The internet is not gonna change with or without your actual presence, specially since you said you don't plan on becoming popular. If you plan on staying with a niche fanbase, whatever you do is only gonna affect that fanbase. So, if you're working to entertain that small fanbase, you're doing great, and if they really are liking what you're doing, you're doing even better.

If you still feel like you could do better, you can begin to experiment writing other things, and mark 'em as experiments, so your followers don't take 'em serious either

I guess I should be more specific; one of my goals is to be featured in one of the collabs that require you to be a talented animator, like these for example:

Then again, even if I was a talented animator and made it into one of these I feel like I still wouldn't be satisfied considering I've seen many people featured in these collabs who are younger than I am

Appreciate you taking the time you type this out. Sometimes my imposter syndrome over shadows why I really like to create.

By the way guys I don't feel this nearly to the same degree anymore, I rescently got hired to do a bunch of art stuff for someone and will be getting rehired by that person again and I feel way less pressure to gain popularity, at least at the moment. Thank you to everyone's advice in the thread!

Interestingly I got commissioned by a person because a close irl friend reccomended me to that person on a discord server (which I'm very greatful for), and got commissioned to do a non fandom non character piece that looks drastically different from the art I do online (which I had fun making, even though it was a lot of work)

i struggle a lot seeing my friends do art really frequently, like at least one fully rendered piece a week, and i'm sitting here going slowly and not really drawing much except for my daily sketchbook sketches. i know those are at least something but it just doesnt really feel like im outputting enough yknow? and when i actually finish a piece and share it with them it feels it just kinda gets glossed over. a large majority of my works are shitpost pieces too and they just kinda feel less valuable even though theyre what i enjoy most. maybe im overthinking, idk.

Yep, you're overthinking. However, if you feel your works are glossed over, maybe you should let your friends know about that. With that interaction, you might learn if they didn't know it made you feel that bad, or instead don't care about it at all, and that might either strenghten your friendships or let you know you have to find new friends.

As for your work currency, no it's not bad if you take lot more time to make something than others. I love drawing, but I make a new pic with a randomized scheduled, since I rely in whether I have energy for drawing or not, and what I want to draw and how. As a result, it could be easy a week I don't share anything. And if you feel you should do better, well... do better, challenge yourself, try mastering what you already know how to do

Well. Um. Hi.

My name is Knight.

And, well it's been months ago, but like, i just though i had unfinished business to go here and, whelp. I'm finally here, after finally having some free time.

Yeah, i mean, i know that the fact, that, i like drawing, i don't draw for clout or that thing, i like drawing, but at the same time i feel like, it's still not enough. Ik, it's kinda stupid to get worried for being popular, but yeah, i guess time workds different for all the people, some get the easy way, and others have to work harder to finally being noticed. I just need to, ugh, idk man.

Other thing is that, man, i'm hella worried for 2 things. Commisions. I want to start doing commisions, you know, it's time to earn some moolah and buy more things for me (And help my family, of course), BUT the thing is that idk how they really work, plus the fear of scams and stuff like that, and a HUGE PLUS is if my drawings are good enough yet.

The second thing, and the main reason i still wanted to go here, is the little aid Thetageist told me. Yeah, it's more about writting than drawing, but yeah, i think i suck at plots. Like, i have an idea at the palm of my hand, but when i go drawing there's nothing. Nothing at all, and heck that's the main reason of why my Sweet Sixteen comic was rushed.

And it's hella weird cuz, i have lore, and things that will happen and all in my projects, but there's that issue. And don't get me started on the basic questions. Yeah, i know who are the main characters, their world, and what they do, but still, nothing.

Man.

Daily sketches are what I did to start making art quicker and overcome perfectionism, so maybe you could apply that to other aspects of art, like doing quick digital paintings or something to practice rendering.

At the same time, though, everyone also has different schedules, so you might not always have the time or energy to do rendered pieces all the time, whereas maybe they do.

OKAY THAT PART IS A RED FLAG ‘CAUSE I’VE BEEN THROUGH THAT SHIT (NG RAGE EMOJI)

If your art is being treated like it doesn’t deserve attention, then don’t even bother sharing it with the people who don’t appreciate it. Shame on them for making you feel shoved to the side like that! Find better people to send your art to!

(May also be good to look at if they’re doing that in other aspects of your friendships. Some people really do just keep a person around as a “friend” but use them as an audience. I’ve been used that way before.)

Please post your shitpost art in the meme thread I started, that I have linked on my profile. I love me some handcrafted shitposts.

No, clout was the wrong word, draw for being popular, that's what i was thinking. But yeah, still the point, but i guess it's just a thing of stop worrying about how attention and do your stuff. Yeah.

The best advice I can give you is you still try even if you have fear. Let's speak with some seriousness: If you fear you get scammed or something for doin' a commission, many of us could advice you how to detect a scam or similar, but you'd still be missing the experience part, which is important to know how to detect these kind of things. Same goes for your "story writting skills", I can give you my experience but you need yours to see actual success and improvement, otherwise you're only gonna compare and feel like you can't do that good.

