⚱ Light fare ⚱

31 October 2024, 23:10 EST

Good evening, and happy Halloween!

I really enjoy making pixel art - especially on small canvases, in which I have to pack a lot of detail (or find a way of showing what I want to show succinctly). I like reading short stories and novellas, too, I think for a similar reason - the small space forces an author to be creative when shooting Chekhov's gun. I have several incomplete pixel projects I've hardly shown anyone, and I work on them little by little as I feel like it.

One of the things I've been trying to figure out is workflow. I'm easily bored, anxious, frustrated, and discouraged. I've tried many ways to reduce these traits, and few have worked. I'm not sure it's possible. Thinking about this makes me feel like an inherently bad worker and weak person. So I'm trying to find ways to understand and accommodate my ways of working to transform them into something that is healthier for me, and perhaps slightly marketable. (Yuck. I feel repulsed by the idea of marketing myself. If I sell myself as a product, I find that people do not see me as a human.)

Being bored can be pretty easily dealt with by being given freedom. I naturally gravitate toward projects that involve my interests and curiosity. When I'm forced to do something pointless, menial, dishonest, or trite, and I'm not allowed to express my own interests, I drop projects.

My anxiety comes from that freedom, though; I also drop projects because I wonder if they're poorly-researched, too idiosyncratic, or otherwise ill-advised. I enjoy fair criticism (quite a lot, actually) but if I am caught making a basic, avoidable mistake, it does feel painful. So paradoxically, I also require structure, to keep me on-theme and on-schedule, and to supply the rigor that reduces my anxiety about missing something important.

Usually, it's technology causing my frustration. I like physical media the best - I don't need much besides pen and paper - and I do resent the encroaching digital age that makes "content curation" necessary. In digital form, a physical work can't really speak for itself; I used to edit the hell out of pictures to make them portfolio-worthy (on this site, though, I just toss my phone pictures in the gallery; it's freeing to be so careless). I do like making entire works digitally, but there's something that feels wrong about the way the movements of my hand are interpreted on the screen. All the calculations that happen inside a drawing software make my lines look dead and same-y. And generally, computer programs never seem to know what I want. So that's why, when I work digitally, I stick to pixel art - it's well-suited for digital expression (which is no surprise, because it didn't strictly exist before computer hardware made it necessary).

Discouragement can happen for any of those reasons, or others. But it's the most debilitating, because it destroys my "hands". What I'm making stops feeling like my own work, and I lose all motivation to keep going. I can push through boredom, anxiety, and frustration as long as I have the will to keep making. But discouragement comes, usually amplified by poor mental state and physical stress, and it makes its home in my mind and does not leave.

There are fireworks outside and I have lost my train of thought. I don't feel empathetic toward willfully noisy people.

It seems I am especially vulnerable to losing my will, for art and in general. Changes in my life, which would be more easily managed by someone else, cause massive mental and physical collapses in me. Learning about sensory sensitivity and pain, suicidality, social confusion and trauma, and artistic individuality has helped me understand discouragement, but not "solve" it. But it has also changed my self-concept - from "someone who is weak", to "someone who has weaknesses". That's a big difference. The latter is someone I can forgive.

Thank you for reading. ❀

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