Does art ever made you feel depressed?

[keii4ii]

In my case, art didn't cause my depression/anxiety. But art sure can be an outlet for depression/anxiety just because I'm thinking about it all the time. Consequently, art can seem like the cause even when it isn't.

It's like this:

1) unrelated RL event causes depression/anxiety.

2) brain wants to process it and be done with it, but doesn't know how.

3) at the same time, brain is dealing with art and comics all the time.

4) brain starts conflating art/comics and depression/anxiety because both are constantly influencing me.

5) Conflation leads to this thought: "art/comics are depressing me. I'm not good enough an artist, I'm not working hard enough, nothing is enough" when in truth it is "that unrelated RL event is depressing me."

6) ...which in turn leads to, I attempt to fix my depression/anxiety by making my work Good Enough. But this is futility. My work will never be good enough to cure my anxiety, no matter how skilled I get. In order to heal, I need therapy (even if it's self-therapy), I need support, I need clarity; I need to face the true cause of my stress, instead of its substitute. I need to STOP listening to the lie that my work not being good enough is the cause of all my misery.

[JaeHaru]

I hope you don't mind me replying to this ... I felt very much the same way. The biggest thing that was holding me back from catching up to them is that I hadn't learned the fundamentals well enough and that I hadn't become familiar enough with photoshop and all that it CAN do like they were. Looking up tutorials on the fundamentals and photoshop for painting has helped me IMMENSELY come a long way faster than I ever had before and I highly recommend both. I'm not telling you what to do or anything like that, and I can only speak for what has helped me, but they were things I didn't know about when I was at a time like that in the past that I had wished someone had told me so I'm just trying to help, really ^^;

[AVXP]

Not to be that person but...

We seem to be mixing the reasons for the depression. One seems to be about...I don't know. People who suffer from depression who also do art. And in that case, I have no idea why we're talking about art at all. Depression is the problem, not the art part.

And people (or at least one post I remember clearly) is depressed about 'where they are' in relation to their art/career.
And maybe some problems with doing art for more than art's safe.

I also don't know if you want anyone to take these posts seriously or are we just venting and sharing and more...sharing.

So in the case of A) Depression is real and there's a sickness and then there's a 'life sucks when you're a (pre/post) teen' with little control over the, seemingly, most important aspects of your life. You need a life coach or someone who's been there and can explain how life changes as you get older and you have/had more control than you thought and the biggest problems are- worrying about the wrong things- and that includes people. Speaking to a professional - usually is a go-to.

B) When art mixes with business or profit concerns, it usually becomes a craft. That's when you need more technical skill and discipline than vision and motivation.

C) You can't fix the business side of art with more or better art. Success is not measured or achieved by the quality or quantity of your artistic endeavors. All most do is reverse engineer and look at the results and search for the reasons.
And fill in the gaps with speculation and opinions.
That's not how it works. When you compare (which is always a bad idea) - you need to compare more than what you can see. You don't know WHAT they did or for how long and with who.

Most successful people don't know and/or don't share that kind of info.
They do like to tell stories though.
None of which ever reveals the magic trick.

[Klaustasya]

No, actually i just wanted to know everybody's experience but now i get it, so i won't talk about this anymore XD

[AVXP]

You don't gotta go do the victim thing.
Feel free to post in your own thread. lol

Maybe I should have said
"In my experience..."
Cause that's what I shared and built most of my thoughts about this on.
Beyond "me" I've seen this before, in other art forms and among other artists.
I just think they are separate things.

Depression isn't the kind of thing that goes away if you pick the right hobby.
That said, for many artists, the arts are an escape from the world/reality.

You are setting up a circle with the whole premise of this thread.
Art is nothing you are forced to do. If doing art causes you any sort of .....problem...do something else.
If EVERYTHING is a problem, then art isn't the problem and it also might not be the answer you seek.

Ever felt a negative vibe while working on an art project or your comics?

Yes. For many reasons.
1. It felt like a waste of time and wasn't going to get me any of the thing$ I wanted for making it.
2. I felt like it was crappy and I wasn't good enough so I should stop.
3. I felt like a hack and was cheating since it had gotten so easy to create my 'style'..
4. It was a waste of time and I was missing out on real life while staying a loner, hunched over my drawing board.
5. It sounded silly to tell people 'that's what you want to do with my life"
6. Everyone else in my circle was doing better at other things and I was still in the same place with the arts.
7. I had no concrete plan on how to make a living, only dreams that seemed dumber every day that passed.
8. Art for craft (Commissions) and any other 'paid gig' was soul-crushing. It feels like slavery to do stuff you hate doing.
9. The stuff that I imagined would make for a successful career was all stuff I didn't respect. I'd hate myself for 'winning' in that way.

All those thoughts puts me in a 'depressed mood' or I found myself in a 'depressing situation'. It was bleak.
It required a major mind-shift and tons of reprogramming.
Mostly, it took looking at everything as a challenge.

There were a ton of steps, some easy some hard.
One step was....
Stop using the word HOPE and start asking myself HOW.

There's a huge thing after this...
But you get the idea.

