Lately, I thought that working on some more neutral content (namely, character sheets for my little posse of OCs) would help ease me into regaining some confidence in my own work, but the insecurity has only persisted. I hate being in this state, cause it gets me into a mental catch 22.

One of the best solutions to breaking out of an art block is making things. Unfortunately, when I'm feeling exceedingly insecure, what I make isn't good for this. The selective bias boils down to, "what I've achieved was trivial, what I've yet to attempt is insurmountable." Worse still, seeing others' fantastic work broadly has an effect counter to inspiration. "It's been done now, likely better than you'll manage it if you tried."

It only further discourages me from focusing on my strengths since I'm too busy regretting the ideas I didn't have. Don't even get me started on the troublesome ideas surrounding the use of reference material and maintaining originality within this community.

I've been trying hard to train myself out of worrying about that and just focus on making good art, derivative or not. It's not easy. This is very much a "me" problem, but when I'm in my vulnerable state, any new idea I see is simply territory that's no longer accessible to me. Basically, someone's "claimed" it. Anything related will be derivative. Copying is verboten, but where is the line?

It's ridiculous.

I can't wait until I've found my groove within a little niche of my own style of personal content, even though I still hope to tackle a fairly diverse spread of themes. Right now, though, I still feel paralyzed cause of so many different factors and choices available to me.

I have some direction now, at least. That's better than I was when I launched my site and migrated from Patreon, but there's still a long road ahead of me to feel like I'm really creating what I consider "my own" content again. I'll be dealing with growing pains until then.

Thanks for reading through this. I'm okay, I just have some self-destructive ideas about what constitutes acceptable work, which I have yet to reconcile. I know they aren't true, but they still hold a lot of sway in how I do my thing.

I think the one thing that hurts the most is that by now, it ought to be as easy for me as "just drawing," but it isn't yet.

I'll get there, though.

PS: For those of you who haven't been able to frequent my streams lately, I have been working hard on more worldbuilding content as I'd mentioned in an earlier post. It turns out that making reference sheets for 6 characters is fairly time consuming, but I aim to have some progress content up for €7+ tier patrons soon.

Last Monday, I reached a turning point while working on setting up a new platform on my website. It unfortunately failed, and so also turned out to be a bit of a breaking point.

I figured that words would not suffice when trying to explain how it's made me feel, so I made this. The good news is that getting it out of my system during yesterday's vent stream helped me a lot.

The better news is that Tiff already found another angle for us to approach this problem from. It'll take more effort to set up than the previous solutions we've looked into, but when done, it should work out better than any of the alternatives I've seen so far. I'll have more information once we've made a bit of progress.

I won't lie - this has been a genuinely draining experience. It's going to take some time after this is fixed until I'm back where I was a few months ago. My effort for the past several weeks has been put towards ensuring that I won't have to deal with this problem again for as long as possible - and with any luck, never again. With that in mind, I'm still determined and trying as hard as I can.

I promise my next upload will be a happier one. This month's rewards are just about done and I think they're among the best I've made to date, so you have that to look forward to.