Strong Like An Amazon

Furthermore the pervasiveness of societal pressure to hit certain milestones by a certain age, or to have your life and career all sorted out and your shit generally together by the time you hit a certain stage of adulthood, is imbuing you with understandable feelings of anxiety and frustration about running out of time and whether or not you're making the best of the time you've got. It's ok to take a breath and remind yourself that none of this stuff is set in stone, and it's fine to take as long as you need and you're never too old to make a significant change or reach a long-sought-after goal in life. (Also sometimes the problem is due to external factors and not that you, personally, aren't good enough at being an adult.)

More advanced artists—please, please, PLEASE stop referring to a cleaned up, colored, and very polished piece of your work as a “sketch” or a “doodle.”

I’ll use my own garbage work as an example.

These are sketches:

Note that nothing is finished. Bits are overlapping other bits. The proportions aren’t right. That’s all fine and great because these are sketches. (This is me trying to figure out how I want to draw my Inquisitor Lavellan in my style.)

This is a finished piece:

Don’t let the lack of a background throw you off. This piece has cleaned up line work, finished tone work, and nothing unrelated is obscuring the subject matter. (This is from my set of Inktober pieces where I did 30 baseball players instead of the set prompts.)

I get that to you, an artist who has been doing this a while, it seems the thing you drew/painted isn’t your best work. Or it wasn’t something you put much thought into. So you consider it a non-piece. Just something you kinda threw together. This is because you’ve had a lot of time and experience and have maybe forgotten what it was like when you were first starting out.

But when a new/less experienced artist sees you calling a cleaned up, often even fully colored, piece a “doodle” or “just a sketch” it can be a blow to their confidence. After all their sketches aren’t that good, maybe even their finished pieces aren’t as good as what you are insisting is a “sketch.” But sketches aren’t supposed to be good! They aren’t supposed to be polished! They’re the messing around step BEFORE you start the actual piece.

I know it’s not your job to regulate other people’s reactions or emotions to your work, but in this case maybe just take a second, remember what it was like when you were a baby artist, and don’t call something that isn’t a sketch, a sketch.

"what if I've read part of it" if it's a large enough part that you would consider yourself to Have Read It in general contexts, then it counts. if it's not, then it doesn't. only you can be the judge of that, but I'm not giving you a nuance button.

any translations count, but abridged retellings don't

1. If you see this post, highly recommend taking it as an opportunity to set a timer for 15 minutes and switch over to ACTIVITY YOU ENJOY. if after those 15 minutes, you want to go back to scrolling, that's okay!

2. Huge shout out to this popping up in my notifs often, bc I do go back to activity.

Parent: I want my wife to take one of my infant daughters to the UK and I’ll take the other one and we will never see each other again.