Is anyone still there? I'm back Man, this new writer system is cancer, wtf did they do to it?! Anyhow I'm drawing again now, I haven't been for a while (I mean I had a bit of a phase in 2019, practiced maybe once or twice in 2020, practically nothing since the start of 2021) I don't know if I'll be uploading anything but I'm sorta just picking up where I left off anyways, just more practice. But perhaps with a bit more direction now.

I believe I finally found the right mindset to progress my drawing and painting skills, and I felt the need to write it out somewhere. I used to write journals like this all the time but then I stopped, I don't know if I'm gonna be firing up that engine again but at least I'm not planning to become an active member in the DA community, I never felt like I got anything out of going to the forums here and idk, I don't actually like this website in the first place

But this journal system is a convenient place to just dump my thoughts where it won't bother anybody :D

So here goes, what I think is most important for an artist that's learning.

Enjoyment. This is really what I finally found, or rather, it's not that I never enjoyed drawing, it's just that I've stopped enjoying almost everything else I do with my time as much as I used to and now drawing is what I find the most enjoyable all of a sudden

But yeah, ultimately, if drawing isn't fun for you, you're not gonna want to do it, or maybe you'll want to do it but never feel like doing it, you'll always be demotivated and maybe even demoralized on top of all that. But if you enjoy it, your motivation and morale doesn't matter anymore, since you're doing it for fun first and foremost

I believe this is the most critical #1 thing for an artist's mindset, it really doesn't matter if you're a beginner or a professional. Art block? It's a thing that happens when you're not enjoying this enough. Lazy? No you're not lazy, you're just enjoying something else more instead.

Not enough practice? If you enjoy it, you're gonna get enough practice, because if you enjoy it you're gonna want to do it every day instead of struggle to get yourself to do it every day. So many of the biggest problems with drawing can be solved if you just enjoy doing it. And there are some pretty important things you can do to make it easier to enjoy.

• Stop pressuring yourself - This has been perhaps the biggest problem for me, I was pressuring myself to do better, to be better, I didn't want to be a shitty bad artist, I didn't enjoy being a shitty bad artist, the idea was that maybe I'd enjoy being a good artist. But this is just the wrong mindset, even the best artists tend to think that they're not good enough, they're constantly striving to improve and never satisfied with themselves. There's no reason to think I would at any point be any different than that. There is also the feeling of being in a rush, you want to get good and you want to get good fast, but developing as an artist takes time, it's not gonna happen fast and if you're in this sort of stressful mindset, every step of the way you're just gonna be a nervous wreck, the key here is not caring. Not making plans for a skill you don't have yet. You're not setting out to be a professional artist, you're not setting out to impress somebody, you're just setting out to draw because you want to, it is a hobby, it must start as a hobby, you can maybe go professional later but it is too soon to start worrying about that when you can't even draw a proper box yet. You need to let go of that pressure, anticipate the failure, expect the failure, embrace the failure, push through it slowly, gradually, to eventually succeed. Don't be in a rush.

• Don't let external factors create pressure -This has never been a particularly big issue for me, but I see it in a lot of other artists. Don't let external factors create pressure on you. It all really loops back to the former point, why are you drawing? Are you drawing just to impress others? Are you drawing for praise? Are you drawing for validation? Do you actually think you can become a good artist with such a mindset? Are you gonna let some asshole saying he doesn't like your art get you down and make you quit? Is that all you're made of? Thing is, if you want validation, go show your art to your family and friends whom you know will unconditionally shower you with praise to feel good about yourself, but don't post it on the internet, the internet has all kinds of people, some of them will just praise you out of their ass but some of them are gonna be honest and tell you just how bad you suck, they'll really let you hear it. If that's something that gets you down, then you absolutely shouldn't be posting your art on the internet, or idk, you can do it but disable comments. Sure, that way you won't get your vaunted praise and validation, but at least you won't get anyone trying to force you to look at your mistakes either. What you need, if you're only drawing for praise and validation, is an echo chamber of praise and validation, you don't need to be a good artist, you just need to be surrouneded by people willing to tell you white lies whenever prompted. Create yourself such an echo chamber instead of expecting the entire world to be an echo chamber of praise for you. Or better yet, abandon this mindset entirely and just draw for fun instead because seeking praise and validation for every little thing that you do is a toxic mindset (toxic to yourself that is, and nobody else, it'll hold you back in life a lot)

