I've made a threat on bluesky about what I've been working on in the last month:
https://bsky.app/profile/zyonji.bsk...../3lbtx7rwods2a

I watched a video by Robert Sapolsky about depression ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzUXcBTQXKM ) and wanted to write down some thoughts on how it relates to art making. I’ll also reference “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (And Rewards) of Artmaking” by David Bayles and Ted Orland in this. I’m no psychologist or neurologist, so my understanding may be flawed.

A scenario most artists have experienced: You sit in front of an empty canvas with a picture in mind and yet find yourself unable to start it. What happened to stop you? Pablo Picasso once said: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Where does the inhibition to start a painting come from? For a child, painting is child’s play. Play behavior in a safe environment to improve skills. Literal child’s play. The difference lies in the anticipated outcomes. Something made that artist live in fear doing the wrong thing; the fear of wasting their time.

Let’s build up this hypothetical scenario gradually in severity:
An artist finishes a painting and is unhappy with how it turned out. This creates a shift in the anticipation for the next painting. You may think that’s the start of the problem, but it really isn’t. Experiments by B. F. Skinner showed that uncertainty in the outcome of an action creates more motivation to engage in said action. If making a good painting is a gamble, then the artist may become addicted to making paintings.
What if art can’t be a gamble? That happens when the artist thinks that they can’t try again. Maybe it’s a deadline or lack of money to buy more paint. Now the brain reacts differently. Making this painting becomes categorized as a negative experience to be avoided in the future. The artist will feel depressed because of the failure. Failing doesn’t feel good. The difference between feeling depressed and becoming depressed depends on how the brain explains the failure. Finding excuses is healthy. Even if it’s delusional, if the artist thinks they failed because they didn’t sleep well or ate something bad, then they recover from the depressive feeling and return to being motivated. If the artist finds no excuse, then the brain becomes prone to avoiding behavior that leads to those bad feelings. The behavior was making art.
Now an artist starts another painting with an increased desire to avoid painting because of past negative experiences. To overcome this avoidance desire requires some pressure. The stronger the pressure, the higher the psychological stress will be. Lack of control and lack of outlets will amplify the consequences of the psychological stress. Examples for lack of control are working with clients who choose when a painting is done instead of the artist or relying on unpredictable social media algorithms to bring the art to an audience. Examples for lack of outlets can be a lack of social contacts that care about art and pressure to keep a public image. If the stress is large enough, then the artist will have a strong stress response; anxiety.
If this depression occurs repeatedly, then anxiety turns into depression. The artist enters a helpless mindset. Problems become overgeneralized. Bad outcomes with individual paintings get elevated to failures of the artist as a person. The artist accepts that they can’t avoid those terrible outcomes. The defining symptom of depression is anhedonia. The inability to feel pleasure. Memories and imagination become distorted. The artist becomes unable to recall when making art went well. The artist becomes unable to experience art as engaging and in turn unable to imagine engaging images to paint. This is major depression, a serious medical disorder. The artist gets stuck ruminating on bad experiences. They feel guilty for not making as much art as they think an artist should make and ascribe that failure to their character. Psychomotor retardation however is a symptom of depression. It is the inability to take action and make decisions. Bad experiences have forced the brain to always prefer avoidance behavior. Depression also hampers focus, memory and libido. All problems making art even more difficult to make.
At this point, the artist has entered a depressive spiral. Here I want to emphasize that depression is a real disease. It’s no personal failure to get help. Most artists experience at least some part of this process and the earlier they get help to escape it, the better. You’re not alone with this experience.

There are some ways to shield yourself against falling down the spiral. I like the book Art & Fear for this purpose, because its success speaks of how common the experience is for artists. It’s a book full of quotes from famous artists who struggled the same way. Making art is hard. I doubt there are any artists who haven’t struggled with making their art. “Most artists who start quit. Those who continue have learned how not to quit.” The majority of art students quit after school, because they lose their support system; and yet, art is made. Art is made by ordinary people, all fighting against uncertainty. They embrace uncertainty. To cherish a happy accident means that you don’t fear failing. That is the greatest advice given by Bob Ross. Make the mistakes small. He was so successful, because he helped you not to quit. Not with the painting at hand and not with painting in general either.

