I arrived to a point in my life where I stopped to care about the score / likes on my art or if people like my stuff or not. My time is very limited now, so I only draw stuff that I will enjoy unless it's a paid commission ( though, I tend to enjoy drawing them too ). If people like my work, good ! If my work gets no views or is disliked, well.. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Though, I think what demotivates me is my limited time to draw. I have so many ideas yet, so little free time due to my schedule. So when I sketch a bit in my free time, I tend to not finish the sketch the next days because I lose interest & I always feel like my other ideas are better ( plus, I'm not often satisfied by how my sketches look ). It's even worse when it comes to longer projects like comics or animations ( because I wanted to make some GIFs at one point ). x.x

I think about this sort of thing a lot. Being a certified oldhead I have a kid and what I usually tell them is that they need to be okay with failure. It's the most valuable tool for learning and improving that we have available to us, and without mistakes and failure learning doesn't really take place. When we look at some finished product and compare ourselves and our work to it, we don't see the foundation of mistakes and failures that product is built upon, because people don't often put that part of the process out there. This is how we mistakenly attribute their success solely to skill or some innate talent and not to diligent, consistent work. The most important person that has to give your comic or future game a chance is you.

There will be thousands of people that will tell you your work isn't good enough, that you don't have the talent, that no one will care, that you are too much of this and not enough of that. They will take care of the important work of being hard on you, so you don't need to add your voice to their chorus. They've got that part covered.

I find taking a smaller scope helps with my projects: what am I doing right now to turn something out or achieve a goal? I try not to worry too much about how it will be received. It has to be important to me to want to finish it because I love it, have an intellectual interest in it, am invested in contributing to it, whatever the case may be.

Nah, that's not cheesy. I used "failure" because I feel like a lot of creative people struggle with the "fear of failure". The language is just kind of baked into the concept. In practice, I agree with what you're saying, but a lot of folks feel that if they try something and are not immediately great at it that it's not for them or they have "failed" at it somehow.

ironically, the fact that it has to be seen.

part of me is like: NOTICE ME SENPAI!!!!1!!!1!!!ONE!!1!

and another part of me is hoping it sits in a dark corner collecting virtual dust forever unseen.

in group projects: when i am (or appear to be) the only one who is getting anything done. i join a group because i lack the competence to do it by myself, and if i'm the only one doing anything, it's doomed. if i could've done it alone i wouldn't have joined the group in the 1st place.

Having ambitions, then reevaluating and thinking that your head might be up the clouds a bit too much. It's like "I want this to happen" then you'd realize "But... I can't do that" so either you don't work on it or have to scale it down to something that feels more probable for you to achieve. This has actually happened to me, in fact.

So, main takeaway of this is to start small but dream big. Not a unique quote by any stretch of the imagination but has a very general appeal towards anyone who practices their creativity and talent.

Maybe way too simple reason, but other people. I'd get excited and do what I can do start up something.. But constantly getting distracted and degraded by other people up to where I don't have the energy or sometimes even the mindset to continue...makes it hard to continue projects on ideas I had been preparing for for a long while...let alone Help anybody else with theirs...

Biggest demotivation is humanity

Talking about them, and I'm not joking. I have a nasty habit of enjoying the process of gushing about my projects too much and then nothing ends up happening because my brain translates "you talked about it" into "wow you did it! good job this is the exact same thing as actually making it"

It's telling that the one project I came the closest to finishing (and am still going to finish, just not right now) is the Sweet Sixteen comic that I had to shelf because I got sick in last few days. However, I was well on track to finish it before that happened, and this also just so happens to be the one I didn't openly talk about. No one has seen it but me, and for some reason, that gives me more motivation to finish it. I'll keep it that way. I'm not going to start working on it again right away, but I'm not posting as much as a single character design from this short, stupid comic until I finish the whole thing and post it online.

TL;DR If I'm ever working on a project, no matter how small, you're not going to see/hear about it until I'm either in the final stretch, 100% done, or it's a part of an already ongoing series and I can trust myself to finish it.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but not enjoying what I'm creating is a big demotivator. About as big as finding something too difficult to draw.

As of late, the fact that I missed Flash culture in the 2000s has put me off and hindered my enjoyment of making art.

Now I'm trying to do art as therapy to counteract that.

Ya it's weird.

ahh fuck, I feel that pretty hard

I always feel my will to make art drain from me when I post something I spent a while on, tried super hard on, and put my feelings into, and I think turned out super good, and then nobody sees it or comments on it. Cuz art for me is a way I try to find new friends and bond with people and communicate my feelings because I suck at communicating with other people in general. Basically, art is very personal to me.

Also, the whole part of overthinking/perfectionism that I personally struggle with immensely. I always worry if my art is unique/creative enough, or as good as other people's. So sometimes I try waayyyyyy tooo hard, and frustrate the shit outta myself. A lot of projects have fallen by the wayside half-finished cuz I didnt think they were good enough.

