So this morning, I spent a good amount of time happily replying to any person who gave any sort of response to the Trope-tan poster, and I felt great coming up with many different ways to thank people for favs and stuff like that. It was nice.
Then I started talking to a friend who immediately started criticizing it, calling the body awkward and all. I laughed because it was kind of a crass whiplash after all the positive reception, but after a while of talking more, it got really depressing. Then, after something he said, I realized something.
He was in a critical mood because he was disappointed with himself for failing at something. That's why he was criticizing me; we both have much to learn and need to overcome our faults.
What I realized is that... I don't want that. I don't want to think of art as that thing that I have to do in order to become a person who is worth anything. That's what it had become to me, and that's why I hated doing it so much, because whenever I failed, it would mean that I'm worthless, and it was always easier to distract myself than to try and keep failing at being worth anything. That is not what I want art to be. Drawing is supposed to be a thing that I enjoy. Something that I do for myself, not to fulfill some vague obligation for a goal that I don't even know.
It's a bit of a complicated thing to think about, of course. I want to draw for myself, but also for others. I guess it would be a good explanation to compare it to studying kanji. I started studying Japanese, and I love studying kanji. It's a mental exercise, it's interesting, and the best thing is, I know exactly how to get better, and I can see my progress in numbers. The mental exercise makes me happy, and the progress makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile. The progress of drawing should be similar. I want to explore it, I want to be able to see what I can do and that I can keep doing it better and better. Of course, I also draw for other people. A single person is useless, and so is a single person's isolated art. But the progress is for me.
I guess a part of me wants to say that I don't want to receive criticism, but that's not quite right. I'm well capable of realizing when I have trouble with something even as I draw it. As long as there's anything that I can't draw without fumbling about, constantly erasing and trying anew, I cannot claim to be able to draw it well. And as it stands, that is a lot of things. But of course, there's many things I will still miss. God knows I can take forever to notice when an eye doesn't quite match up with the other, for instance.
It's not like I want mindless praise. In fact, that kind of thing touches me quite little. If someone says a picture is "cool" or even just "nice" or perhaps even "good", that's nice, but it doesn't tell me anything. I guess what I really want out of feedback is to know just what the person's reaction to it was. Did it make you smile, do you find it cute, does it strike you as very melancholic, whatever impression you may get.
I guess the kind of criticism I don't want to get is the kind that just says, in some way, "this could be better", because that says nothing I don't know already and only serves to remind me of the harsh side of reality. If there's something that stands out to you as wrong, I'd like to at least know in detail exactly what it is, and perhaps if it completely ruined the rest of it for you. Just like I want from positive feedback to learn exactly what I did right to get such a positive response, and what kind of a response it is.
This post ended up rather disorganized. I guess the bottom line is: I'm unable to become happy if art is, to me, a thing that I must live for, rather than a thing that makes life worth living. I share art because I want to move people in some way, make them smile or make them see things I see, and the progress of getting better and improving flaws is something that I want to do for myself, at my own pace.