separate post to have a little emotional moment regarding my progress with digital art these past 5 years.
I got my first proper drawing tablet on my birthday back in 2016, a couple years before finishing my art degree and it was so wild to have to learn art all over again. The very first thing I drew with it was a Richard piece, and from then on every new technique I wanted to try and brush I wanted to explore was always a Richard piece, like the one above.
And it was always difficult and discouraging when my digital art didn’t look how my traditional art did or how other people’s digital work did, so I just started to push myself harder.
By 2018 I was canon-balling into photorealistic art, and it was amazing, not perfect, but amazing. By then my art started to get a lot of attention in fandom, people I admired and professionally, so I obviously did as any other normal person would do and started to hold myself to incredibly high standards. Standards that drove me to start ignoring signs, signs of burn out and other more physical ones like joint pain and more severe stuff I may talk about some other time. But none of that matter to me because what mattered was the notes and the likes and retweets.
On top of that I started to get hate over my work, and it all began to accumulate until I finally broke down and had to stop. Which only made me feel worse because I was no longer the artist I'd been busting my ass to be.
When I finally felt good enough to pick up a pencil once again, my work wasn't the same, and it got to me. I was so preoccupied about getting people to notice my work again that I didn't realize how much I hated doing photorealistic art, and forgot art is not always about creating stuff that's an exact copy of what people can see, but also about showing other people how you see things through your own eyes.
I honestly think I wouldn't had been able to get here without the support of many of my friends and other people, because they always treated me, and saw my talent for what it was better than I ever did. So if you're reading this and you've stuck with me all this time, thank you. I hope I can keep creating things that keep us connected <3