24 07 10	4:37AM

You'd think the hardest part of "art" would be the physical, having to learn to draw the stuff
aspect of it, and yet here I am about four years after finally putting serious effort into that,
still stuck on a completely separate part of the process.

In the end, the supposed quality of whatever you're going to create means nothing when after all
that effort, you still can't directly insert yourself or whatever emotions you've got going on
inside your mind into the work. And the sad part is, that's basically impossible to avoid.

No matter how hard you try, you can't remove yourself from what you do, and yet if you don't go
out of your way to actually put meaning into it, it's just not going to have any and you're still
left searching for whatever it was you wanted when you started this whole mess.


The weird thing is, I don't even mean this as a complaint despite being someone who's innermost
thoughts tend to consist mostly of complaints. It's just a strange observation. Logical, but
still strange all the same.

Once you've achieved a level of skill you never thought possible from yourself, you gain further
perspective on the field as a whole whether you want it or not. I used to envy anyone who could
put some lines down onto paper or a digital canvas and get a nice end result. I still do,
in a way, but I would no longer accept some proverbial "deal with the devil" in exchange for any
amount of skill in the world. You just can't escape your feelings through technical achievement,
and luckily I realized that without having to really make it anywhere interesting. I've watched
so many of the artists I admire most continually suffer, always improving from a viewer's
standpoint while falling deeper into their own problems.

You just can't fill that giant internal void within through furry popularity, I suppose. :V


Sadly, all you can really do is grow the fuck up, slowly learn to have the emotional maturity
that even 15 year olds get to experience when they don't come from a messed up family, and
draw yet another cat person.

Luckily, though, when you keep doing that, you finally find some friends to show those cat people
to, and they have their own funny animal drawings to show you. That part's pretty nice.