I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts on this topic. They took up space in my mind for a while now and it was about time I let them out. (:

Today I saw this piece and it made me want to talk about an artistic technique:
https://realspacejunk.tumblr.com/po.....r-world-amidst

This picture is a nice example of how you can create a more striking impression by using less defined textures. If you look at the poncho, you'll notice that it unlike real fabric is entirely smooth. No surface texture. And yet it reads clearly as fabric and not as something artificial like plastic. And it's very important to be like that, or else the material contrast to the skin would make the texture free face look artificial. Instead of using fine details like shadows caught between fibers to convey a haptic sensation through texture, this picture uses the folds in the poncho around the neck like a carefully crafted iconographic representation of the material essence of fabric. The sharpness of folds covey the idea of the thickness and rigidity of the material. A deep red transition from shadow to light gives an understanding of the softness of the material as light can travel through it to spread into shaded areas. This allows the material of the poncho to read as a soft and warm fabric, while at the same time having so little texture that the minute brush marks of the reflections on the head can draw attention instead. This great texture management is able to create an overall unique impression that detailed textures could not achieve.

As some of you may know, I'm using my self made software to paint. It's made for my personal use only, without any labels in the interface. But after another friend asked me recently, if my software was available to use for others, I decided that it could be a fun project to make another painting software, which is designed for general use and document my process of making it. It'll probably take quite a while for me to get this paint tool into a somewhat finished state. In the meanwhile I thought it would be fun to share what I got and maybe get some feedback from others who are interested in that kind of stuff.

https://github.com/Zyonji/PaintTool

It's not much so far, but if there's interest, I'll share more updates. Currently I'm going through the documentation of common image formats to add a decoder for those to the project next. So far I only used PNG, but maybe it's time I add some WebP compatibility. (:

I don't think I've done one of those life updates before, but this year's convention was great and I feel a desire to share my thoughts!

First of all, I didn't realize how much I really needed to spend some times with friends again. 3 years of staying at home to avoid contracting or spreading the pandemic virus drained me a lot. Even though I felt very sore from walking around all day for a week, I also had so much more energy than I've had in a long time. Originally I was hesitant to go this year, because of the higher prices and the big crowds increasing odds of contracting diseases, but friends and family eventually convinced me that it was a risk worth taking. Many of my friends did unfortunately test positive for Covid-19 after the convention. Luckily my test has been negative so far, but I did contract something, which gave me joint pain and a headache for a couple of days. (edit/update: I did eventually test positive. So that actually was Covid causing those symptoms.)

On the topic of the pandemic, I did realize that I've been out of the loop on that for a while. For example, I still assumed that masks where only effective at preventing you from infecting others, if you're already infected. That was a large part of the reason why I didn't apply for a spot in the Dealers Den this year. Of course it would be nice if by next year some unexpected developments would make conventions feel safe again, be it some new vaccine or something else. But even without that, I feel like I might try selling in the Dealers Den again with already existing counter measures. Though I definitely want to make some new paintings to offer up in the Art Show again! :D

Speaking of the Art Show, my sales there managed to surpass my expectations! I went in with the primary goal of just showing off my paintings, because I wasn't sure at all if anyone would make a bid at all. I actually go one bid on two of my paintings each! And one of them was significantly over the minimum bid too. It was such a nice surprise to see. A big bid like this helps a lot with putting me at ease in such an anonymous auction setting. If someone is willing to give that much to obtain that painting, then they must like it at least as much as I do.

And there's of course also the venue change. The CCH is so much nicer than the Estrel. The Dealers Den was pleasantly climatized and it never felt as crowded as what I remembered from 2019 when I last attended. Everywhere inside where also a lot of places to sit down and take a rest. But outside was probably the biggest difference. The CCH is right next to a park wich is a great place to spend some time. In the Estrel I rather stayed inside the convention all day, but at this new location it felt like a great option to go outside with our friends. If only it wasn't 30°C outside for most of the week. xP

With every year, there seem to be more friends to meet at the convection as well! And I have at least 6 friends who told me that they'd like to meet me at next year's Eurofurence. One of them had a couple of panels last year, which I missed out on and very much hope to get a chance to see next time. Luckily other friends who did attend this year did hold some great panels though. One very thought provoking one was by Sasha and Jonathan about how to build real communities. Wyoryn and Theo had fun panel about how to commission artists right before that one. And Theo also had a panel later introducing the principles behind the meaning of tarot cards. I myself feel motivated to prepare a panel for next year, which would go in depth on colors. I'd call it something like "Why does red have 5 correct complementary colors?"

