do u actually know how to create something? (my take as a comic artist)

How to create art in the bluntest way possible?

When I ask that, I want you to remember all the stuff you were building and dreaming about as a kid.

I think the real challenge as an adult is to bring that pure feeling back, whether it makes you look cool or not, but how? And why does this feeling feel so unreachable now?

The answer can be cut in half; the first is that you are growing up, you are more socially aware, and u are shaped by personal negative experiences. Often, these experiences can be associated with objects in one way or another, which makes a huge impact on your inner imaginary world.

The second is that these personal negative experiences, in today's world, are no longer yours. These feelings belong to an online algorithm that tracks your feelings and decides which ones could make u more miserable and weaker.

The algorithm categorizes different feelings and how people react to them, then separates archetypes of people and suppresses individual thought, replacing it with a rigid collective imagination.

Now I'm not saying that a collective imaginarium was created by social media; it is always there, but since the creation of television and sitcoms, this mechanism has been growing more and more, and now (or at least 12 years ago) that companies have entered the internet atmosphere, it has been becoming in to something more terrifying than u think.

You can no longer be on social media without it becoming a part of how u regulate your emotions.

So how can you take all those years that shaped your brain into being the perfect fetish object of capitalism back ?

By realizing what your art has been influenced by it , maybe you started drawing a certain style bc u saw it as a trend, but do u really like it? Does that really represent how u want your characters to express themselves, how the shadows and shading should feel? ask yourself that.

Because being an artist is not about cropping different stuff u see on Pinterest or TikTok and putting it in the same drawing. If you want to stand out and make a difference, you have to elevate your game; you have to make the world understand there is more that the human brain can create and express.

To create your own imaginary and influence that collective public imaginary is an artist's ultimate goal, either if u wanna actively throw it into the vortex of capitalism or not (i find  actively capitalizing your art is a highly debatable subject, but we don't wanna talk about that right now)