I TOTALLY FEEL THAT!! But its super good that you keep reminding yourself to just do YOU. :) It's YOUR art, YOUR vision, YOUR own unique beautiful creation. Remember that it is a good thing that you aren't making the exact same kind of content as the people you admire, because that means that you have a unique vision and that's super cool! Be proud of your ideas, make them the best they can be, and share them with the world and make it a better place by sharing yourself with it :)

more like crapitalism, amirite? :D

Ahh man I feel ya. This one hurt me for a WHILE this year. Most people don't really care about artisan things. They just want a product. I myself have felt quite insulted when people say that it doesn't matter, because the personal feelings behind the art and the process matters to ME, dammit. But yknow what? The fact that it matters to YOU is the only thing that DOES matter when you think about it. And this website is full of other super talented people who really deep-down give a shit about their craft, which is really cool to me.

yeah, art is nothing without heart, do what you love n experiment n have fun! As long as you are trying something new every now and then, you won't fall off. Even if the experiments don't turn out as you hoped, you tried something new, and thats something to be proud of :)!! (also i think your arts really good haha)

it's ok, if you don't feel confident about the quality of your art, you can always spend a lil while doing some life drawing, or practicing something specific like poses, studying arm muscles, painting from life to study light and color, drawing faces from odd angles, or practice drawing something you barely ever draw. consistent learning and refining is absolutely key to getting the skills to put the images in your head onto paper

dont have any tbh

My demotivator is my inability to focus and hyperfocusing on things no one will notice in my work but me. Becuase I can't focus, it takes me longer than usual to get small things done. If I do focus, it turns into me wanting everything to be perfect. I'm normally happy with the outcome, but the amount of time it takes to finish a project becomes annoying when you have a list of other projects to complete. I'm stuck working on 3 (not counting my writing) atm and it sucks.

When I try and do a stylistic choice and it gets ppinted put by someone thinking it's an oversight, they do have a point but man it hurts

Mine is when I put 4+ hours in a piece and it gets almost no attention, but the low effort doodle I made in 5 minutes somehow gets 100+ likes

Scope. There's so much I want to try and learn, and even though I think I have time for working on what I want given enough patience and time management skills, I constantly fear that I might not get there, or that I'm learning too much at once, or that I'm not learning enough, etc.

Another challenge I face. Am I being too rigid or trying to spread myself too far out?

Straight up people mischaraterizing or misinterpreting my work/characters. I always think about how fandoms "woobify" characters, or will straight up miss a character's arc. My characters are all pretty complex broken people (not to sound like im patting my own back LMFAO) and I just worry that someone will assume im trying to glorify something that im not... but I also have to tell myself that sometimes people are just dumb and that I cant always expect everyone to... think critically when consuming media (especially because the comic I want to make has some erotic elements, so the people reading it might skip over the plot and go straight to the smut ☠️)

Having a lot of free time, you always feel like it's time to work on the project that you were waiting to work on,don't feel like it anymore

Knowing that, no matter how much time and effort I put into my artworks, nobody on this site will ever even see them due to me being effectively shadow banned (silently de-scouted for no reason), and that none of my artworks will ever be front paged either, due to the subject matter not fitting with the Newgrounds brand.

in general i sometimes fear that people wont like my stuff and just wanna see fanart. its gotten to a point that i just avoid drawing fanart completely now cuz it always gets more popular than my other stuff. not to mention my art being so gorey and edgy and yknow me being primarily a furry artist, im the prime candidate for getting called "cringe" lmao. ive also been trying to become a tattoo artist so.. lots of fear about that, thinking i'll never reach that goal and whatnot.

Not having enough time and trying to balance life stuff while still trying to put out consistent quality. Also spending a long time on a piece and being somewhat proud of it only for it to flop can be very demotivating as well.

when nobody ever interacts with my art

rarely does someone ever see my art

or anything i make

or when i get something under 5 stars because in my mind it has to be perfect

Resources. I want to start a webcomic here but I don't have a good scanner. I could draw digitally but I prefer traditional.

Also, quality. I don't think I'd be as funny as the stuff posted on this site. Last thing I want is to get the same response JIM got for his for his Foamy shorts as of late. Also I'm still not satisfied with my somewhat janky art. Granted, I'm very inexperienced.

I've been thinking about what you wrote since I read it, and I think i'm beginning to agree with you more (I mean, I already respected your opinion, but now I have a slightly more grown up mind). Even if we have different perspectives of what a job is, I think both are still aiming for the same: we just want to live peacefully while doing what we really like to do. As everyone I think, tho some people don't seem to be either brave or smart enough to actually go for it.

Even tho I love doing art (and admiring art as well), I can't see myself living from it, at least not in the form of an artist that takes request or commisions, I think that's what motivated my reply in that manner of "I'd prefer die young while having fun", but seeing it backwards, I feel it was a reply a bit childish (which embarrases me considering i'm 20 years old). I want to thank you for your reply, since it had a bit of a harsh truth feeling that made me reconsider a bit my mindset. That's mostly everything, I feel this reply wasn't really necessary, but I needed to spit it out

This, you mean?

I fear that too. I want to make a post apocalyptic comedy where everyone is an unhinged awful person, like Tank Girl, but I'm worried people would turn them into "uwu smol beans" instead of laughing at them.