Welcome to my page!

BLUF: I am not uploading anything until I can figure out a healthy balance between authentically drawing for myself and sharing things without desired metrics or audiences. I have no idea if such a balance can be found for me at this time.

You know how it goes. You grind, try new things, show off your best works, try to make new connections, identify points where you improved, and possibly even unfurl a smile at your last pencil stroke. Yet, when you click all the upload and share buttons, your best gets ignored and goes nowhere. So, you try again. Same results. Try again, but this time, you cater to a particular fandom...negligible results. You study your works. They're not bad, but they're not great, either. Could it be fundamentals? Are you lacking in something? Are you painfully average? What's missing here, and why doesn't anyone say anything beyond stuffing a digital copy of your piece into their box of "favorites", where it gets immediately buried all over again? Why does that art guy pull such greater engagement and actually have a participating audience? How come that art gal skyrocketed to 2k followers in a month, and you can't even get to 150 after years? Why didn't that big account repost your works? Are you terrible? Should you give up and quit?

Pause.

This is a typical unhealthy downward burnout spiral of social media artists, and today, it's certifiably mine. No matter how much I told myself "I draw primarily for me and everyone/everything else is secondary", I still went down this thought path of uncharitable comparisons and self deprecation. I'm not drawing for me at all. Nope, personal enjoyment was the second or third intention. Metrics, views, impressions, retweets, fandoms, you-name-it were priorities even if I said otherwise. When I drew a piece, I'd wonder if it would be "the one" to boost my numbers and increase my reach, not whether I had fun drawing it. I begin to feel entitled to some kind of "natural progression" of metrics, and when I didn't get them, I'd get bummed out. It didn't take long for the de-stressing and light-hearted nature of drawing to become a stressful and obnoxious chore to me, so naturally, I started avoiding it and dreading it more. In time, I forgot what it was like just to pick up a pencil for fun. I ruined my longest-standing hobby for the dumbest freaking extrinsic reasons.

So this makes me wonder what it even means to draw authentically while uploading pieces online. There's nothing wrong with wanting to share our works, but for me, there's always this certain competitiveness or response/metrics expectation. I like sharing my work, but I also like knowing what people think about it, sometimes to a fault. It becomes a game where I try to figure out why all my early pieces here got so many views and favorites, but all my recent ones don't get jack. I wonder why the piece I spent a lot of time on and "actually felt something" while making was largely ignored and why some 20-minute shitpost got all the love. It is what it is, but in many cases, I can't just accept it. If I don't draw what people like, I won't build an audience. If I do, then I won't draw what I want, and I'm back at square one. I know there's an artsy-fartsy way to do both, but at this point in time, I don't see it.

So, for now, I'm done uploading stuff online for some time. I broke my own damn favorite hobby, and though I can't pick up a damn pencil, I miss it. If you're one of three people to actually read this, art is hard, but art is such a special personal gift. Don't enshittify it by chasing numbers and metrics.