• Be patient! (+Fundamentals!) -The popular phrase 'Rome wasn't built in a day' truly applies when talking about artistic skills, nobody is born a master painter, nobody is born to be a master painter, only hard work will get you where you want to go, and by hard work I mean it's gonna take time. Drawing is a very complicated skill, it's not just one skill, it's a collection of very many skills that combines into what we know as drawing or painting in the end. It all starts with perspective though, never forget that, the entire fundamentals of drawing is just perspective, making things appear 3D on a 2D surface is the essence of drawing. And lighting, creating a believable representation of light within said 3D illusion on said 2D surface, because that's what our eyes see, light, light is everything we see, if you dive down into how human vision works that's it in a nutshell. So it's just these 2 things. Perspective creates the illusion of 3D on a 2D surface Lighting brings said illusion to life, makes people believe it. Master these 2 things and bam, you're a master artist now. Everything else like anatomy or whatever is just icing on the cake. This is not complicated, it's simple... But it is very very very very very very very ridiculously outragously hard and takes astupid amount of time. You gotta give yourself that time (which loops back to my first point of not pressuring yourself, you gotta see it as a hobby, as a passtime, if you look at it too seriously you won't be giving yourself enough time and it's all gonna just suck for you).

• No guesswork!!! -This is so critical, and even if one of my favorite things to say is "if you practice drawing badly for 10,000 hours, the only thing you'll master is drawing badly" I have essentially been ignoring my own advice I know the dream is to be able to just sit down to a blank paper with nothing but a pen and draw out magical things with nothing but the power of our imagination. And maybe this is an achievable dream... But it's still a dream when you're a beginner artist ok? You gotta learn to do it right first. Now you could guess your way to doing it right if you're really lucky... Or you could get reference which FORCES you to get it right. So you learn a bit of perspective, you look at some tutorials, you learn how to breakdown elements from references, now u gotta actually do it, no imagination. Imagination comes later, right now you're learning, and if you're learning you have to learn how to do it right first before you can start cheating and drawing from pure imagination. This obviously means you can't be guessing, because again, like I said at the start, you practice for 10,000 hours based on the wrong guesswork, you become a real master of doing the wrong thing :D And I don't know about you, but I don't want that as someone who's learning to draw, I'd rather eat my metaphorical vegetables and just always use reference until I at least become good enough not to actually 'require' it. (You'll probably never be good enough not to need it, but you can probably become good enough to be able to live without it and that's the goal, but to get there, you first gotta do it with the reference) If you're like me, and you don't enjoy failing, then at least if you're working from references you can more easily see HOW exactly you're failing and work to fix that issue. You'll always be able to pinpoint at least one thing you did wrong and go "ok, time for round 2, but this time I won't be making that mistake again."

