Hello.

I had a lot of epiphanies last week.

One of them was having a different technique to “art studies.”

It dawned on me that my approach to art studies was…Not to say that it was wrong but it was ineffectual long term. I felt like my old method of doing it for the past few years, as much as it helped me in some anatomy bits, like muscles, It didn’t really improve my art as much as I’d hope to.

Now ofc I’ll still do figure studies and art warmups but the classic method of art studies I did every weekend generally didn’t prove effective and made me procrastinate more rather than produce more.

Yeah quality over quantity but the method I was fixated with for years begets more perfectionism which leads me to procrastinate because of this compulsion to having to master something before applying. An example would be having to perfect a head before I can actually make an illustration that has the head.

Aside from it encouraging more procrastination, it ends up becoming very tedious. It’s really tiring having to do the same muscular anatomy studies all over again.

So, I changed my approach to a “Study as You Go.” method which was recommended by my partner in crime. It’s doing art studies while working on a piece instead of doing art studies as a separate category of drawings and I find it more effective in terms of productivity and increasing skill.

A good example would be….

The hagie comic from the latest post (black and white one).

That was actually an idea from two months ago that I finished this Monday. (It was in the Unfinished folder, haha.)

When I opened it in its wip state from two months ago, I was cringing at how bad my anatomy was, haha.

I know it’s typical of the WIP and the finished product to be this different but this was just from two months ago and I can’t believe that the way I drew the necks were…off.

Not to say that the version from this week is perfect, I can definitely see mistakes there, haha but I learned a whole lot more while doing the “Study as you go” method rather than the classic method I’ve been using since. It didn’t feel tedious and I was actually drawing something and being productive.

It felt good.

The classic art study method is useful in some areas ofc (for practice) and I’m not going to stop doing it.It’s beneficial in a few situations but for now, I think I’ll stick to the new one. The old one led to just more perfectionism anxiety and procrastination. ^^;;

Hello.

I’ve been busy colouring the nsfw commission today so…no illustration or doodle atm.

But despite me having less output than the usual, I’m very happy that I managed to open commissions this year, for the first time. Aside from the fact that those commissions helped me financially, it also made me improve drastically in drawing and painting from what I observed. I learned so many things like rendering, doing backgrounds, detailed works, etc.

Stuff like those make me regret that I didn’t open commissions years ago. I often wonder if it was too late for me since I have this mean voice nagging in my head, “Oh, X and Y are in middle school and have opened commissions, why did it take you so very long to open, Millie? You should have done those when you were very young, now it’s too late for you.”

The whole “You’re too old for this. People wayy younger than you are doing 1000x better than you in everything so there’s no point in trying” reason plagues me a lot, lol.

Sigh. Anxiety, specifically Generalised and Social Anxiety disorder are very self-sabotaging. Aside from the fact that I had a very low self-esteem with my skills, a debilitating fear of letting down my followers with my art, I was extremely afraid of failing, too. Yeah, I opened commissions but what if nobody ever commissioned me? That would mean I embarrassed myself online with even posting it in the first place.

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