As a whole, I'm really glad to have gone. Though next year I'd like to to spend some more time preparing for it. Read up some more up to date information on how to stay safe from viruses in crowds. And it also might be worth to pay some extra to get a hotel room close by to the CCH, because it was a bit inconvenient at times to plan around when busses would stop driving around midnight. And if I was in the Dealers Den, the shorter distance to transport my stuff would be nice too.

So yeah, Eurofurence was neat. (:

This year I applied to the Eurofurence Art Show and got a spot for my oil paintings! And in anticipation of it, I updated the pictures for them in my gallery with bigger quality ones. (:

Take a look at them here!
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/34515509/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/37813565/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/50987701/
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/51682185/

That's all. I just wanted to wish you a nice end of the year. :D

Apparently I have a reputation with friends, of never giving easy straight forward answers for their their questions. Frustratingly forcing them to think more and having more questions after receiving my answer. So, why not give you all a chance to experience that. (:

I'll be taking up to 5 commissions again.
Commissions that fit the style and themes of my usual work will be given priority. Being faster won't give you better odds, as long as you contact within the following week. (:

For prices and other info go here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/.....L2zqBifQj2/pub

My current queue:
1. Illustration for Mulefoot - finished
2. Wing-It for Zibeline - finished
3. Wing-It for Oscthor - finished
4. Wing-It for Glitch308 - finished
5. Wing-It for xarinatan - finished

After my last journal, my pineapple friend recommended me to listen to the audiobook of "The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles." It has a lot of nice thoughts on the topic in general, but with how much I talked about fear, I would like to share one specific quote from that book: "If you're paralyzed with fear, it's a good sign. It shows you what you have to do." It's in reference to the idea that the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. And if you care about something enough that it makes you scared, then it's something deep down you need to do. I hope you all out there dare to make that painting you're afraid of making. (:

- on the insurmountable pressure of high expectations.

There is a book I like to go back to when I feel unable to make art - Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking Taschenbuch by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It is a great book. However, it only mentions and presents no solutions for one very ordinary problem: Making money. Where it excels is putting your mind at ease on getting your work done. Allowing you to create art that may or may not ever have someone care for it; to give you confidence to create what you want to create and make something that truly matters to yourself. People who care about you will care about art that matters to you. Taxes, social security and healthcare don't care about you. They want money.

Here lies a difficulty that seems insignificant to some and insurmountable to others. There used to be a videogame critic named John Bain. Something memorable about his personality was that he never wanted donations; he didn’t want money from his fans without giving a tangible and useful service in return. It's not a unique mindset. Many people have a sense of pride that makes feeling like a beggar the most undesirable feeling they can imagine. Many would rather be dead than be a burden on others. The opposite personality that allows people to take money without regret, to be greedy with the conviction that they always deserve the money most, doesn’t present the struggle I want to describe here. Making money with art becomes a lot harder, if you care about giving people something useful in return for their money. The use of a digital painting is a lot less tangible than the use of a car. The use of a painting that didn't meet the clients expectations is often hard to justify at all. Can you justify taking money for giving nothing useful at all?

And yet you put in a lot of work. Not just the hours spent creating the piece, also the hours learning how to create something that most can not create. If you're an exceptional artist, maybe even something only you could ever create. Your time is limited. You need the money to stay alive. You should even see many people genuinely appreciate the piece you created. They want you to continue. They want you to create more. Every time you don't post a piece of art to capture someone's attention for a few minutes, they will instead scroll down further on social media and read more posts to make them feel more miserable and cynical. Without art depicting the spectrum of what trans people can look like and what it means to be nonbinary, those concepts most likely would be far less understood. If you didn't demonstrate that it's possible for you to learn how to create great things, then there would have been others who never got inspired to create something great themselves too. Your work has value. It does make the world better. But still... is that useful?

Not everyone who benefits from your art will pay you. A commission comes with the idea that someone has a use for a creation and will pay you to be it’s creator. Others may very well have uses for the creation too; even more people will benefit from it existing, but as tradition goes, only one person will pay for it. In turn, the artist only worries about that person for making money. Clients have expectations. Expectations you may or may not meet. If you don't want to be a beggar; a burden on others, how often can your mind stomach taking money from a client who expects to get something else? How often does your bank account allow you to spend more time to meet those expectations, or to pass on the payment for some peace of mind?

