sign of life and rant.........or maybe not

Hey everyone!

Finally I am able (and willing) to update this thing after quite some time of absence. One reason for me not posting was simply because I have been pretty swamped in work and thus did not have any time to do personal work at all. The other reason is that quite frankly I kiiind of lost the urge to share any of my work online anymore at all, except for some finished work here and there.

To be honest I planned on making this one of those ranty blogposts explaining why I lost interest in sharing my work and "progress" publicly but as I am writing this I am kind of losing steam already, so i guess we will see how this turns out :D

I guess as far as painitng is concerned I always came from a perspective of being a student, trying to be humble, being very aware of my shortcomings and not being afraid to be open about how I feel about them. (I did have my phase of being a total asshole towards people but this was more on a "human to human" level rather than one concerning doing art, but this is way in the past now and honestly quite another story).
What appealed to me "back then" when I started drawing seriously some six years ago was the fact that the communirty of aspiring artists largly present in art-forums like conceptart.org has been pretty much all about that mindset. Being humble, buckling down, doing the work and supporting each other doing that.
Nowadays pretty much every kind of platform for communities like this is gone and the number one artists showcases are gallery sites or maybe facebook and it seems to me that the overall mindset has transformed. I used to see hard working students everywhere and now I see people who are obsessed with giving a professional appereance no matter what, everyone is selling tutorials obviously coming from a perspective that they posess knowledge and a level of skill worth sharing (and worth money). Methods  enabling artists to make "professional" looking work more easily to satisfy the kind of workflow and needs practiced by gaming and movie companies seem to be valued more than actually being able to paint or draw (nope not going deeper into the photobash discussion). The few art community sites (and facebook) are used as "best-of" showcases and study-groups which appear occasionally are dead within a few weeks or sometimes even days.

While all these things are not bad in and of themselves, and looking at pretty pictures and successful artists is nice from time to time, I just don't care about it at all. Honestly it's as simple as that, I simply stoped caring for the kind of "professional artist community" existing now. Having been contaced repeatedly by various artists trying to tell me that I should rethink posting studies and sketches since they tend to "drag down" the overally value of my body of work (presumably unless they are perfect photocopies and thus are nice to look at) if shown together with finished work just lead me to the decision that artists platforms as they are existing right now are not the place for me. Not because the way I use them can potentially damage me and my career but simply because I do not care about them anymore at all.

All this might sound kind of bitter, and honestly it is unfortunate. I used to enjoy posting my studies and that so called "journey" to becoming a decent artist tremendously as well as watching other people do the same. However , getting rid of the pressure of posting "only nice work" has been freeing my head up SO MUCH. Simply put I was starting to enjoy painting less due to this weird pressure thing, now that I got rid of it I am finally starting to have fun again, trying out new things, exploring what my personal goals are. This alone is enough proof for me that I am doing the right thing.
What does this mean for this blog or for me in general as far as posting my work is concerned? -Well, I don't really know, I guess I will do the same thing I have been doing now. I'll post whenever I feel like it. I will drop in some personal work from time to time while pushing myself doing the work behind it on my own. And who knows maybe someday posting ugly sketches and studies you actually learn from will be fun again :) It's just more fun like that right now for me.


Now to end this, here is a little update giving a glimpse on what I am doing right now. I have started working in pencil again, as a matter of fact I am trying to do as much of my studying as possible with traditional media. I don't know but I believe it makes me think more than doing it all digitally and it's also just a personal thing as I want to simply be able to handle a pencil and/or brushes.
I have been tackling drawing faces for the last few days again. It has always bothered me that I am able to draw more or less decent faces only by trial end error every time, pushing things around until they look correct. Being able to just draw a face (especially when drawn from imagination) and just nail the proportional and anatomical structure  is a skill I don't posess right now. buuuuuuuut I want to change that so here is the studydump from the last 3-4 days. It's a mixture of referenced and imaginary drawings. Right now it's still super obvious which is which. Also these are just quick "gesture" drawings if you can use that term for faces reduced to the initial "block in" of the proportions.
And guess what, most of them are ugly as fuck and thats totally okay and the way they should be right now ;P