hecko cannot into art

i want to have the ability to do half-decent art (or even quarter-decent art)

i don't care about realism but rather stuff like (discarding the animation aspect for all of these) aimkid or yorushika or morxvx or cwitchy or kekeflipnote or this specific video by lucky toffee or honestly even the cdi cutscenes yes i'm that desperate

i am not putting examples of my current art here because a) it doesn't exist and b) people are just gonna say it's "good" when it's not (to me)

obstacles to that:

there's much information online but it all disagrees with each other

i saw a video (that i can't find now) with someone saying he spent years learning photorealistic art to build up a solid base before daring to do cartoons ("you must know the rules to break them") and that others should do the same

that's demotivating for one but also my main artist friend (electriclizardfren) did none of that! and his art is very good!

he says that he has no idea how he learned and that he just draws and magically becomes good at it over time, which sounds a lot like how i got good at computer stuff, and which i can't do because i can't have fun drawing because i suck at it and can't just ignore that (more on that in section 2)

maybe formalizing way to learn the art styles i want is like trying to engineer a viral meme, as in it just comes naturally (and perhaps randomly) and having it as a goal just makes it look fake, in which case i guess i'm screwed

anyway then there's ethan becker whom i was explicitly recommended by a good artist (nickeman132) with such takes as:

i know they're probably more nuanced than that and/or clickbait i'm just mad

this one says i should do boxes first, this one gesture drawing; during april 2022 (my month of [drawing/suffering]) i didn't know which to pick and tried both and didn't progress much in either (and also ended up giving up early)

probably a mixture of being unfocused and doing the same easy thing over and over again instead of actually advancing (the gesture drawing site doesn't seem to have any progression curve? at all?)

also: How Do I Deliberate Practice

"just do it" How

have i ever done anything deliberately in my life even (see section 2 paragraph 3)

i can't even motivate myself to watch a youtube video without getting distracted every minute

and even when i do it's hard to keep it up, i can't even keep up a duolingo streak for more than a couple months

i think my longest ever streak was when i was like 13 and decided to do A Workout (from skimble workout trainer) every day and i mean i technically did but a good chunk of them were in bed at 10pm because i forgot to do them all day

and it's not like i don't have time, i just keep wasting it on mindlessly meandering through the web

but with university coming up (and then work) i'll probably actually not have time and then i'm double screwed

doesn't help that i was able to coast through school withut learning much of anything since i was already Naturally Talented™ at math and english and somehow managed to bumble my way through the rest (even if very barely, as with literature and other foreign languages)

also doesn't help that i can't place my drawing tablet anywhere comfortably (even on a table with a ton of space because my laptop has to be further away which throws me off)

drawing on paper is an option but it's more conspicuous (mom found my april stash and started commenting on it and i hated it)

i've once been suggested to get an art tutor but that's a lotta money for something i probably wouldn't end up learning from anyway

and if somehow free tutors exist that's even worse since they don't even get the satisfaction of having taught someone because i probably won't learn anything

coming back to electriclizardfren, he says:

which i just don't have the inherent motivation to do that

in fact i instinctively dislike drawing because i suck at it and How do i Fix that Please Tell Me (but with specific actionable instructions instead of "simply Don't Be Like That™" because that doesn't help or "it's okay to suck at first" because i already know that intellectually but my brain refuses to accept it)

another artist contacted by electriclizardfren said that artists push through the hardships of learning art because they have stories to tell etc etc, which is not true for me

i don't wanna make Art™-type art i just wanna doodle silly little things that's it

(which also doesn't help with finding courses because they're often aimed for people who either do wanna make Art™-type art or get a job as a professional illustrateur)

as of 2022-09-31 ai art is Here and it's probably only ever gonna get more here

sure the stock stable diffusion model sucks at furries but i've seen what a finetuned model can do and it's glorious

and even if it turns out that this iteration just Cannot Do Cartoon Style Ever there's gonna be another one that can in a couple years (definitely sooner than i'll be able to at this rate)

and once it's there it's gonna be even harder to motivate myself to learn, since what's the point of tearing up

there's also the possibility of commissions but that causes the conflict of "i should pay this artist enough money to make up for bothering them" vs "is a single drawing of my honse really worth that much money"

additionally oh look here's a study and it says that practice only affects up to a quarter of one's skill so even if i had magically gotten myself to practice an hour every day for years i could still have ended up worse than a teenager who just Happens To Have Talent (such as aforementioned artist friend)

i've seen art progression charts that go from "godly" to "ungodly" in a few months, and i've seen ones that go from "bleh" to "still bleh" in a few years, and honestly what's the likelihood that my uncreative autistic ass ends up in the first category

and honestly i'm not sure if i even actually want to art

surely if i did want to i would've tried harder

maybe i just wanna be mad

or maybe i just wanna not be mad and suck in peace

i've been advised that the crying may be due to some sort of trauma or similar and that i should seek therapy and not draw in the meantime

unfortunately the meantime is probably gonna last quite a while because: money and bravery

there is cheeseburger therapy which is pay-what-you want but in the examples they say they explicitly avoid giving answers which i very much would Like to Get

and going into it knowing it probably won't help me and then not paying because it didn't help me would be quite ungood of me

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