The book Art & Fear raises an important point on this topic. To attempt perfection in art will only lead you to create no art at all. They quote Ansel Adams: “The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good!” You start getting paralized by the fear of making mistakes and end up procrastinating. If you’re a plummer and fix a leak, you know it’s done when the water stays in the pipe. If an artist thinks that their work is done, once the client is satisfied, they can always find some dissatisfaction leaking through in the client’s reaction. You need a quantifiable cut off point. You need to know that you’re done.

Once your work is done, you need compensation. Do not shoulder all the mistakes of others. If someone built a new house and let the plumber lay pipes to a room just to realize that they marked the wrong room to be the bathroom, then the plumber’s work is still done. The plumber made no mistake. Unreal expectations are easy to come by. As an artist, the best you can do is to make clear to the client exactly what you’re going to do. Don’t let them hope for greatness beyond what you make. Don’t just ask them what they want, tell them what you will do and do nothing more.

An aspect of fear, which I personally still seek to overcome, is that potential clients might see my most laborious pieces and expect something equivalent. This comes in small, with pieces of the same commission type. I would liken it to power creep in video games. When developers make all new content at least as powerful as the strongest existing content, because of the fear, that otherwise players might not find it useful. For an artist that might be the fear that when one piece works especially well with little effort, that every following piece has to work at least as well, even if it takes more effort. Otherwise the client might be disappointed. This problem can also come in large. The complexity of a painting can range from 1 hour of painting to 100 hours of work to create a finished piece. What if the simple pieces pale in comparison to the great pieces? What if the easy looks bad compared to the great? What if you develop a fear of making exceptional art, because you still need to sell mediocre work to survive?

That leads to the question, if maybe commissions are not for artists with that mindset described at the beginning. Then, what else would be? They might enable a donation button, make a ko-fi or patreon, but end up never advertising it. Asking for donation is not something everyone feels comfortable doing. The artist might not want to spoil the feeling of a personal piece by asking for donations at the end of it’s description. Or they might not want to annoy people with advertising themselves and rather focus on earning that attention/money purely through the art they produce. Maybe they fear those with the compassion to want to help an artist might need the money more than the artist. It doesn’t matter. They’re all just excused spawned from fear.

And here I am at the end, still with no solution to the problem. There are plenty of reasons to justify why you should take money from people. Money will allow you to make more art. That art will make the world better than if you didn’t make it. Advertising your work also is beneficial, because it diverts attention from other ads, which would lead people to invest into products that destroy the environment instead. But fear doesn’t listen to reason. Fear makes up it’s own reasons. Every single moment you sit there doing nothing, your fear just finds more fuel. Your fear feels more justified with every moment you waited and didn’t get hurt. Fear wins with every moment it brings you closer to death doing nothing. How long have you been avoiding actually doing what you know you should be doing?

Time passes no matter what. Make use of it.

Does adding a light hood to your white dress automatically make it look like a wedding dress? v:

I painted over an old painting to improve it with what I learned over the last year, but don't want to upload it as if it was a new picture, because it's still mostly the same. So instead here's a link where you can look at it. It also has a nice description where you can read a bit more in depth about my thought process. (:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/26729033

The dice have spoken and Virensere won! http://www.furaffinity.net/view/30687201/
(I rolled an actual d20 for this! :D)

I finally reached 500 watchers on this site, so I want to give one of them a chance to get a free painting from me. d:
All you need to do is write a comment on this journal with a link to pictures of one character you own, the name of an animal I can use for anatomy reference, tell me if they would wear a dress and a description of the general feeling their chosen fashion should evoke. (I won't specific uniforms or naked characters.)
I'll pick someone to paint on Sunday through some random process. (:

After this year’s Eurofurence I set myself new goals: I want to make it into next years Dealers Den and I also want to paint something to sell in the art show! Now I want to share with you the plans I made for getting there:

The first idea is to make oil paintings with a theme that I had in mind for a while. I want there to be 8 paintings of two animals each. One a big predator, distracted by some kind of technology and the other being that one’s usual prey intently looking at the predator expressing some strong emotion. This idea is based on this old painting of mine, but I would want the new ones to feel more intimate than this: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/22117285/ I would also like to put more of a focus on contrasting the feel of different materials in the scene. The slick plastics of technology, soft fur, flowing fabrics of clothing and hard metals of jewelry. I want to convey the feeling of different worlds being unified in one scene. When I first wanted to try to make a series a few years back, I had the idea of animals native to Germany wearing dresses and hanging out with various types of autonomous war machines. This series would be a nostalgic callback to where I started, but adapted to the styles and themes I found to resonate with myself. Having some of those paintings to sell at the art show would be neat. (:

