#its like cooking or driving stick or writing essays. good days. bad days. getting rusty. getting inspired. MAKING GARAKS SO SO BAD. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

chitinleg · 2 years ago

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do you ever make a drawing that frustrates you so badly that even before you finish it you're like "that's it! no more art for the rest of the day! i need to recover from this truly mindnumbing defeat before i start asking myself berating questions like 'why didn't you go into plumbing so your curséd hands could at least bring something of use into the world'"

totally and entirely unrelatedly: here's the pastel drawing of garak that preceded the acrylic gouache painting

its. well its not good at all, and since i'm no longer in Art Hell Brain mindset, this is no longer painful to admit but instead really really funny

(some of my dear + beloved friends have even been so kind as to tell me he has a kind of "charming in his own harrowed way" or that he looks like a humble ego death demon, or that he's like garak if he had a disco elysium portrait intro. hehehe)

and i do love this drawing now, and he genuinely makes me laugh!! but i cannot stress enough that at the time of creation this fucking gaze had a comically ridiculous vice grip on my ego and sense of self

anyway here the pieces are, beside each other, as they exist on the paper, for the full effect of the extremely silly ego killing failure art vs the artist's intended image, created once i rallied myself and tried a different method of approach

rocks and shoals

#image desc in alt text #pastels #the funny thing for me is mostly that when you accept the identity of “artist” unto yourself you become your function right.#person who Makes Art. thats You. so what happens when you make art that isnt up to your personal standard? that you dont like?#art which feels bad?#well when i made the pastel garak i was like “this is bad art. therefore i am a bad artist for creating it.”#“as my identity is the creation of art. now i myself am bad—perhaps bad at being myself. perhaps im not myself at all anymore”#these weren't word for word my exact thoughts obviously. but ultimately this is what my thoughts led to #im sure marx has a lot to say about this kind of thing #LIKE. OBJECTIVELY. theres something so funny about the way that a single bad drawing can absolutely wreck me for a day or more #but this is also very common too not even a special or noteworthy reaction #actually theres like. even in ds9 plot lines theres many eps where characters are like “if im not my function then WHATS THE POINT OF ME!”#mostly im posting this because i'm getting better at encountering this kind of mental hurdle and letting it pass #instead of getting stuck in the art failure death spiral brain sewer. many are familiar with that nasty pit im sure #and as indulgent as it is (why its in a reblog not the main post) its good to celebrate the victories. the visible and the invisible both #what else. something something. art isnt Who I Am its something i do and like all skills i will fuck up sometimes and thats fine #its like cooking or driving stick or writing essays. good days. bad days. getting rusty. getting inspired. MAKING GARAKS SO SO BAD.#i rlly love Pastels Garak now actually. genuinely. my friend was right hes got a certain harrowed charm. i should try pastels again

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