Now let's talk about other things: imagine you do a commission and get scammed, what's the worst that's gonna happen? You just won't get paid for your work. Yeah, sounds sad and demotivating (and it is), but nothing worse than that is gonna really happen, and you gain a bit of a experience so you know how to avoid scams in the future (like requesting a partial prepaid before beginning the commission). Same for your story writting skills, I remember I sucked ass at doing stories and dialogues, but I improved in that a lot by:

1. Experimenting by my own.
2. Investigate in how to write a better story.
3. Analyzing other stories I liked and why I liked them.

At the end, everything resumes to trying by yourself and gaining the required experience to get better at all these things you want to achieve, and having passion obviously: things done for money end great, but things done for passion end legendary.

(side note: whether your drawings are great or not for you is sometimes careless when talking about commisions. If someone commisions you, it means they like what you do. That doesn't mean you shouldn't improve on your own if you feel you can do better)

I don’t know what’s wrong with me today, but I just have a sinking feeling that people don’t like my OCs/characters and they aren’t appealing. I’ve tried a lot to get some kind of response for things I made for myself, but nothing ever seems to work. And yet it seems to happen quite a bit with other people. What gives? What’s wrong with me? Am I just doomed to be an internet servant for other, more popular creators?

I kind of like your oc's, you seem to have lots of inspiration. But maybe you've just made way too much oc's and haven't used many in other situations than just one pic (Hence Mikunator for example).

Making an oc more appealing would be easier if you hadn't to worry about that many different characters not being appealing

Lord, I rarely have the attention span to draw more than one image of a character, lol.

When I was in secondary school, I had many different characters. I could draw them all in different situations since I knew them from memory. Nowadays, only Delsi Ambar has remained from that era, since I decided to scrap every other char I created. The reason was 'cause those characters were either not that really useful, were full of nonsense or I really didn't want to use them anymore, since they didn't behold anything that I liked actually.

You already know some of my actual chars, like Kinbari or Acanima. I've tried to avoid making unnecessary characters and focused the design of the very few in things I wanted to experiment with, so my works can feel to have a bigger personality and as a side effect these characters develop lore by their own. I'm not thinking in long term for their use, i'm thinking that they allow me to do nice experiments while I still want to experiment with them.

Do you find your tastes often align with other people? Or are you usually into the more niche thing?

At that point you need to re-evaluate who you're making art for. If you want to make things with mass appeal, you'll have to adapt your product to have mass appeal, which means making changes you might not like. But if you're reason is for making art is because nothing else appeals to you, and you're making exactly what you want, for you, then other people's opinions are irrelevant and if they like it, that's an added bonus.

This isn't to say you can't get mass appeal being a weirdo, the odds are never 0.

A lot has happened since my post, so I'll give an update. I've been doing better. I felt encouraged to start sharing my art again last month thanks to a post from EmsDeLaRoZ. When I read that, I was thinking.."why am I holding myself back for?" Deep down I knew I needed to let go of having this ideal perfect art gallery. I made the decision to start re-uploading the next day and got a couple of submissions frontpaged. The support has been really great. The biggest downside so far is that my negative self-esteem about myself and my art hasn't changed much [I woke up feeling a bit unhappy this morning, believing I'm stagnating and not pushing myself hard enough to get the results I want to see]. I'm not expecting this issue to evaporate overnight, as it takes time of course. It still sucks to find myself feeling unsatisfied, like I'm being too greedy or something. Despite that, I've been trying to stay positive and keep looking for ways to improve my work.

I recently seen someone on this forum saying something along the lines of "be appreciative of what you got right now". I need to keep that in mind whenever I feel like this.

Yeah... I've been trying hard, i guess un lore therms i got something better compared to 2016-2020. But yeah, everything else, idk, it's never that good enough.

Heh, yeah. You have a point.

Yeah, ik, like i said, i love drawing. Heck, i've been drawing since... Idk, since a long time ago. But yeah.

The only thing i'm kinda worried if that might ruin my love by commisions, but hey! Like you said, i'm never gonna know if i try.

Hehe, yeah, thanks, i will.

I wasn't going to post here, but this is the perfect thread to share this feeling.

I feel pretty fucking demoralized having my efforts invalidated as art. I am modeling, texturing, and rigging characters, props, and environments but it isn't finished and I prefer not to show my work in such an incomplete state. I had several animations planned with one halfway completed, but why bother?

I wish Newgrounds had a hug reaction. Because I know you’re probably dreading seeing my name pop up again, but I still want to offer you some reassurance.

I don’t know if I said this before, but the Art Portal isn’t necessarily for everything that counts as art, and therefore, just because you can’t put it in there doesn’t mean it isn’t art. The reason it has those limitations is to prevent people from posting shovelware, I think, as well as to avoid lawsuits from people who created the assets and didn’t give permission. But a lot of things that don’t belong there can still be art. Character creator pictures can be art (that’s why I have a club for it in Clubs and Crews lol), photography can be art, and yes, 3D model renders can be art.

