art health
Dec. 10th, 2025 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavit's fascinating reflecting back on my art situation and seeing how much has improved since 2020.
not even stylistically, i'm actually mostly thinking of project management and general peace of mind.
In 2020 ... "aimless" was the best general word. listless. I was severely burnt out on iron crown (webcomic) which had been my sole project from 2016-2020. i could barely do 6 page mini zines in terms of artistic endurance. was briefly thinking of setting up a zine store and doing zines out of my bedroom (lol). frankly, art and sharing art was not Fun that year; i think that's right about the time i straight up took a year's hiatus of posting art on social media and just stuck to my personal site to re-calibrate my relationship with art <=> social media.
(best decision ever, 10/10 would do again, and highly recommended if the above paragraph resonated. there was some odd synergistic brain worms going on that i had to disconnect in regard of "what kind of engagement bait posts you need to make for a publisher/audience" versus "genuinely posting whatever the fuck you feel" online)
getting temporarily possessed/obsessed with gunter fire emblem (<3) a year or two after definitely helped. i think that was like a genuine live wire to the system, or getting shocked by a defibrillator for good. there really is no drug quite like fervent Blorbo Fever(tm) and it reminded me of the early dA days when i had it similarly bad for zihark, at least enough that it kickstarted the entire art career. (still down bad for him, clearly. but said Muse is nice enough he'll give me a break every now and then.) gunter did definitely help getting me through the last of that burnout, though, and trying out a wide variety of projects (bound 120k fanfic, a doujin, a dakimakura pillow (.....yes), among others, including re-falling in love with dead dove work.)
getting the cataract surgeries slightly before that time also definitely helped; there's no question of a dramatic before/after delicacy and nuanced handling of thinner lines since i could actually SEE where i was placing them lines lol. gave me a sharper appreciation of more modern anime cell work and the intricacies of acting & layering of characters and backgrounds.
that said, i think what helped most, ironically, was slowly re-creating the dayjob system of "project tickets".
most of y'all are old hats and know how i used to be famously bad with project timelines and replies and all of that. but it really started taking shape right before the gunter possession when I was doing lots of shorter zine projects to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what stuck there (also to very very slowly improve art endurance like going to the gym to get mad gainz). and what quickly became apparent is I really love bite-sized projects I can do in 2-3 months to then check off and pivot to something else. easily the times i get the most frustrated at my dayjob is when a project lingers way beyond what's expected, and man it is so clear in hindsight that's what happened with iron crown. my ass cannot, and does not want do multi-year projects that demands a lot of sustained character & plot ideation lol. that's some people's idea of a good time and love that for them but i end up wanting to run away and just draw one (1) pretty Muse all day ~~~
what's neat about the ticket system is there's a way to chunk slightly larger projects while still making it bearable. a doujin project is essentially 3-4 "tickets" (aka 3 separate comic strips) which are then stitched together (ashes & ghost proved that; since i could and did pivot to selfship strips in between some of those while still keeping the integrity of the finished doujin). i'll be using the same tempo going into this zihark doujin next year. i'm already seeing Gaze backgrounds nicely chunk into a ticket being => a particular scene location/arc with pretty dramatic differences between the locations.
it also makes it very visible if i have too much on the plate; i do not need to be doing more than 3 tickets at a time. (i have 5 right now; my fault, schedule got weird in august with some additional outside factors... working on crunching through those before accepting new ones :P) even at the dayjob the difference in stress is extremely palpable once when i go over that 4 active-ticket maximum.
but what i also like about all of this is the clarity; actually extremely happy with art right now, and the general arc of the tempo; the ticket system lets me gracefully remove or rotate a project if i'm not feeling it anymore. i can generally assign a mental list of concrete things i want to improve on with a specific project (inking, backgrounds, etc) and not feel scope creep. i can tackle wishlist projects i've always wanted to do, feel proud with that specifically, and show them off on the site while all of this is utterly irrelevant with engagement and vice versa.
no idea what's going to happen in the next five years other than this zihark doujin, but excited for a much more solid --and imo-- healthy road ~
not even stylistically, i'm actually mostly thinking of project management and general peace of mind.
