I haven't been able to get myself to draw anything since Thanksgiving, and I have obligations -- commissions and a Patreon -- that I'm neglecting because when i think about drawing I feel nothing but overwhelming despair and anxiety and I don't know, just like...I can't make myself do it even when I want to do it. When I know I NEED to. I feel like I'm scamming ppl, i'm scamming everyone and I need to just quit. This is all because of my depression I know but this KEEPS HAPPENING....this isn't the first time I've just not been able to do my work for weeks at a time, or has been months at a time before, because depression rears its head and I just...stop functioning. Should I stop offering commissions? I don't have a job right now and that was the only thing paying the bills and I was so proud of selling art, that people wanted to pay me for art and I could do this thing and they'd be so happy with the results and getting it and feeling like an actual real Artist, but if I'm going to have these breakdowns every so often, I feel like I should just give up trying to get paid for making art/or try to do art as a viable career. Obviously I don't have what it takes. it makes me just want to stop drawing forever. This wasn't what i was supposed to be doing with my life, apparently. I don't even know what to do, every motivation thing i've tried, to make myself do it hasn't worked. it's like I can't make myself care. Should I stop and throw in the towel?
maybe you should tell your commissioners and patrons about the difficulties you are having lately and see how they respond.
Shit, man, artblock sucks and depression fucking hurts. I'm nowhere near your level of competence, but I had like four years where I only drew maybe three or four pieces a year and two of them were local commissions and I had to just push through even though I hated everything I produced. I would definitely get in touch with your commissioners and let them know that you're having trouble producing. Forcing those commissions left me creatively dead for months. I'm just spraffing out loud here, but can you take a break, or change the medium you work in in order to try to get some of that creative energy going again? Even if it's something completely against your particular style, like making a whole bunch of art components and just putting them together in different ways? I keep thinking of something like that for kinda-personalised cards but as I say, competence levels etc. Art for a living isn't ever going to be a steady flow unless you're an employed artist or Liefeld-type just churning it out, and it doesn't hurt to have easily produced backup sources of income. An artist friend of mine has been creating for nearly fifty years and he still gets spells where he'll only work in photography, or takes a couple of years to build big-ass, commercially unviable rock sculptures out of chicken wire and plaster because that's what motivates him at that moment. If you do need to step back then maybe think of it as a sabbatical, not giving up. Regardless, I hope you get your creative flow back soon.
Dude, you're making a buuunch of logical leaps in this thread. You've gone from "I'm struggling with drawing" to "therefore I'm a scammer" to "therefore I should just quit art forever bye" in .5 seconds or less, and none of those things is actually logically connected to the other. As a fellow depressed artist who knows this shit is real, it's hard, and there's no "how to get motivated to draw" article on the internet that fixes it (and, in fact, most of them just make it worse), let me just tell you that it's OK to take a break, that it's really self-defeating and unnecessarily cruel to think of it as "throwing the towel" or as being a symptom of you being unfit to make art. I took a look at your art, and it's amazing, and you're an artist. And when someone is an artist, even a depressed artist, even an artist who can't make art right now for any reason, that's a part of them that's always with them, and even if you take a sabbatical (which is OK) I'll wager that sooner or later you'll find that not making art actually takes more effort to you than making it. Also, while you may not be able to do certain art things at given times, you can do others that still help develop your artistic skills and bring you a sense of accomplishment. You can develop a sense of color and composition from doing tiny abstract paintings with cheap children's materials, for example; you can get better hand-eye coordination from taking up knitting or crochet or airplane model construction; you can develop a sense for poses, movement and atmosphere from watching some cool movies or cartoons; you can rework your imagination (in the literal sense of "ability to conjure up images in your head) by reading a nice book or fanfic; you can study composition by taking a walk around your neighborhood or, more romantically, going somewhere else. You can develop your artistic skills and level up even during periods when you can't make the art you usually do, can't make the art you want to do, or even can't make any art at all. Have you ever heard of the book The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron? It's a book based on workshops the author used to offer about clearing artist's block and leading a "more creative life", and while it can be annoyingly ~spiritual~ at times (if you're not into that), I like it a lot because it's made with the goal of clearing away at artist's block without getting into annoying "YOU JUST GOTTA DRAW, EVEN WHEN YOU DON'T FEEL LIKE IT!!" discourse, has a very simple week-by-week structure, like a course, with exercises to do every week, none of which are specifically about making a piece of art. Often they're very playful and achievable things, like "go outside and find a pretty rock, a pretty leaf, or any other remarkable object", and they're surprisingly good for clearing one's mind and rediscovering the sense of possibility, fun and wonder that got one into art in the first place.
