Down The Rabbit Hole

If I’m being completely honest, I’ve barely drawn a bean since I finished university. I told myself it was burn out, I needed a rest, etc etc. In truth I was scared. I’ve mentioned how unhappy I’ve been with my style lately, and I’ve really been allowing it to intimidate me. I don’t know why: I was happy with my final pieces for my uni course which were more on track with the kind of work I want to do again, and I also drew an Alice in Wonderland piece, an update of an old drawing from way back, and was pleased as punch with how it came out. But then I didn’t pick up my pencil again, and allowed fear and self doubt to take over.



For the past 4 years, I’ve almost exclusively drawn portraits and abandoned my illustrative style. And I now feel as though I’m starting again from scratch. I barely know where to begin, there are so many mistakes and layers of lines, nothing looks fluid, I don’t remember how expressions work, I don’t remember how anatomy works, just how do I even art??

For a long time I’ve kind of romanticised a period of my life in my teens where I was drawing all of the time and would upload several finished pieces a week to sites such as deviantArt and forums I was a member of. I recently re-discovered that old deviantArt account and it was eye opening to look back at all of my old work - mostly it was crap. But back then I was convinced I was good, and I don’t mean that I had any arrogance over it because I didn’t, I just had that unwavering confidence of youth. I was having fun, and therein lies the crux of it. Art is no longer fun, it’s almost painful because I place too many expectations on myself and so I just end up frustrated. Looking back at my old work, I can also see why my work was so bad then and it’s mostly because I was trying far too hard to draw a certain way with a certain style. And I feel like I’m slipping back into that frame of mind; I’m so frustrated that I’ve lost the fundamentals of how to draw, but instead of fixing that I’m getting caught up in style again and trying to make things look a certain way. I need to get back to basics. Things might be a bit haphazard in terms of style for a while, but I’ll never re-learn if I don’t.

New version on left, and original drawing from about 10 years ago on the right.