#They were what convinced me to look at the original style doodles! Looking for poses

[sysig]

Okay actually, the OG Just Desserts style was onto something (Patreon)

[inksandpensblog]

“If you allow yourself to become chained up to one thing, you get this, like, numbing fear of losing everything. You become chained to these obligations that you don’t really have.”

That part of the video stuck out to me, because that’s exactly where I was my first year in college. For a good decade of my life at least, I had been telling everyone that I wanted to bake for a living. Come high school, I did well enough in vocational classes that everyone was convinced, including me, even though I had started to not enjoy it to the degree I had as a preteen. The household kitchen wasn’t really the best place to bake, so my lack of experimentation at home was taken as a lack of resources instead of a lack of interest.

Then college started and the expectations were so much higher and the environment was so much more industrial. This wasn’t my grandparents’ kitchen. This wasn’t even my cousin’s local artisan business. Not only had it stopped being fun, but even when I consistently put all my effort into my work, I couldn’t seem to meet my own standards, even if I met the standards of the school. And when I failed a class, I fell hard. That one failure is still my biggest regret. Partially because I lost my scholarship, but mostly because I was failing at what I thought I loved and had convinced myself I’d be doing for a livelihood. I’d been telling everyone I knew, and telling myself, for ages, that this was what I enjoyed. I didn’t think I could just change my mind.

I’m so glad my parents noticed how unhappy I was, and encouraged me to really think about what I wanted. Mom reminded me that what people do when they have nothing else to do, is what they enjoy.

I never baked when I had nothing else to do. I doodled. I made up story premises. I wrote out character concepts. I tried to edit pictures and trace my own pose references in MS Paint because that was the only program we had. I made my own Sonic recolor once on my dad’s crummy old laptop and I was so proud of myself. I traced an anime screenshot and then printed it and redid it with colored pencils. When I did cook, I was more concerned about how the food looked in the photo than how it tasted.

And you know what? I was curious about the graphic design world. I looked up a lot of digital paintings. I found certain styles I liked. I was amazed that something done on a computer could look like it was done with oils. I watched Flash animated videos. I picked up the differences between how rigged puppets move and how hand-drawn characters move, even though I didn’t know anything about how animation worked. I could tell anime was different from the other Saturday morning cartoons I watched before I even knew that English wasn’t the original language.

The more I discovered, the more curious I got. I would’ve loved to try my own hands at it.

But I never asked for the means to. Because I thought I’d be baking for a living.

And the sad thing is that my everyone else picked up on it before I did. I had so thoroughly convinced myself, that I thought I’d convinced everyone else. I thought that if I changed my mind, I’d somehow be letting them down.

Thankfully that was not the case. I’m studying graphic design now, and loving it. I haven’t decided what specifically I’d like to do in this field, and in a way that’s liberating, knowing that I can explore all my options. But I’m still kicking myself for not figuring it out sooner.

Whew, that got long-winded. Point is, Mark’s right.