My thoughts on being a bad artist

I used to be soooooo so soooooo caught up about my art looking professional and getting frustrated to tears when it just couldn't look that way. Did I even know what I was goin for? Prolly not, but back then I'd killlll to be able to become a professional artist.

Nowadays I'm like who cares honestly if my art looks bad. Who cares if I don't care about improving or not? I've always been a bit confused by the people who think everyone's goals need to be super good professional art anyway. Like I can't draw side profiles of humans at all, and that isn't a bad thing. It's just how I draw. My goal is to just have fun. Maybe that makes me an outsider but I think thats cool tbh. Just doing whatever I want and not caring is so freeing.

There was a point where I stopped drawing completely, actually. I couldn't stand to look at my art in fact. But one day during that I just...kinda went "I want to make something fun." And looked up guides on how to draw in the 2000s-early 2010s style because that looked fun to me. Was it terrible looking? Yes absolutely. Was it the most fun I've had with art? Damn right. I ended up refining it and admittedly it doesn't look THAT bad but it doesn't look super great either. But again, good art was never the goal here. 

Looking back at my old art, I start seeing younger me being more and more frustrated in the majority of pieces. Just trying anything I could to be good at it and ironically making the art look worse by doing that. I tried all I could while clinging onto the one strength I knew I had (character design). I figured if I couldn't make the style good I could at least make cool and cute characters in spite of that and even if my art was painful to look at, maybe it would inspire people anyway. Which was...an interesting way to think. 

I really feel for my younger self, I really do. I wish I could tell him he just needs to relax and focus on having fun (and not get into really toxic friend groups but thats a diff problem <<). He really needed to stop focusing that hard on what other people thought of his art, that was never why I started art in the first place. It was never about other people it was about having fun. 

So yeah, I might be considered a bad artist but maybe it was never about being a good artist in the first place.

Cool fact this was initially about being underwhelmed by the switch 2 but the topic changed SUPER fast XD