@lapis oh good because The Vyvanse Is Kicking In

so the art pendulum is an idea of like

when you're making a piece of art, it starts swinging. on one side of the pendulum is "ahahaha yes!! fuck yes!!! i love this!!!!! i am the cleverest and best possible person!!!!!!!!!!", and on the other side of the pendulum is "oh god it sucks. everything sucks. i am a fool and a knave. i am god's perfect art idiot."

so usually for me it's like.

the sketch? oh i love the sketch. so vibrant. so full of movement. so perfect

inked? ah fuck i ruined it! where did the movement go! fuck!

colors? wait wait hold on this is good actually. this is good.

shadows? never mind i have ruined it forever and should be banned from every art supply and art program

highlights? NEVER MIND THE NEVER MIND, I AM A GODDESS OF ART WALKING AMONGST MORTALS

so it's back and forth and back and forth. sometimes the steps are different! sometimes the final pendulum swing is a background that needs doing. sometimes it's cleaning up bits and bobs. sometimes it's something entirely different. but you get the idea. it's the process. you go through all these stages of the thing being incomplete and your imagination filling in the rest. but this means transition points where it doesn't look right because you're in the middle of the process.

and sometimes, honestly, it can be time spent away from a piece that swings the pendulum. when you've spent so much time with an artwork it becomes hard to see anything but the faults. after all you've just been staring at the faults trying to fix them. so that's where the pendulum has swung. then you put it down... get other things in your head... give it time... and the pendulum often ends up swinging the other way. the sting of defeat isn't so close, you haven't been focusing on the ways it was a failure, etc, etc - in fact, you probably have done more art where you were using what you've learned to do things better and develop those skills. it's a lot easier to be kind to a stepping stone that got you further on your journey than it is a seeming dead-end.

so i'm not saying you have to love it. but you don't have to hate it either. i think the main miniatures/set artist for dimension 20 has talked about how they have a sign up in their workshop that reads something like "if it sucks, keep going", and that really is the art pendulum in a nutshell lol! (it helps that the miniature painting steps very much are full of the IT LOOKS LIKE SHIT NOW BUT KEEP GOING examples lmao, doing shit like underpainting and dry brushing shadows and whatnot.) and even though i very much don't think it sucks, i'm not going to tell you that you're never supposed to be disappointed or frustrated with your art. it's okay to fuckin just... whiff one. you're allowed to beef it. in fact, you're so allowed to beef it that beefing it is an integral part of the process of the art pendulum lmao.

the important thing is keeping the pendulum going, getting a little better with every swing. (and part of that getting better can absolutely be stepping away and giving yourself a break, too.)

but really it's just good for the ol' anxiety to have this in my head. anxiety can start getting nervous about how it's terrible and sucks and we're bad at art forever... but you know what the game is, and anxiety doesn't. you haven't ruined it forever. you're just riding the art pendulum. it goes back and forth. it's not the end. you can choose to get off the ride if you like where things are at and don't want to work on it any more, but you can let that be the end point, not driven by panic. you get to choose to end the ride in joy of finishing (even if it's just the joy of going "oh boy i think i'm done with this, i get to put it down now, hooray"), instead of the anxiety of avoiding failure. those are two very different mindsets despite essentially describing the same thing. ...and i realize that "you can stop whenever" is a thing much more applicable to like, drawing, where you really can just be like "i completed this step and i am good now, time to walk away", versus crochet, but hey. there's no law that says you gotta finish every project to the bitter end. you can get as finished as you want with it.

you don't need to give up. you just keep going, knowing that it'll swing back up to "this rules, actually". even if it """"only""""" rules by being "a thing i learned from"!!!!! or """"""""""ONLY""""""""" WITH FIVE MILLION SCAREQUOTES OF CONTEMPT FOR THE IDEA THAT THIS GETS DEVALUED AT ALL being a thing that you enjoyed taking the time to do as part of your hobby where you do a thing!!!

that's the art pendulum babeyyyyyyyyyyy