A while back I changed my account from http://www.furaffinity.net/user/digitalvg/ to this one because I didn't like the other user name.

But sometimes I want to import all of my art from that account to this one.

On the one hand, my new work is what is most important to me, no? So there's no harm in letting the old one fade. On the other, my poor widdle ego wants people to be impressed.

Ho hum. What would you do?

Anyone in California who's listening: http://www.change.org/petitions/pro.....therapy-sb1172

These are really cool and some beautiful work. http://siberiantimes.com/culture/ot.....r-old-tattoos/

I'm routinely amazed by how prolific some of you guys are, creating art that's better than mine and much much more frequently.

I work full time and have work around the house I have to do in the evenings but I'm betting most everyone else works a lot too so I'm coming to the conclusion that you guys are just a hell of a lot faster at rendering than I am. It's pretty friggin' impressive and leads me to believe I must be doin' it wrong.

To that end, I tried a different rendering technique tonight and while it's looking pretty nice, it's even slower than how I'd been doing it. Doh! Ohwell. Back to the drawing board.

Ego is a funny thing.

A few months ago, I decided I was going to take the ego hit and change accounts from digitalvg to obscurestar. The old account name hadn't suited me for years but I'd been afraid to take the ego hit of abandoning it. An empty gallery with no favorites or watches. Hard thing to do. I'm not a terrible artist but I am by no means anywhere near 'the best' if such a term even applies. So losing that little bit of momentum I had was hard for me. But in part, the act of detaching from ego and doing it was a good exercise for me.

Yesterday I posted a transformation drawing. First one I've done on this account. It isn't even coloured yet. I knew it would be more popular than anything else I've put up. It's a good drawing; some of the perspective is a little off but it does show continued progress in my work.

In oen day, it got five times as many favs as the second-most-favorited piece I've put up. That's a pretty powerful lure to a fragile ego.

I have nothing against smut or the people who like. I like it too sometimes. Also silly stuff, gross jokes and wrong. (Seriously, my favorite artist on FA is probably :van-weasel: who is all about the dirty, wrong, silly, wrong, gross, wrong, and wrong)

What I'm struggling with is a more existential question. I make art for me. I don't do commissions or try to sell art, in part because I'm not good enough, in part because I enjoy my day job and it pays well, but mostly because I like making what I like to make not what someone else wants me to make.

The question is whether I consider ego a healthy part of self or not? That's a much harder question. In meditation, go, and drawing, ego is not good. It gets in the way, reduces my focus, makes me not perform as well. I get focused on the destination and not the getting there.

On the other hand, in the real world, having some ego does have value. Being able to sell yourself when applying for a job, recognizing that you are a valuable person and not being used by someone. It's critical to find a good balance between ego and no ego to maintain healthy relationships.

Now that I think about it, that is a partial answer. I don't make art purely for me. If I did, I would just stay in bed and dream all day. Art is communication. When I create something, it is something I want to externalize to others. I like creating worlds for others to wander in. I enjoy being a doorway to somewhere else for someone else and in creating things that I want to share with others, I end up enriching my own experience because my worlds become more real to me. Ego, for me at least, is necessary to art.

I guess the question then becomes, where is the balance point? I think I'm going to have to contemplate that more before I have an answer.

Meanwhile, I guess the lesson I can take is that in Go, feeling insecure about your successes is just as bad as feeling overconfident about them. You won't win if you spend all your time attacking or all your time defending. Feeling wounded that something that had a little fan service in it is more popular than something that did not is much like spending all my time trying to build walls. It's a decent drawing that shows continued progress. That it accomplished two goals at once should mean it was a bigger success. Saying "I am a brilliant and sensitive artist who is so much deeper than everyone else" is a huge ego trap too. Yes, I do know how to manipulate my audience. So what. I'm pretty sure that everyone who has posted anything here knows how to do that. So what I know really isn't anything that's secret or you need a high IQ to figure out. The ego trip that it is ends up kind of sad when viewed in that light. What I should really be trying to figure out how to do is create work that all of my buttons and does what I want but also presses yours now and then just to let you know I care and want to share something with you. (Whoever you are, arbitrary 2nd person)

Anyhow. Lunchtime is over. Back to the prim mines.