• Have a goal, but keep it simple, and divide it down into a few parts Last point here I feel like making is the importance of a goal, if you're a beginner artist you probably need a goal. Staring at an empty piece of paper without knowing what you want to eventually put on it is not gonna do you much good. A simple goal would be like "Learn Perspective" and you could break it down into "Get good at drawing boxes" and "get good at drawing cylinders" and "learn to draw ovals in perspective" and "learn to draw boxes in several different rotations within a consistent perspective". As an example for something that might be good for a beginner, my current goal is to learn to draw faces and bodies and to render them, these are all big, difficult goals btw, it sounds so simple but it's deviously hard, and I only have these as my goals because I am already far along in learning these things, I already have all the knowledge required I just need to put it together and practice quite a lot to get it down (also I haven't rendered in like half a decade or something, geez). And I have some caveats, for instance for rendering, I only intend to learn to do it in greyscale for now (no color theory yet, that comes later) as for bodies and faces, I only intend to get decent at drawing simplified versions of these things, not photorealistic ones. You know maybe not anime style kind of extreme levels of simplified but somewhere in the general territory of say manga. I'm not gonna be some kind of master, but I'll be able to draw ok looking pictures, that's the goal here. But I mean there are more caveats, for instance I'm not planning to learn facial expressions yet, or any sort of extreme poses or poses with a lot of foreshortening, that stuff's all gonna come but I'm trying to keep it real simple for now, just simple poses in front, side, rear and 3/4 perspective, same applies for the heads, hair is something I intend to focus on last. It's important to keep your goals realistic, don't go expecting too much of yourself, I know I'm most of the way towards where I'm currently aiming for already, all I gotta do is put the pieces together and get a bit (a lot?) of practice doing it. But using my tips from earlier, not pressuring myself, being patient, no guesswork, and most important of all, enjoying it? I'm fairly confident that I'm gonna get there. I don't know if it'll take a week, a month or a year, but that doesn't matter to me because I currently see myself as a hobbyist with no plans for going professional (even if I were to go professional I'd probably just be doing so as a professional hobbyist if that makes sense). So I can take all the time in the world. When I get tired of practicing bodies I switch to faces, when I'm tired of faces I switch to bodies, when I'm tired of both I can go to rendering, etc. It's a nice little triangle for me. Once I'm satisfied with all three things i intend to move on to environments; I'm fairly confident I can figure out urban environments so that's probably where I'll start, but natural environments have always thrown me for a huge loop, so that's gonna be fun when I get there. There's a reason I'm not starting there though, and that reason is simple, if I establish a skill level I'm at least somewhat satisfied with in figure drawing, I will always have that as a fallback, I will have a comfort zone I can fall back to whenever I feel like the going is getting too hard on what I'm currently practicing. And that's important. One of my biggest problems is that I never had a comfort zone, my bar for creating a comfort zone was just too high, it still is, but I can tell I just need that one last push to be able to make it there. Once a comfort zone has been established, you now have a base upon which you can build. Contrary to common advice, you don't actually have to leave your comfort zone, you just have to improve upon what's already in your comfort zone bit by bit :D For most artists drawing in your comfort zone is one of the most enjoyable things they do, and if you already have a comfort zone where you can enjoy yourself, where it's easy for you to just sit down and draw for fun every day, half the battle is already won.

And that's about it for my thoughts for now. There's really not that much new in here I think, there are a lot of thoughts in here I've already had before, but I feel like now that I have such a good mindset it's nice to write down where it's all coming from you know? Ah well, I'm satisfied for now, wonder if anyone's even gonna be reading this after all this time I've been gone

I guess I have a bit more to say off the topic of art, a bit of a rant about life maybe, I finally had enough with microsoft's bullshit. I uninstalled windows and I'm not going back. No matter what. I had enough of google's bullshit. I stopped using it and I'm not gonna use it again, sure I still browse youtube sometimes, but when I do it, I do it through Freetube. I still use chrome, but not google-chrome, but ungoogled-chromium, I hardened my browser to tracking, disabled cookies (only cookies from sites I explicitly allow are allowed, this means no cookies from google, incidentally) I wanna stop using android too, that's next on my list, it's a bit harder to get rid of though, but I have ways. I just don't use my phone that much anyways. so it's lower priority. I have virtually no social media presence, whole thing seems like cancer to me anyways, and with how people are getting censored left and right and sometimes even losing their job or having equally serious shit happen just because of something they posted on the internet, that is not something I'm willing to touch with a 10 foot pole either. I'd like to be rid of discord too for similar reasons (this thing's spyware really, just like skype) but there's a shortage of alternatives (crossign my fingers for teamspeak 5 tho) Giving up so much convenience for peace of mind hasn't been a walk in the park I tell you... I replaced Windows with Linux about a week ago maybe, and it still feels like I'm constantly putting out fires. Whether that be misconfiguration or just some program not working as hoped, (have been planning to get photoshop working on it, it's been unpredictably harder than expected for one example, but it's a pretty low priority since I have paintstorm in the meantime anyways)

