I have a difficult decision to make. And I wanted to write it out in a place where people who follow me and wish to stay in the loop will be able to know where my head’s at if they want to.
A friend recently told me that it’s important to spend time doing what makes me smile, and avoid what pulls me down.
Recent complications have made me call into question whether drawing is something that is good for me or bad for me at this point.
What about drawing brings me joy:
1. The pride I feel when I finally, finally complete artwork to my satisfaction.
2. Creating something I’ve pictured in my head in a way that others can now see, in a way I get to share with others.
3. Contributing to the Pokémon fanart community.
What about drawing makes me stressed out:
1. The process of drawing is frustrating. Despite practicing for about twenty years, I have the following frustrations.
1a. I draw very slowly. Slower than any of my peers by an enormous margin. It takes me months to complete art, even though I don’t tackle complicated projects.
1b. Forming a sketch from reference images is frustrating. Getting the anatomy to make any sense on the page is not clicking for me, and it’s not gotten any easier.
1c. When I DO get the anatomy correct, someone calls me out for copying the art I looked at on another screen to reference the pose.
2. I am feeling very ostracized from the community of Pokémon NSFW fanartists. A large number of these fellow fanartists have explicitly called me annoying, or much worse things. This is endlessly aggravating, as it always comes after I try to do the right thing, stick up for what’s right, or offer a constructive suggestion. Which is, of course, annoying (or worse) to some people.
Over the years, I have made appeals to people who hold me in disfavourable opinion, using all manner of different advice from my friends on how to handle these kinds of situations. Sometimes to the individuals themselves, sometimes to the moderation team of whatever subcommunity it took place in. Often the moderation teams respond in ways that my friends and I agree are unjust.
When that hasn’t worked and things get especially nasty, I’ve taken others’ advice and tried moving on and finding different peers. It’s happened again. And again. Often to the point of me gaining people who verbally harass me.
Knowing that such a large number of my peers in this community find me annoying, or actively hate my guts and say bad things about me, has been pulling down my morale for years now, and lately it’s become a weight that is too much to bear.
So, I have a difficult decision to make.
A. I form a plan to tackle ALL of these problems and I continue to create art. I do not know what this plan will look like, since I have already tried everything that both my friends and I can think of.
B. I decide to stop drawing entirely. I leave the Poké fanartist community (they’d no longer be peers). I focus my time to create the one thing that I know I am skilled at, faster at, I take pride in, and I enjoy doing: writing Pokémon fiction stories.
I don’t have an answer yet. But thanks to those who wanted to catch up with what I’ve been going through lately.
Best,
-Afterglow
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3 years, 3 months ago
29 Dec 2020 03:22 CET
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