Side note: I find it frustrating that things that interest me don't maintain themselves without conscious effort on my part. Like dreams for instance. If I put effort into it, I remember pieces of dreams but the moment I stop mentally prepping myself to dream before bed each night, it just disappears and I get nothing at night. This seems to be the pattern for a lot of things in my life. If I'm not actively studying and pushing on them, they rapidly decay and vanish.

Side note 2: I REALLY need to learn how to remember people's names and associate them with faces. This is a serious handicap for me that I have to learn to overcome.

Last night, I intended to dream. I did. I was looking for something. Some piece of something for some art project. Perhaps I was just seeking inspiration. That was my goal when I went to bed.

Someone in the Other told me they knew a person that might have it. I rode a bus through a city of winding cobblestone streets and twisted decrepit buildings until we stopped in sort of a cul du sac with ruined buildings on the left and a view over a bay straight ahead and a sort of run-down old hotel or mall on the right.

There were a couple of rough-looking people out front. A man and a woman. Old, weathered, looked like they lived on the streets and drank a lot. The woman was wearing a badly worn wedding dress, the man a tattered tux. It triggered all my ingrained little fears about 'those people' but they welcomed me like an old friends and invited me inside. I felt ashamed of my fears. I think they owned the place or at least ran it. They told me their names but I promptly forgot.

Inside, we were on an elevated walk looking down into a large open room that had various people doing stuff. Drawing, chatting, sewing, juggling, practicing fire dance. The interior was kind of like a victorian era building, somewhat decrepit with carved features. Mostly cream and off yellow colors. I think some of the columns were white at one time, there was some wallpaper on at least one wall in a sort of diamond print.

It was a bit like a burning man event but not 'an event'. The air of it being a special occasion wasn't there. This was where these people lived every day. I felt awkward. I felt like I didn't belong. Where it hit me was that I had a 'regular job' and these people were virtually homeless but they were somehow more 'real' than me. I felt like a fake.

A kind of handsome vaguely hispanic guy, no shirt, dark brown knee-length pants got up from a couch where he was working and came around the left side and up some stairs I didn't see. He'd been making a brown knotted wide-brimmed hat. He put it on my head and said, "Welcome!" to me, gave me a hug and then disappeared down a hallway. I was very thankful. I'm past due for a haircut and my hair is faded and ratty.

Some of the other people below waved to me and told me their names (which I again forgot :( ) and invited me down.

A first, I didn't see the way the guy had come up so I kind of wandered around and then found a gradual slope that went down to the main room on the right.

A couple of guys sitting on a couch invited me over to sit with them. I sat down between them. They introduced themselves. One of them had said his name just a few minutes before when I was above. I tried to remember his name. I almost had it but it slipped. He was thin, wiry-muscled with a neatly trimmed goatee. Dark brown or black hair. He sat on my left and smelled a bit of olives and turpentine.

On my right, the other guy was large with rolls of fat but not obese. It oddly suited him. Kind of baby faced but with sallow cheeks and a strange sort of smile. Now that I think about it, he only passingly resembled human at all. He smelt stale but not oppressive. Like old tea and a bit of mustiness.

I was about to tell them what I was looking for but I had some shallow ego need to try to prove that I belonged there and my sketchbook was in my hand so I told them I drew. They were both excited by this and wanted to see. They also both had sketchbooks of their own and presented them to me. I handed mine to the thin man on the right, now suddenly feeling awkward because I instantly knew their work would be leagues better than mine.

In the fat man's sketchbook, every page had a fully rendered image in it. They were a strange style. People with rounded rectangular body forms. Sort of a stylized grotesque. A little cartoony with a strong graphic element. It was really visually compelling stuff. Some of it was sublimely funny or uncomfortably odd. It wasn't a style I would have said I 'liked' but it was definitely quite interesting and in the back of my head, there were some ideas that I wanted to steal. Particularly one about a unicorn man.