If I wasn't already a veteran linux user I wouldn't have been able to configure my sound to satisfactory results, if I had installed linux just a couple months earlier, I also wouldn't have been able to (yeah, it's fucking madness right? I had to replace pulseaudio (the default sound server in most linux distros) with a new alpha release alternative called pipewire, but I also had to configure pipewire to get it to fix some issues I had with both pipewire and pulseaudio and I had to do this entirely through trial and error, there was no guide, it was an unpaved road man!) sure, the end result is that my audio is better than it's ever been...

I've still got some minor tweaking left to do for the equalizer but it's better than it was on windows already. (One good thing about sound on linux I suppose is that it's easy to install a system-wide equalizer, whereas on windows you either have an option for a system wide equalizer from your soundcard manufacturer, or you don't have the option and are screwed)

On that note, discovered some pretty awesome music recently

There's an option to run Windows in a virtual machine so that I can run certain things I just can't get working under linux (like photoshop is potentially looking to be), but it's not for the faint of heart, I mean, I'm an experienced linux user, and been a superuser type of computer user since I was a teenager, but even I am scratching my head over how to get KVMs working right and constantly running into weird issues that make no sense. (This is not something most people can count on, I know I'm gonna work it out in time, but that's just because I'm a stubborn motherfucker and have already decided that I'm not going back to windows anyways, even if I can't get this working, I'd rather just live without things I can't manage to make run on linux in that case)

I could say a lot of positive things too, I'm focusing a lot on the bad part of my experiences and kinda giving Linux a bit of a bad name maybe :'D But the truth is for most people, they're not as unlucky with this as me, the majority of people who install linux have it 'just work', at least if it's Manjaro linux (which I'm also using).

For me it's been more of a 'everything that can go wrong, will go wrong' experience, but luckily I'm equipped to deal with that, also unlike most people.

Let's maybe look at some of the bright sides to lighten the mood yeah?

Tablet drivers? They're better than anything you'll ever find on windows or macos (sure, u gotta confirm if ur tablet has working drivers for windows at all in the first place (if it's wacom it probably does btw)) but there's no suddenly breaking drivers, there is no reinstalling the driver if you switch to another tablet, or uninstalling one driver and installing another to switch to a tablet from another brand, hell if u want u can have all the tablets plugged in all the time it just works. It depends a bit on your DE whether you will have a decent GUI to configure the tablet driver or not (I'm pretty sure KDE has the best one, it's possibly the only one that has the lock proportions option)

But it works, and u only have to configure it once after all, unlike the windows drivers which I kept having problems with (no matter what tablet brand I had I kept having problems with the windows drivers lol)

The notification daemon in KDE which I am using is a lot better than on windows, I never miss notifications anymore unless I'm AFK.

Virtual desktops are of course a lot better implemented, I can keybind each desktop and use the mouse to click on whichever desktop I wanna go to directly rather than going through windows's retarded task manager to switch desktops. (I did have an autohotkey script to bind specific desktops to keybinds though, but it was complicated and didn't always work)

It's a lot more resource efficient, back when I was using XFCE I only used like 700mb of RAM for running the OS, it was unbelievably efficient, the one I'm using now, KDE uses a bit more, it's at 1.5GB of RAM use or so at boot. (This is all nothing compared to the 4GB of RAM windows 10 eats up, which is absurd compared to the 700-800mb or so Windows 7 used, wtf does Windows 10 even offer worth 2-3GB of RAM use over Windows 7? Sure didn't offer anything to me except privacy abuse...)