I can tell that you care a lot about your work, and I have a feeling that if you stick around long enough, that enthusiasm can draw people to you even if you don’t have anything up on the portals yet. Like I said as well, there’s other places on the site to post the renders, and luckily, I find that it’s a lot easier to connect with others on the forums than the portals.

The easiest way to build confidence is to do the stuff that’s slightly outside of your comfort zone, again and again, until you’re comfortable with it. If you stick around, you’ll likely find people you gel with more and feel more comfortable showing your works in progress with.

Trying to maintain my optimistic attitude about improving has been hard lately. I'm in this mode where I slam everything I make and beating myself up for not being good enough. I hate using art to place value on myself as a person, but that's what I unconsciously do. All the time.

I have been going back to this specific video over and over to help clear my thoughts and re-evaluate myself. I recommend anyone currently experiencing these thoughts watch this. It's an inspiring, beautiful video. Expressing kindness and compassion to myself has been a struggle for a long time, so I teared up a few times.

Hey this video actually kinda piques my interest a little

do you mind sending it in a link so i can watch it in the Youtube app

Hope this works for you.

It does!! Thank you :)

so uh, i guess i dont need any advice, just general support and understanding. i already know what keeps me from getting discouraged and its taking frequent (sometimes very long) breaks from anything art related.

i suffer from depression, PTSD, amd bipolar disorder. on top of that i have really bad chronic pain. if im not demotivated because of my mental health then im physically unable to draw because of a debilitating migraine so painful it makes me vomit. resting my mind and body helps me a lot! i always go back to drawing feeling refreshed and confident! but i cant really help feeling guilty that i sometimes end up not posting any art for days, even weeks. im not in it for the popularity but im like constantly anxious what people will think of me when i keep dropping off the face of the internet. i guess i just need to know that people arent mad at me for doing the right thing for my mental and physical needs. and that nobody expects me to be posting fully finished art daily or they'll riot lol.

Hey watsup

I've been super stuck recently, like glued to the ground.

Ive been experimenting and trying too many things and I change course after trying it only a bit, and I drift again. Its gotten frustrating.

I guess the real killer for me is the voices inside haunting me, telling me I ain't good enough, I can't accomplish anything.

I've been depressed for awhile, because self hate and low self-esteem kills me inside and stops me from making anything. And the guilt of relaxing, when I could be doing something productive.

I have no regime or no direction, I feel like a sailor looking for el dorado

I've been rewatching this video to clear my head, God bless ya Marc

Marc Brunet how to kill your passion for art

It makes me go like "man, I've literally made every mistake in the book."

Lately I've been trying not to think this way, but everytime I come back to make, the voices come along with it and the enjoyment fades.

I have 2 problems.

First is feeling nothing after being done drawing something. I have 2, maybe 3 drawings on paper that are fairly decent, but I don't feel anything from them and no, it's from being crititical about them.

Second, because of the way how I easily get demotivated from drawing I got something like an allergy reaction. Just thinking about it makes my breath short and doing setup feels like a chore.

I don't know what to do about those 2.

I'm not sure how to feel about this...

I didn't want to make money with art. Not in the beginning. Unlike other fields, art is competitive and nebulous. What's popular? Why is it popular? I'm not the type who likes to scrutinize details like that, because often times they're too random for me to make sense of.

But after testing a few things, I realized art really is something I'm okay at. But what's frustrating is I have no clue how to get myself out there. I'm not terribly interested in fanart anymore--I want to challenge myself by doing original work. It's something I enjoy doing too, but making original work appealing is far more difficult.

To make my original works pop more, I've been thinking of projects to work on. I'm still worried though. How many characters should I show at first? What types of stories should I write concerning them? Where do I post? All this stuff is confusing and I don't have a good frame of reference on me. It doesn't help that I get bored easily and I like to mess around with things.

Personally, I just want to be someone who inspires others, and bring them joy in a day and age where it’s needed most. There are days when I end up panicking and cause a scene where it’s not needed, but I still pull myself up and get back to doing what I love. Even though I fell off in some places, this site especially, I continue to work to try and be someone’s inspiration. My only gripes are that I wish I wasn’t made to be invisible, and that I’m given a chance to stand out. This way I can reach more people to potentially inspire.

I have… so much stuff I have told other people I’m going to do…

Do art trades, write stories, make an animation for a friend, make that game for the Pokémon collab…

And yet I think I’ve lost my motivation to do any of it. I don’t know why. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the majority of the time I try to do stuff, I either crash and burn or get ignored completely. It doesn’t feel worth it anymore, right? It doesn’t feel like I’m worth it.

It's definitely a burnout, and is even harder to fight if you feel you aren't being recognized for your hard work. At the end, the best you can do to fight this is... well, balance your work and rests, and interact with people that appreciate you. There's not much else, something that harsh is very difficult to fight alone, and maybe consider sometimes not accept certain works, just for sanity (or accept there's a moment you can't do something, either because time, resources or motivation)