The Tragic Extent of My Failings
Art dump! I’ve been doing a lot of drawing - and a lot of writing - but it’s all either very much in progress or just practice. I’m trying to learn to make art with the door closed, as it were - without the thought of showing it to anyone or how it might be monetized. I don’t want to see my art as a “product,” or to consider all ideas on the basis of whether they have the potential to accrue capitalist gains; I find that completely disgusting. But I’ve never been in a position where I didn’t have to worry about money. I’ve never been able to forget, for even a second, what my time and my work is worth in real dollars.
It’s funny, because my mother gave me this neurosis, and she also is the one who used to say, “I only nag because I want you to be okay. I just want you to have a nice life.” I’ve never known what “nice life” means, and I’ve never been able to convince her that I find my life very nice, regardless of whether she would enjoy living it… but I also think it’s sad that, in her attempt to encourage me to succeed, she inculcated a message so perfectly guaranteed to silence and suppress success. Nothing destroys the desire to work, to make art, to do anything at all, as the cynical totting up of its dollar value, the instantaneous disintegration of every idea, desire, and mote of pleasure into “not enough” - not enough to save you, not enough to protect you, not enough to feed you. Not enough to “have a nice life.” If it can’t be sold for enough money to secure your livelihood for the foreseeable future, it’s worthless. A waste of time.
I don’t want to see the world this way, and I’m sick of seeing my creative drive destroyed by it. So I’ve been trying to invest time in some work that I enjoy but that also cannot possibly be sold. I’ve been helping edit a wiki about other people’s music. I’ve been drawing a lot, and some of it’s unfinished, and some of it is me copying other people’s art to practice and understand their style. I’m learning a lot from that, but it doesn’t have a dollar value. That helps a bit.
The art, then. I’ve been doing a lot of sketching with the brush-pen at work, in this tiny pocket notebook I have. Seemed like a good use of the downtime. I draw a lot of dogs (which you can always see over on the Gram) and a lot of coworkers staring at their phones, because that’s what I see. I don’t usually post the latter online, because as much as they are my art, they’re also drawings of real people, and it feels wrong to post them without asking. This one here, though, is a cute girl I work with who ran up to me several hours after I drew her, asking, “Hey, am I Instagram famous yet?” So we have a sacred duty to make that happen, I guess. Congregants, your moment has come. Make it so.
The other two are based on Darkest Dungeon, which I play a lot of, because grinding my face off until an unyielding surface breaks out of sheer pity is the only way I can get it up anymore. The art style is incredibly beautiful, and grim, and dramatic, all things I’m definitely trying to emulate with Sects, to the meager extent I’m currently able. Here we have the Leper, whose design is just fantastic (I have something of an obsession with masks), and the house around which the game is built, before it fell into disrepair due to its owner shacking up with tentacled monstrosities. Some people do the mid-life crisis thing right.