And yeah I mean there are a lot of plus sides to this whole thing :)

For one, it looks great

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/799390918205374485/879380712480985088/unknown.png

But the downsides are undeniably there too. The good thing though is that on Linux I can actually fix these issues. On windows I could not.

For instance, there's something wrong with my soundcard, it uses some unconventional setup, so whenever I plug in my headphones they don't work. On windows I would just keep getting sound from speakers and nothing from my headphones, if I wanted to get sound, I had to restart my computer with my headphones already plugged in on boot

On Linux it was a bit different, I'd get no sound from the speakers, but the sound from the headphones was so low it was almost inaudible, but it was easy to fix (I just had to tweak a little setting everytime after I plugged them in) then I found out there was a setting I could set for pulseaudio that entirely solved the issue, of course I'm not using pulseaudio anymore but at least my alternative is an easy workaround, I just open a console and type 'fixheadphones' and it all works. Certainly easier and quicker than rebooting.

And that's just one example of problems I'd have on windows I couldn't solve on windows but can easily solve on linux. Windows just doesn't give you the option to tinker like Linux does. But man, this all has not been easy. And I'm only like halfway through it. Luckily I only have to configure it all once and then it's pretty much just set until I get a new PC, but god damn.

Isn't it fucked up that if a person wants even the tiniest bit of privacy on their own home PC they have to go through this much effort?

What made me decide to just never use windows again? This has been a long time coming, ever since Windows 8 was released I knew such a day would come where I just would not want to use Windows anymore, I could see microsoft going into a direction I didn't like and I didn't want to be helpless when they kept going in that direction and I couldn't use anything but windows so I would be stuck with them anyways...

Well, my fears were mostly unfounded, they backtracked on what I was fearing at the time (their horrid UI changes) but what they pushed instead was just so much worse than any UI change. With Windows 10, Windows became a bulk collection service for the NSA; Windows 10 is free? That's because we're the fucking product, and the buyer is governments around the world. This is beyond disgusting, and I just won't stand for it.

I'm not some crazy boomer, I was born in the 90s for gods sake (and this isn't some conspiracy theory either this has been all but confirmed by Microsoft, just like it's been all but confirmed by Google, Facebook and now Apple too for their products) and even I can see how crazy this is, why the fuck are people allowing this to happen? Just sitting there and taking it like good little whores?

I do not understand it. But at least I decided it was time to do about it.

You know, i did something, I installed windows 7, did you know you can get windows 7 updated? They're still updating it, it's just for corporations but, I was able to get my hands on it.

You know what I felt? It felt like I was home. Like I'd been spending all this time in some crazy nuthouse called Windows 10 where I had to watch my back 24/7 cuz everyone and everything in it was out to get me but then I went to Windows 7 and even if it was just in a VM, I felt it, I was home. It wasn't out to get me (sure there are backdoors in it, but the thing is those can only be used for targetted spying, not 'bulk collection' which is the term governments use in-house for mass surveillance, I know I'm safe for it unless a government is out to get me, and if a government is actually out to get me, I'm not safe anywhere anyways so that makes the entire thing a bit of a moot point.)

It was just... Such a relief, sure I'd used linux in-between, but linux never truly felt like home, it's been more like a summer house or a vacation home or something. You know, I'd stay there maybe a year on a year off or something, but there was always just something that didn't sit quite right.

But then I'm back on windows 7, and everything is good again, it wasn't nostalgia, it was relief that I felt.

Now if Windows 10 is having such a strong mental effect on me, that I feel constantly pressured when I'm using it, and that I'm this relieved when I'm using something else (I mean this applies to Linux too actually, just less strongly than on Windows 7 cuz on linux I always seem to have some issue like aforementioned ones on the backburner I need/want to work out)

I think it's best for me never to use that atrocity again, or god forbid Windows 11, it's even uglier sibling... Windows 11 is an OS I will never install, not anywhere. I mean come on... TPM 2.0 is a requirement to install Windows 11, do you know what TPM is? It's a freaking spying chip for the NSA (also not a conspiracy theory, it's a known fact, there is a reason the TPM modules are ILLEGAL in China and Russia... There are also exactly 0 reasons for an OS to require it, it practically doesn't do anything except phone home to the US Government, that's literally it's only purpose.)

