just PUG things

On the internet especially, you'll always be exposed to people can do more, who can make bigger and better things. I find there's often complicated feelings about what art means, your own relationship with your art, and your own relationship with your artist peers. The feelings are sometimes quite ugly.

Social media numbers tell me that after 8 years, I'm worse off than when I first began.

But numbers are never the whole story.

After years and years of being disconnected with my artistic side, years of drawing this little comic has changed me. I find myself looking at things with fresh eyes and new perspectives. There is a kind of peace in looking at something and trying to work out how to capture just what is so captivating about the vision in front of me in my drawings. It's the season of Makuru here, our coldest and wettest months. When I look out the bus window everything is grey, sunlight struggling to penetrate through dense, dark clouds. The artificial lights of shop signs along the highway are sparks of bright colour dotted along an otherwise dull scene. As the season transforms into Djilba before transitioning into the bright and flowering Kambarang, these lights will seemingly fade into the background despite being exactly the same as before.

It's a mundane observation. And yet it's one that I couldn't have made years ago. There is a scene early in the manga/anime Blue Period by Tsubasa Yamaguchi where the protagonist, high-school student Yatora, makes a drawing of his mother in an attempt to convince her to let him pursue studying art instead of the safer, more financially secure degrees. And it's in this process of drawing his mother that he notices the roughness of her hands from doing the dishes in hot water, the muscles in her arms from lifting groceries, all her daily acts of love and care he hadn't noticed before. (Please read/watch Blue Period.)

8 years later, I think about how I've spent that time. Has my journey been good? Has it been worthwhile?