I've decided to divide this into three separate entries because it'd be a bit much to go through in one sitting (both for me in writing it and for those that might be reading--hello). I'll link the other parts when completed.
part 1: click me! // part 2: (you are here) // part 3: (to-be-written)
This part is far shorter than the previous, as most of what I write about here has to do with my personal art-related decisions post-grad and therefore it's easier to figure out where I fucked up, whereas whatever was going with my professors was a bit of a guessing game.
Despite wanting to drop my art major, I finished out my senior year from home in 2020. I'd graduated but I was stuck at home like everyone else, and I didn't have a job because no one was hiring and everything was closed anyway (I also had no idea how to build a resume at that time, cause it's not something that was ever talked about in my art education--more on that later). While my professors and the nature of the art major cirriculum messed me up during college, I am solely responsible for messing myself up further after college because I decided that this was the best time to teach myself a new medium: digital art.
This was not, in fact, the best time to do this. At all. I thought it was because it seemed everyone and their uncle was taking an opportunity in this unexpected interim to do things like learn to make bread, crochet, write a book, whatever. And good for them. But for me personally I shouldn't have started on digital art when I did. It was far more difficult to get into than I'd anticipated: digital art, like any medium of art, comes with its own advantages and challenges. It was attractive to me because of how entirely forgiving digital art can be; it's very hard to "mess up" with an undo button and the use of layers to separate color from lineart and lineart from sketching and the background from the foreground, etc. That said, I had to build most of my digital art knowledge from the ground up in terms of color profiles, blending modes, resolution (esp. in terms of raster v. vector-based programs), and achieving clean lineart (which, on its own, took me like a year and 1/2 to get even remotely comfortable with). Add to that researching tablets, purchasing one, paying for/learning various programs and that's an insanely sharp learning curve to take on straight out of a hard-won double major.
Digital art wasn't taught in my major; we had graphic design classes meant to familiarize/train students for working in the Adobe suite (not that that's very helpful in the year 2024 AD with Adobe's choice to be a shady company and then being actively sued by the government and all that--but anyway). There was nothing in terms of approaching digital art on a tablet. I would like to think that this particular dead-zone in my art education was for financial reasons (too expensive hardware for a small liberal arts college sort of thing) rather than any unnanounced elitism towards digital art or any pre-concieved idea that it's "unprofessional" in nature. But I don't know that for sure because I never asked.
This general struggle coupled with the fact that I was already burnt out and feeling like shit about my art led to nothing short of an implosion.
And then, because I'm a sadist I guess, I thought that I'd try to build a following (bleh) on social media platforms, and then came the advent of AI, and then the general difficulties of trying to make art for platforms that prioritize quick content (also, the larger online art community itself is toxic as fuck right now and is slowly self-cannibalising itself). Even throwing all that out and talking strictly about the algorithm, I am not a content mill. It took me far too long to understand that there was no way in hell I'd be able to keep up the demands of "production" (especially on instagram).
I had better success with tumblr than instagram, as tumblr's tagging system at the time was far more reliable than instagram in terms of actually getting my work in front of interested people (or even people in general, because instagram doesn't push out shit unless you had already amassed a following previously and/or used instagram as a supplementary social channel for maybe something more community-oriented, like a youtube channel). I even started to like reading the personal notes people left in the tags and the general slower pace of tumblr in comparison to other platforms of its size and reach. But after all these platforms started automatically opting in their users for data-scraping to use their blogs/profiles for fodder to feed into their image-trained AI datasets (instagram, tumblr, deviantart), I had to step away from that as well.
I shouldn't have done any of this. I should have taken it easy, but I didn't. I think I was afraid of stagnation and remaining still in a time where it seemed like everyone else was reaching for new ambitions and trying to pick up new skills or start small online businesses or publish books. Instead I caused myself more pain (however inadvertently).
Of course, what's done is done and I can't take it back. It is better to think of the present, and I've tried hard this year to step down from shittier social media platforms. I've also taken time to thoroughly dissect my relationship with my art so that I can find the crux of all the issues and "operate" on myself. I am starting, in my slow and steady way, to like my art again. It is very much like healing from a traumatic injury (though far less physical, obviously). In the third and final part of this long-ass entry, I will detail my various approaches to falling back in love with art.
Though this entry is shorter than part 1, I took a longer time in getting to it. I had to take a break after the toll that writing that first part took, and I was not looking foward to delving into more negativity with this second bit. But I plan to keep the third part mostly positive, so expect it soon.
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