The art community debilitates young artists.
Raise your hand if you started your art journey anywhere from 2013-2018
I started around 2015, and I don't think enough people talk about just how fucking TOXIC the art community was back then. Back then, art shaming and bullying, ESPECIALLY towards young/beginner artists was RAMPANT
You all remember Solar Sands and DeviantArtCringe
I grew up on that content
I grew up watching other artists I thought were better than me shit on other artists for simply being a beginner. There was a lot of anti-tracing rhetoric especially- and I'm not talking about blatant art theft -I'm talking about practice tracing from photos, blank bases, stuff like that to learn the anatomy. Basically, back in those days, the idea was if you did not create your work 100% yourself from a blank canvas, it was stealing. Concepts like pose theft, color palette theft, hell, even IDEA theft were fucking everywhere.
There was this huge idea that not only did you have to be good, you had to rely on absolutely no help for your art to count as "yours" and "valid" in the art community.
Lately I've been dealing with a lot of creative burn out and imposter syndrome. I find myself dreading sitting down at my tablet when I used to love it. I feel this sort of mental barrier between me and doing what I love and I wasn't able to really pinpoint WHY I suddenly hated something I used to be so passionate about, until very recently.
I use a lot of FTU bases and stock images to trace over the anatomy of the poses so I can build off of it. It's because I'm not good at visually conceptualizing a pose and recreating it 1 to 1. It's like I can see the idea in my mind, but there's this disconnect that causes my brain to jumble up the pose. My proportions get wonky. My poses are stiff and lean to one side. If I don't have something to visually anchor my drawing to, I just fall apart, and it makes the entire process frustrating, and not fun.
I see the blank canvas and its like my brain freezes, so I use an image or a base as a visual anchor, and build off of that.
I was convinced that it was stealing and that my art was all fake, and I wasn't a good artist like people think I am. I saw myself struggling, and I thought it was tracing that made me so bad at what I used to love doing. I thought that my misery in my craft was penance for being "lazy" and "stealing from other artists". I would force myself to draw things I hated because I felt like it was the only way I could be a "proper" artist. I would make myself draw boring shapes over and over, I would make myself cold turkey the canvas and if I found myself getting frustrated, I'd beat myself up because "you used to be so good, what happened?!"
And it made art miserable.
Nowadays, when I make art I dread it. I procrastinate drawing. And it kills me because I used to love it. Art used to be my escape from reality. I didn't care about being good, I just did it because it was fun. But my process started to kill that fun and it just sort of turned into a chore.
And that's because I spent my formative art years being told "unless you create everything perfectly all on your own, your art isn't valid"
Now I'm slowly unlearning all of that
because I'm still learning as an artist.
Something I've been coming to terms with was that back before the internet, way before art was more of a common hobby, beginner artists would spend years copying the work of their masters so they could create their own works. They traced, they hard referenced, they did everything that is shamed heavily in the art community even to this day. Look at the 2026 artfight rules banning ANY use of tracing, even from photography.
A lot of professional artists recommend tracing over photography as an exercise/warmup so you can get a proper feel of how the body moves in real life. And it's because the kind of tracing isn't just blatant line tracing, you're tracing over the form, not the outline. You're blocking out the shape. You're breaking the body down into simple shapes so you can learn how certain parts of the body move with each other. You're not copying the line art, you're following the natural path of the body and mapping it.
That's not theft, that's learning
There's this idea that there's no such thing as complete originality in the art world, and it's an idea that I agree with. All art is a remix of other artistic influences. You don't pick up a pencil and just create bullshit. You draw what you already know.
thinking about the art community and how fucking debilitating it can be to young artists makes me so angry
@winterleadd thought you'd might like this.
