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Anon, I get what you’re saying. However, you’re missing the point. Dedication is not measured by time, but by will and want to improve. I seems to me that you have the dedication, but may be lacking the means - primarily time and confidence. You do not need to spend every waking moment drawing to achieve a greater skill. Obviously, having the time to put towards dedication to art helps, but it is not all that make up the journey.

If you only have so much time to devote to drawing, then it is up to you to partition what time you do have to best suit your artistic development goals. If you are up for a series of suggestions, I have these points to offer that may help you. Using them word-for-word may not benefit you, but they may permit you to build a groundwork on giving yourself a stronger push towards your art goals, whatever they may be:

If you only have a half-hour (a day, I’m assuming) to sit down with a pen, pencil, or tablet, then consider setting aside one or two days, to start with, to study. Draw the room you are currently in. Draw your hand as many times as you can in that span. Or, if you are able, gather references beforehand to draw from for those 30 minutes. Alternatively, you can chop ten minutes of a 30-minute draw period to do a study, and devote the rest to general drawing instead. Don’t rush. If one study takes longer than the 30 or 10 minutes, that’s fine. You can always either try again, or pick up your study the next time an opportunity arises. In your case, working from photos may work best for you, since the subject will not move or otherwise change, allowing you to pick up where you left off. Remember to draw what you see, and not what you think you see. These are two very different things, and it is important to make the distinction between them.

In regards to (physical) illness, I can only offer anecdotal advice: if illness renders you unable to draw, assuming the illness is temporary and not chronic, a break to recuperate is not going to hurt your advancement. The next best thing you can do is read up on areas witch which you are having trouble, or watch videos on professional and basic techniques. I recommend the videos and blog posts made by Matt Kohr on his site CTRL+Paint.com, which are all-skill-level friendly and accessible. Reading and studying in this manner will not result in a sudden blast of skill, but it will make the choices and observations you make sharper, clearer, and afford a deeper understanding. Knowledge and understanding is half the battle with art, just like science or anything else.

In regards to (mental) illness, the only suggestions I can give are limited, as my experience is truncated to depression and ASD / Autism Spectrum Disorder / Asperger’s (which is not an illness but can be counted here as a roadblock all the same, giving me more than what I’d care to admit with brushes with anxiety, lack of confidence, and concentration). It bears repeating that what worked for me may not work for you, as everyone is different. When I went through a very deep and debilitating spell of depression from 2010 - 2011, I went through many, many dry points of not drawing at all. I was too bogged down with dark thoughts and a lack of energy. I was much more concerned with sleeping. What allowed me to begin setting myself back on track with regular art was a new project that allowed my mind to dwell on anything that wasn’t related to the bullshit I was dealing with at the time - something that I could get excited about (to whatever degree my personal state allowed, which as not much) just enough to motivate me to pick up a pen. I didn’t do jack for studies during that time, because the energy and confidence wasn’t there. I did still want to improve however, so what I did instead was use this new project to try out drawing new things, like a scene, or an object that I never tried to draw before. Even if the results sucked ass, it made me feel a bit better in knowing I tried. Outside of depression, I’ve struggled with Asperger’s since the beginning, and there is no end to the laundry list of problems it’s given me in regards to my art, as well as real life. I’m anxious, nervous, and have problems with focusing outside what is the locus of my attention (which right now is Digimon). It’s a nightmare, I can’t stand it, and there is very little I can do about it. Because this is something by definition I cannot fix, because it’s not like this “goes away”, I’ll do what I can route my energies into any constructive fashion. For days where I just can’t study for the life of me, I take whatever I’m into, and make it into a project with focal points related to what I want to improve in my work or where I want my work overall to go. Anatomy and monster design is always my biggest personal focus in terms of skill, so this will always be the biggest effort sink. I don’t do those skeletal and musculature studies on redesigns for nothing. I didn’t read up on the anatomy of theropod legs versus mammalian legs relation to Wargreymon’s design for nothing, either. The reading I did not only went towards my pet project, it also cleared up a considerable number of misunderstandings I had about the pelvis and the nature of locomotion and leg alignment in animals. The Digimon ASL post has encouraged me to try to do more quick, small drawings, maybe even small scenes, because backgrounds and pictoral story-telling are big weaknesses for me that I want to work on. Designing armour for Diaboromon and Wargreymon is getting me in touch with non-organic design. This is what I take up these projects for. It may be fanart, but I’m still using it as a vehicle to expand my skills. TL;DR: if I can’t get to studying, I will use my interests as a means to teach myself something new and deepen my knowledge of something I want to improve on.