At worst I'll install Windows 10 in a virtual machine. That's the closest I'll get to using Windows again. Even then though, I will exhaust every other option before using such a VM (Like I'm currently doing with Photoshop).

I intend to have such a VM on hand, and I'm admittedly still working on setting it up (I mean I have it working, just not working well enough yet) but it's gonna be a last resort and I expect not to use it much I literally have exactly one thing I need it for right now, which is photoshop, but like I said it's not even that high a priority, because I already have a painting software installed that I can use instead and is more than good enough for my current purposes :D

Last time around the reason I switched to windows was because I wanted to use photoshop (guess how that worked out? I never used it it was early in 2021, remember how much I've drawn in 2021) but now I know I might be able to get it working on Wine (not counting on it but I know it's possible and I'm gonna figure out how) and I know if I don't figure it out, I can make it work on a VM, it's hard, it's not for a casual user to do either of those things, but luckily I'm not a casual user I know what I want, I know it's possible, I will have it my way, it will be my PC and not Microsoft's PC, reeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

And I suppose a rant on life in 2021 wouldn't be complete with complaints about covid. I hate covid, the vaccines are sus af. I think it's funny how they call people who don't want to take the covid vacciens anti-vaxxers, these are not anti-vaxxers, I'm not an anti-vaxxer, I think vaccines are an amazing awesome thing, but the covid vaccines are the most suspcious vaccines in the history of medicine and I do not trust them I respect the choices of people who do think they can trust them, but if I would rather take my chances with covid, that's my business and nobody elses.

I don't trust the existing vaccines (not to stop me from getting covid, and not to not kill me by it's own merits a few months or years down the line), and I'm fairly sure that the virus was created in a lab, the entire pandemic was planned (plandemic, hah!) to what end is a bit above my understanding (population control seems to be a common theory among conspiracy theorists I suppose).

Overall, I think the situation sucks ass, and I wish for nothing more than for it to be over. But even if you're vaccinated, guess what, it's not over anyways. There's always another strain or something and suddenly you have all the restrictions you had before the vaccines again (so why bother? I understand if you're old, then you have a much bigger reason than me to be mortally afraid of the virus, but I'm not old, I know I'd probably survive the virus anyways, fucked lungs is a risk I'm just more willing to take than being injected with a shady vaccine).

I'm probably one of the least affected individuals though, sure, I can't travel all the time anymore which sucks, but before I was travelling I was already living basically like I was in quarantine, hardly ever going outside so this is nothing new to me really, but the extroverts are losing their freaking minds haha.

But for me, I really wish I could go travel again. And you know what, technically I could. But I think that with this pandemic, travelling is not a good idea, besides the fact that your flights are gonna get constantly cancelled, air travel is like the likeliest way to get infected in the first place. It's strange to me how tourism has ramped up again here in iceland already (actually it's starting to seem like some kind of conspiracy, we hvae like 10 times or something almost entirely stamped out the virus, less than 10 people infected in the entire country, then they just randomly say "ok, lets re-open airtravel" or "ok, no more restrictions on people entering the country, no need for testing and quarantine upon entry" and all of a sudden we get a new wave, this is another reason why I'm pretty sure this is a 'plandemic' it is pretty clear the authorities in my country at least are actually working to maintain the presence of the virus in the country. They don't wanna solve it. And people don't seem to actually care about that. This is not incompetence, this is deliberate sabotage clear as day, once is a coincidence, twice is a pattern, thrice is an obvious conspiracy, and it's happened more often than that...

Ok I got that out of my system, that was nice.

Bye!