The thin man's sketchbook was sketchier with lightly drawn lines showing transparent layers of things that resembled violins. Almost like technical drawings. They weren't as visually captivating as the fat man's but they appealed more to the technical side of my brain that was trying to understand the forms in 3D space and visualize how they were constructed and all of the work that went into them.

I just began to talk with them about their respective works when the alarm went off. *sigh* This is the way with most of the dreams I've manufactured. They always terminate just at the story is beginning. I suspect I must dream only in the seconds before I become fully conscious. :/

I wanted to record the experience but also, I'm left with an odd question. Is it right to plagiarize art from artists that you only dreamed of? I mean if I found their work interesting, certainly I should pull some ideas from them but wholesale copying the works of another artist seems wrong even if they were people that only existed in my head. I also feel somewhat ashamed that I couldn't remember any of their names.

I guess I could perhaps try to render the world they live in. It was a strange and interesting place but it also seemed like something that would take a lot of time to render and not be interesting to people other than me. I could cling to some hope that by rendering it, I might make them more real, establish a stronger link with them, bring my flop-house of strange muses more present in my mind.

I know however, that's not really how my brain works. Every dream that I've ever had that I've tried to revisit, I've never gotten back to. I can only recreate or sustain them through active process and somehow that always feels a lot less 'real' to me. All of the characters become Mary Sues that I move in contrived ways.

I think it also says something to me about how shallow all of my emotions and motives were throughout the dream. There were all these amazing things I should have been paying attention to yet I kept being blinded by my own vanity and ego. Even now, there's a rich Other land in my mind and I debate the value of drawing it because it probably wouldn't inspire anyone else. Is that really all I see art as? A tool with which to manipulate others? Shallow indeed.

Yet... True. My head is always full of rich landscapes and beautiful pictures. I could spend an eternity dwelling inside it. For my personal sake, I have no reason to render these things. I'm crazy enough that they are as real as I allow them to be. Often I feel like I'm fighting to maintain my footing in this reality. It would be easy to let Otherland carry me away. At times I wonder if it already has. Maybe the 'real' me is eating out of dumpsters somewhere and the life I have is one that self created to hide from her own reality.

I am instead seeking some sort of communication with others through art. I have vague generalized goals of wanting people to think and dream and smile and sometimes be a little creeped out. I desire to give others an experience that is outside of Default World. I want to infect them with a little bit of the strange. I appreciate that part of myself. I think it's right and on a noble mission.

Then there's the other part of me that has no safety net to speak of and few friends. The self that wants to be loved and adored. The part of me that is the void and could consume all of the love in the world and want more. The part that is afraid of losing this reality and sinking entirely into the Other. That part cripples my art. It's in such a hurry to be loved that it wants to rush everything. It's so sad and pathetic, even I have nothing but contempt or it. I wish it would die. Poor unloved child. Boo hoo. Life sucks, get over it. How does one kill their own ego anyhow?

A very interesting observation today.

The past few weeks I've been studying hard.

I thought my drawing was improving a bit due to studying.

Today I had a couple pots of tea.

My drawing was terrible.

Jittery uneven lines.

I gave up drinking Coke back at Burning Man.

My grandmother had the shakes really bad when I was a kid.

I've always feared I'd be like her.

My grandmother drank a lot of coffee.

My drawing has smoothed out again now that several hours have passed.

Draw your own conclusions.

I'm switching to decaf.

An time I start thinking I'm an artist, I need to remember that I'm just a dilettante. I've learned a few tricks but I'm nowhere near a real artist. If nothing else, purely the number of things I posts proves which I am. I spend hours trying to make a crude image that even remotely resembles what it is I want to convey. Others post dozens of works in the same amount of time. I do just enough to lie to myself and say I'm an artist but I never put in the hours of study to truly lay claim to that label. I may have obsession but I lack dedication, vision, and passion. I am to real art what a doll is to a living being. I am featureless and without depth. Devoid of the things that make the living real.

I changed accounts and then haven't posted anything for months. I was going through this whole, "I need to make perfect art" before I post anything. But I'm feeling better now. How are things out there in TV land?

Since FA provides no way to change account names, I've just got to make a stupid post that says I was digitalvg and now I'm ObscureStar