Anxiety is a multi-faceted problem and is a big issue for many, many artists. In regards to myself, I get anxious all the damn time when it comes to my art - some of it comes from just being an artist, some of it comes from Asperger’s, meaning I second-guess almost everything I do in some fashion, or I berate myself for those things I’m second-guessing myself about. At least once a week I will consider deleting both my blog and my dA when I’m at my worst points. I am constantly concerned, needlessly, about what other people think about what I draw, which is something I legitimately shouldn’t be concerning myself with. I know this, but it doesn’t really put a cork on the nerves, as it were. I don’t know your situation, Anon, but I can suggest the following: if your anxiety is rooted or otherwise related to “shame” because your art is not at x-level, remove yourself temporarily from the online art world. Remove yourself from your peers and idols, for a short while, and focus on yourself and your work, to allow your confidence to rekindle. Every time the anxiety and stress of being an online artist has gotten too much for me, I’ve bailed on the internet for three months or more. During this time I just draw without the weight of concern over pleasing or otherwise tending to an audience of any kind. I look through my books of references, I go through my texts on art history, if I can I’ll go to an art museum. I’ll study. I’ll doodle whatever. If I don’t feel like drawing, then I damn well won’t. I’ll go for a week without drawing, because I don’t want to - either I just don’t want to think about it, or my feelings towards the activity are too closely related to resentment and anger. Once this passes I’ll boot up Photoshop again.

Before I go anywhere with this I do want to say that I get where this comes from. I have felt it myself in years long past; art is a difficult thing to wrangle, and in its difficulty it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that you “just don’t have it” to succeed, or you’re missing something that another artist has. I freely admit that, when I receive commentary along the lines of “I wish I had talent” or “I wish I was as good as you”, I get frustrated. I get frustrated because these two lines of “wishing” are toxic, they are 100% non-conductive to personal advancement, because it changes nothing, and does not encourage growth. On top of that, attributing artistic advancement to “talent” removes the artist themselves, as a person, from equation of growth and skill in their work. “Talent” did not bring me from Point A (elementary):

To Point B (now, my 20s):

Talent did not bring me to this point. I did. I did that over more than a decade of struggling, stammering, and several gallons of salty water. On top of that? The biggest leaps in growth for me have been very recent, well after whatever talent I had as a two-foot shitstain armed with a rainbow of crayons peaked and ran out (which was probably 2004). I sat my sorry ass down and studied. I took the time to look up and observe and learn about what I was trying to tackle, and there is still even more for me to learn and greater refinements to be made. Half of the work is learning about the end-goal - making a point to read and understand, and then apply that knowledge to the task at hand.

“Talent” does not make good art. Good work makes good art. Good work takes hard, honest work and dedication. Art is a pursued interest. As a pursued interest, art grows with dedication and study - it is something that an individual has to make a concentrated effort towards in order to foster to greater skill and potential. Age and speed of growth is not a factor, though it is very easy to get caught up in these two statistics and believe that they hold relevance, when they ultimately do not. As an arbitrary additive to the art equation, “talent” is an individual’s aptitude or innate ability to grasp a particular physical or mental task with comparative ease or swiftness. Having a natural aptitude for things like hand-eye coordination or observational skills helps quite a lot with art and can give someone a decent boost when beginning their journey as an artist. However, that is where the pros to “talent” stops. Talent does not make someone a “great artist” by virtue of talent alone, as the “help” offered by aptitude only goes so far. The rest is taken up by dedication, hard work, and passion. A talented artist without dedication or application of hard work will only go so far up the skill tree. Like anyone else, without dedication their work will stagnate and their skill set will cease to grow.

Fuck off with “artists are selfish” mindset