On VR Smiles~
(Its weird to see you on here XD)
I’m personally glad you found a place where you could be happy with your creativity, with whatever you do. If you do so happen to return— 2d or 3d. Whatever makes you happy, please don’t let go of that ever again.. there’s such a deep heart when it comes to your work that makes me adore it so much.
It felt like *pure love* being given from your own heart and hands. I really hope to see more of that.. I want to see *your love*
Whatever you may do from this point, you’ll always be on mind
I’m also glad you had time to yourself to explore and figure this out!
You deserve to create for yourself! And if you make an account to post your 3D stuff, I hope you’ll share it with us so we can join you on your passionate journey! ^ ^
Great to hear from you again, Tobiki! And good luck with your future projects! :>