jesse fabert

I AM FULL OF LIGHT // I AM FILLED WITH JOY // I AM FULL OF PEACE // I HAD THIS DREAM // THAT I FORGAVE // MY ENEMIES

thank you so much!!!! i like drawing scenes from the game while we play it. its super fun to stream it to my friends, too, since we play over discord. it feels like i am ~do puppet show~ while the dm tells a story, but also everyone jumps in to tell part of the story-- its great. i love ttrpgs.

somewhere along the line i got the sense that people who i admire-as-artists are not peers, they're superiors, which really quickly makes me feel too intimidated to ask for advice/mentorship. which makes me very sad, because i think that's what art communities online are For. its not just for posting your work to show off, its for making tutorials and teaching the craft to other people, showing off your influences and explaining your process and ideas.

something about going from popularity metrics online straight into college, where suddenly we were supposed to be training for jobs that nobody in their right mind believed we would get. my professors really couldn't teach me anything that i wanted to know (none of them could draw or use digital tools, like, at all lol) and all the time it just felt like, compete compete compete.

along with some pretty intense social rejection from professors who hated teaching, potential bosses who thought i was a freak, and classmates whose art i really deeply admired, it all just left me feeling totally worthless to artistic communities irl and online !! and ofc as a millennial i've really never made much money at any job i've ever been able to get lmao. altogether, these things have always made me feel like my art is bad, no matter what it looks like and no matter how hard i try.

so i felt really terrible for the last decade, making rent with commission work on and off between retail bullshit, because most people i meet don't think of it as a "real job." but i really enjoy commission work because it feels like a collaboration with the client, and i have very kind and interesting clients who really enjoy my work. i get to take their ideas and juice 'em up with my own tastes and influences. i take a long time on my commissions because i want to use it as an opportunity to improve my skills, and i get great satisfaction out of making something carefully-considered. i care too much about craft to be very good at any job besides this one!!

really i think i'm just built not to be Employed, because i would rather be an artist, but i have had Professional Standards Brain Worms ever since college lmao. the people in college did not think of art school as a place where peers teach each other, the way internet art communities like DeviantART and conceptart.org did. but those online communities actually took me seriously and taught me what i wanted to know!!

so, since i'm coming back here i'd like to use the space for not just drawing and painting, but also posting tutorials, talking about art theory and symbolism and visual narrative and films and books that inspire me. not because it's just interesting to me but because it feels like a way to model for other people a way to think about art holistically, craft + content at the same time. it can all be part of how i pass on my skills to everyone else who might want them, which is really what i want to offer the world more than pretty pictures.

ouuuuumygoddddddd okay so. i think the last time i posted here was literally a decade ago, like, shortly after i got out of art school. i feel like i have to give context on what happened, why i stopped posting, etc etc

basically i went to art school because i thought they would teach me how to draw and make comics better than tumblr/deviantart already had, and i was completely wrong, because i went to a bad art school. a lot of art schools in the country have tried to turn into vocational schools, trying to teach you how to get a job, etc etc which i sure hope has worked for them but like i got so screwed paying for an art degree in the 2010s lmfao. those people had no clue what the internet was or how to sell art online and i could already draw better than most of my professors.

so i spent like a decade feeling extremely ashamed and incompetent that i was kind of too scared to even try and get a job in a hyper-competitive art industry, on top of trying to transition and just never being able to afford top surgery. i felt bad that i couldn't get a job and also felt bad that i was a born n bred tumblr millennial bc idk my parents didnt love me or whatever, who cares.

anyway i'm kinda back now bc i realized that i really missed the online art communities on tumblr, and just the general vibe of online artists being so generous with teaching and sharing things. i wrote on substack for a few years and i think i wrote some good essays but like, nobody's ever gonna give me a book deal or whatever, why am i doing this lmao. i just want to draw pictures of hot men that is literally all i've ever wanted. so i kind of just want to come back to posting stuff on the site that actually has image positioning instead of freak-ass professional-class instagram. yikes