Terran it up....ehhh

[atrenr]

I"M BACK!

Hey guys! I obviously disappeared again and before I knew it, it's been almost 7 months? Don't worry I don't have a backlog of 7 months of stuff to post. Mostly because I kept my bad habit of deleting stuff I am indifferent towards(which is a lot of it).

Since I've been gone I've done a lot of imagination work which never got finished(boo) and haven't actually studied much. I grew a fear of studying at one point because I realized most of what I've done so far has been studies and done for the wrong reasons. I wasn't actually focused on what I was studying a majority of the time and was doing them just because "you study to get better". Almost never applying anything and almost always getting stuck in the human copy machine mode. I think most of what I learned from all of that was through pure osmosis, which is just stupid. I wasted a lot of time because of this and could be much further along if I had handled things "better". I'm not gonna beat myself up over it though, I think we all have periods where we look back and think "fuck, that was stupid of me"

Since then I stepped away from art for awhile to rethink things and then came back to it only to rethink about what direction I wanted to go in with it. Or maybe think about it for the first time, I'm not really sure. A big part of why I was so unhappy with my work I realized is that I was trying to paint realistically(admittedly very poorly!) which isn't what really appeals to me visually at all. I enjoy styled stuff as well as painterly things much more than the realism approach as those things tend to be much more interesting in concept or appeal. I decided that was a direction I wanted to move in and then had the realization that I have no clue how to translate things in a non literal way and grew frustrated over that as well. It felt like I was beating my head against a brick wall for a good long while before I had the epiphany that it is largely a judgement based way of working as apposed to finding the "correct" answer. Then I realized that is a lot of what art is in general. We're trying to make things not record them. The information we pull from shouldn't be anything but a reinforcement, not the core of the concept. Which is why I tend to dislike realism as a whole, as it usually turns out to just be information and little to no interesting ideas or concepts. Often purely for the sake of bravado.

A lot of this is kind of common sense that I probably could have parroted a year ago or two ago if you asked me to, but didn't really come to fully understand until (relatively) recently.

ANYWAYS, I'm starting to write a novel here, so I'm gonna stop myself. I hope to pick up studying again with more intent this time around. Focusing less on pumping them out for the sake of doing them. Here is some recent stuff, some of it is pretty rough but whatever, I wanna do this now so I don't put it off. I'm gonna go through some sketchbooks later and try to catch up with everyone!