The second idea is another series. With that series I want to explore a theme that captured my mind lately. Old stories from Germanic regions. I listen to a few audio books on that topic while painting, the Nibelungenlied and Norse mythology being two significant examples. In those I noticed a very different value structure to what I observe today. I want to create a series of pictures similar to a mix of tarot cards and the Angelarium paintings, based on those value structures. Each being a detailed painting with a theme like "redemption," "truth," "putting the well being of your kin above your own" and "finding a challenge to push your own skills past what anyone else was able to do before." Those I would like to sell as prints and as sets of cards. Currently I’m trying to figure out how to get the cards printed in high enough quality to make it a worth buying though.

To get those paintings going I’m trying to be more serious about the process. I expect each of them to to take twice as long as this painting: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/27715604/ and this one already took over 20 hours in painting time alone. Because of that I want to dedicate entire days to those paintings where I work for 10 hours without distractions, instead of just working on them on the side like I usually do. To be able to afford to do nothing else I would need about 50€ per day. I will do commissions and use what remains after my own expenses to fund those days. That means I’ll finally figure out commission prices. Additionally I consider opening a Patreon to share the work process and give work in progress pictures. I would make it charge only per completed painting, because I think it would be most fair that way. I hope others can get as excited about getting those paintings realised as I am. :D

And the last plan I made is to design some enamel badges to sell as well. I would base them on my logo in two variants. Metallic black with white in between and silver with black in between. It’s so far the only other idea I have besides my paintings for what to sell at the Dealers Den. I would love to sell some jewelry but, I just lack the experience to make it. Hopefully I’ll be able to secure my place with my skill alone. Maybe I’ll be able to think of something else that’s interesting enough to sell to earn a table. There are still over 300 days left, but I won’t slack this time! I want that table and I’ll do what I can to get it! :D

Thank you very much for reading all of this and welcome all of you to tell me what you think about this! <3

I'm going to Eurofurence this week. Let me know if there are any of you I should keep an eye out for. (:

I needed a new journal.

Tell me something about you. What inspires you? Who are artists that do something you would like to do?

The last month was no fun for me. Constant construction noises outside combined with an intense heat without and air conditioning available made it very hard for me to paint. But at least I finally managed to finish all the requests I got a few months ago. And I'm also close to finishing the art trade I started almost a year ago. I'm just disappointed that I didn't manage to finish the paintings I planned for Eurofurence.

Hopefully things get going again soon. Let me know some things! I'm looking for some interactions with people! :D

I'm trying to get used to painting again. For that purpose, I'll paint at least one 10 minute request a day. (like those http://zyonji.tumblr.com/tagged/10-minutes )
The more requests the better. I'll randomly choose which one to do next, giving those who already got one a lower probability, so nobody needs to feel bad about making a lot of requests! :D

As a bonus, if you make a request that fits the theme of "making a sacrifice" then I'll paint for 15 minutes instead of 10. You know, a sacrifice as in reducing your options to get closer to a long term goal. (:
And finally to practice doing commissions, if you pay me 5€ then you'll get 15 minutes too and move to the front of the queue! :D

Wish me luck, I'm back on the road of becoming a great artist once again! <3

I gotta learn how to be bad at painting again. Make a request and I'll spend exactly 10 minutes painting it. Be prepared for some bad paintings, that's what this is about. If you live without fear, then make your request! >:D

I'll post them on twitter for convenience. Tell me your twitter handle, if you want me to @ you there. (:
https://twitter.com/Zyonji

I just realized that I've got a lot more people watching me than people I watch on this side. Even if 50 of you are just inactive accounts, it's still more actively watching me than I watch. This is such a crazy thought to me. I'm a quiet person and upload rather infrequently and yet you want to see what I do. I really just want to thank all of you! You may not even realize how much every Favorite means to me. I click on every username in my inbox (because I'm terrible with names and got no other way to recognize people other than looking at the pictures on their pages). I recognize you people who favorite my pictures without writing a comment too! Over 160 watchers, that's a lot of people. More people than I would ever be able to remember one by one. No clue what to do with you all, but I'm gonna try to interact more or something. Let me know, if I'm neglecting any fun community type feature.

A lot of thanks to all of you. You let me believe that there's something valuable in what I do (: