pimentogirl:

fallenhero-rebirth:

rhythmic-idealist:

meganisanartist:

Honestly one of the most important things I can say I’ve learned as an artist is that if you feel like you’re really stagnating, that probably means you’re seeing problems in your work that you have never been able to see before, but you haven’t figured out how to fix them yet.

You’re not really stagnating

You’re understanding of drawing has moved beyond your current execution.

Once you have finished processing the problems you’re suddenly seeing, you’re likely to correct them and suddenly make a huge breakthrough in your drawing.

Don’t push yourself, either. Sometimes you have to remove yourself from a problem temporarily to solve it, just don’t give up drawing altogether.

TL;DR feeling like your drawing is stagnating/getting worse means your eye is improving, and your hands are likely to catch up soon.

as a musician who went through this recently, I can confirm this is very true.

you’re not bad

you’re not realizing you’re a fraud

people aren’t lying to you when they say you’re good

you’re just improving, and this is an agonizing but really important step. congratulations, because I can promise you you’re about to get ten thousand times better at whatever it is you do.

Putting this on the site because this is very true for writers as well.

The most important thing to realise is that this is a temporary condition, but one that will return again an again, but it will get easier every time since you will be able to recognise it for what it is.

Don’t ever let self-criticism stop you from creating.

There is a sweet spot in creating where you’ve improved your skills and you can see you’ve gotten better, but you haven’t yet improved enough that your self-editing skills can see what else you need to build up and at that point you feel really good about your work.

After that it’s one long struggle of flagellation, recrimination and minuscule, painfully acquired improvement.

In my case, the sweet spot lasted approximately 23 seconds in 2006.

Never give in, never surrender.