In 2020 ... "aimless" was the best general word. listless. I was severely burnt out on iron crown (webcomic) which had been my sole project from 2016-2020. i could barely do 6 page mini zines in terms of artistic endurance. was briefly thinking of setting up a zine store and doing zines out of my bedroom (lol). frankly, art and sharing art was not Fun that year; i think that's right about the time i straight up took a year's hiatus of posting art on social media and just stuck to my personal site to re-calibrate my relationship with art <=> social media.
(best decision ever, 10/10 would do again, and highly recommended if the above paragraph resonated. there was some odd synergistic brain worms going on that i had to disconnect in regard of "what kind of engagement bait posts you need to make for a publisher/audience" versus "genuinely posting whatever the fuck you feel" online)
getting temporarily possessed/obsessed with gunter fire emblem (<3) a year or two after definitely helped. i think that was like a genuine live wire to the system, or getting shocked by a defibrillator for good. there really is no drug quite like fervent Blorbo Fever(tm) and it reminded me of the early dA days when i had it similarly bad for zihark, at least enough that it kickstarted the entire art career. (still down bad for him, clearly. but said Muse is nice enough he'll give me a break every now and then.) gunter did definitely help getting me through the last of that burnout, though, and trying out a wide variety of projects (bound 120k fanfic, a doujin, a dakimakura pillow (.....yes), among others, including re-falling in love with dead dove work.)
getting the cataract surgeries slightly before that time also definitely helped; there's no question of a dramatic before/after delicacy and nuanced handling of thinner lines since i could actually SEE where i was placing them lines lol. gave me a sharper appreciation of more modern anime cell work and the intricacies of acting & layering of characters and backgrounds.
that said, i think what helped most, ironically, was slowly re-creating the dayjob system of "project tickets".
most of y'all are old hats and know how i used to be famously bad with project timelines and replies and all of that. but it really started taking shape right before the gunter possession when I was doing lots of shorter zine projects to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what stuck there (also to very very slowly improve art endurance like going to the gym to get mad gainz). and what quickly became apparent is I really love bite-sized projects I can do in 2-3 months to then check off and pivot to something else. easily the times i get the most frustrated at my dayjob is when a project lingers way beyond what's expected, and man it is so clear in hindsight that's what happened with iron crown. my ass cannot, and does not want do multi-year projects that demands a lot of sustained character & plot ideation lol. that's some people's idea of a good time and love that for them but i end up wanting to run away and just draw one (1) pretty Muse all day ~~~
what's neat about the ticket system is there's a way to chunk slightly larger projects while still making it bearable. a doujin project is essentially 3-4 "tickets" (aka 3 separate comic strips) which are then stitched together (ashes & ghost proved that; since i could and did pivot to selfship strips in between some of those while still keeping the integrity of the finished doujin). i'll be using the same tempo going into this zihark doujin next year. i'm already seeing Gaze backgrounds nicely chunk into a ticket being => a particular scene location/arc with pretty dramatic differences between the locations.
it also makes it very visible if i have too much on the plate; i do not need to be doing more than 3 tickets at a time. (i have 5 right now; my fault, schedule got weird in august with some additional outside factors... working on crunching through those before accepting new ones :P) even at the dayjob the difference in stress is extremely palpable once when i go over that 4 active-ticket maximum.
but what i also like about all of this is the clarity; actually extremely happy with art right now, and the general arc of the tempo; the ticket system lets me gracefully remove or rotate a project if i'm not feeling it anymore. i can generally assign a mental list of concrete things i want to improve on with a specific project (inking, backgrounds, etc) and not feel scope creep. i can tackle wishlist projects i've always wanted to do, feel proud with that specifically, and show them off on the site while all of this is utterly irrelevant with engagement and vice versa.
no idea what's going to happen in the next five years other than this zihark doujin, but excited for a much more solid --and imo-- healthy road ~
(no subject)
Date: 2025-12-11 06:47 am (UTC)This is really cool to read into, though. Past year I've been looking at others' creative processes to try to wrangle mine into something I can be more reliable with, especially for personal projects and other informal collaborative work.
Serious high five on finding something that works for you!
(no subject)
Date: 2025-12-13 11:11 pm (UTC)so glad the process tickled ya :D sometimes it's fun to tell just to swap notes and see what works for certian brain-ways-of-processing versus others. pretty sure I don't have ADHD but there's a lot of tips there that are awesome for neurotypicals; everyone can learn from each other.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-12-21 09:33 pm (UTC)