Ah, artistic apathy! It’s been a whole eleven years since I last truly experienced how paralyzing you can be, but now it feels like you never left. I kinda knew this was coming. I did all the time that I was working on setting up the studio, I could feel it in the back of my head, so I tried to keep as busy with the studio as possible, but eventually, it was finished.

I didn’t say anything about it until now because I was afraid and ashamed of feeling this way after talking up all that I would draw and write when commissions were done. It is finally time, and I have to rise to the challenge.

I ignored my drawing board for days, and my writing area as well. I felt zero motivation –me, the one who boasted of having figured out how to prevent artist’s block from ever happening again! (The secret, I thought: work through it.)

That is, in fact, still the secret. But it works much better when one is doing mindless one-shot fluffy commissions, brain shut off from the art while watching true crime channels on YouTube.

Writing a novel requires full mental engagement, as does inking illustrations for said writing with pen and ink. It requires attention, focus, and the ability to put the emotions I am trying to convey in the story into words or lines. Traditional mediums are more unforgiving. The characters are visually more complex than most of the many furry characters I’ve regularly drawn (I swear Pip and Rosemary’s wings will be the death of me) and on the whole everything requires SO much more effort.

When I manage to engage, the rush is unbelievable. It cannot be compared to anything: not to the best sex in the world, not to the most absorbing, maddening romantic love. A thrill ride, or even the jaw-dropping views I saw from the ship during the Alaska trip, don’t come close, either. Perhaps it could be compared to all of these things put together.

That rush, that feeling, is why I became an artist and writer. I’m sure this will sound presumptuous, but in the past, I’ve been so wrapped up in a scene I was writing, and then sometimes drawing, that I’ve cried as I was working on it. And, well, I haven’t found that feeling again just yet.

It will come, I am sure of it. So, just like I did with commissions, I am pushing through the block. I can’t wait for inspiration to come. One should never be a slave to inspiration. But pushing through is much more challenging when one cannot turn the brain off with YouTube or other nonsense. I have to learn how to be fully engaged with my work again.

Also… I have a little secret. When the fandom found me, and I began to draw gift art and then commissions, I was going through a similar period. It was really, really bad. Back then, I had the “waiting for inspiration” mentality. I felt like drawing furries saved my “artist life”, so to speak.

And now that I stopped, it’s like I went right back to late 2011. It feels just like it did back then. But now I know that the thing I need to do is to keep going, no matter how hard it is, and I’ll find my groove again.

In the meantime, I am grinding my rusty inking gears by inking this drawing of Zad and Lazlo, that I’ve wanted to finish for years. Brand new inkpot and pen… same old, beloved pen body.

On the first day, I inked most of their bodies, and by the second day, a good amount of the background:

While I was very tense, much like riding a bike, it’s an ability soon remembered. Once I’ve inked all the lines, I am looking forward to lots and lots of cross-hatching. I may color it digitally, screentone it, or shade it further with graphite… not sure just yet.

In case you’re familiar with Gideon, who is visually similar, Zad is a descendant of Gideon, many generations in the future.

Other than this, I’ve been working on multiple digital pieces. I finished this piece of Molly, and I have two of Pip on my iPad, as well as an icon of Horus. Anything with my OCs takes longer by its very nature than commissions, but you’ll see more and more pieces pop up…

I’ve been writing a lot too, slowly but surely. Today I hit 1,000 words in a single day for the first time, so there’s some progress. 😊 Hopefully I’ll have that to share soon, too!