[gempompadour]

Yes, I sometimes get depressed when the piece I'm working on doesn't end up the way I envisioned it. You draw and draw and feel the pressure mounting, and get mad and sad that you can't create the thing you see in your mind's eye. And after you've spent so much time on that shitty piece you can't just throw it away, so you just hatepost it.

I also agree with a couple of comments here on slow growth and other artists barreling past you. At least with me it takes a toll on my self-esteem and makes me love creating art a little less when you work hard on something and get nothing in return. I understand that it's a competetive business and all, but still... no subs and likes always make giving up seem all the more tempting.

[SpavVy]

Yeah there have been times where art has made me either depressed or even riddled with anxiety.
And just to be clear I do suffer from an anxiety disorder along with depression and I have to take medication for both.

Sometimes I will get depressed if my art isn't coming out how I wanted or if I am working on a scene in my own story that is a bit messed up and as for the anxiety it can usually be triggered by a piece that just overall has a lot going on.

[Kat]

Yeah, totally. To be honest I'm STILL working myself back into a groove after hardly doing art for a couple years. Art wasn't the cause of my depression, it was other life circumstances. But I felt too drained from those circumstances to make art, and whenever I tried drawing it looked like crap and I felt MORE depressed so I just... didn't. I still second guess myself all the time and sometimes it's still depressing, but in general it's a lot better these days. I have to be mindful not to take on more projects than I can handle though, because burnout of something you love is also really depressing.

[adrianmirza1997]

of course.. depression is a symbol of soul, its just us who perceive it as bad. And same as laziness, it is not bad, u feel lazy when ur soul feels maximum comfortable and u can just enjoy your life. My kid, who is 16, is predisposed to always fall in depressions from just a single external factor, which is, in most of situations, non-relative to his own life. I know that he has to go through that alone, and go get out from that aswell. I started to shop kratom online, and started to make him kratom teas before school in the morning, and he seem to be in a better mood since I started doing that.

[ble]

I sometimes struggle with the differences between "depression" and "frustration".

In my case I think is more about constant frustration because of the results I get.

I'm frustrated because my art is not good enough despite trying a lot or that I can't make money with art, or feels I may have wasted a lot of time on something that will never produce the results I want/need.

[sarahmcsquish]

I went through a window this year where drawing made my feel bad, and sadly that window was directly after I posted my first webcomic (not related). Sometimes art just hits your different, and that's ok.

[domisotto]

I have creative lows as a writer quite often. Most of my books had chapters when I felt like I am better off with any other hobby. That I am stupid and pathetic in continuing to persist in writing. That people just laugh at me.

Sometimes, it’s news of someone else’s success that triggers the depressive spell—there is almost always a moment when I have to step over my own self before I can be happy for someone else.

Sometimes it’s just part of working in a book that is niche, but i overall want to write it anyway. This happens more often than it should for a writer looking for acceptance.

Sometimes, it’s just not knowing what to do in order to write things that cannot be ignored.

[honeyandcreambutter]

YES! Although, I think in my case, it's a bit specific and unrelated to creating webcomics or writing A bit of a long rant but basically, I was in a community of adoptable creations. It didn't take me long to realise that it was a pretty toxic place to grow as an artist since that community was very biased towards a certain art style... one that I simply didn't enjoy drawing (cute, chibi characters with bright colours)

At first I stuck to my own art style, which was drawing adult, predominantly fantasy-based characters and I did have a number of people interested in buying my adopts. And then eventually i began to stagnate. I ended up conceding and started drawing characters that I didn't want to draw. All in the hopes of getting as popular as some other artist. It worked but it didn't make me happy in the slightest.

I grew to hate my drawings and nitpicked my art viciously. It was such a bad, BAD stuck-in-a-hole phase in my creative journey. I ended up quitting the community because I realised how toxic my mentality had become and focused on my own improvement and what I wanted to do. I'm a lot happier now but I still sometimes find myself comparing my art to other people's art and getting frustrated again.

What does help get me out of that rut is that I shift the focus from "Their art is better than mine and I'll never be able to achieve that" to "Let's carefully analyse their art and see what I can learn from them"

[dongsunpai0]

If any of you out there are depressed, I recommend this man and his channel

[summer_coefficient]

Few things make me more miserable than creating art.
And when I see work better than my own, it feels me with such deep and raw hatred, it honestly confuses me.

[amortelito]

Well, I'm already depressed and I can't blame art.

Sometimes art makes me feel frustrsted and I'm unhappy with the results but for the most part it helps me to distract my mind from bad thoughts. Like a scape.

I remember your previous posts, I really hope you can feel better.

[jgreene2433]

Not so much depression, but I've felt frustration over working on art, specifically commissioned art that I just wasn't into the subject matter.

[Eiranyx]

I would't exactly call it 'depressed' in my case but rather 'burnout' and when I feel that burnout, I lose motivation, then suddenly feel frustrated about my art then I'll start questioning myself and my abilities.
So during those times, I take a break - and during those breaks, I either do completely nothing until I get bored enough to learn a new hobby and then I suddenly realize that there's no other things that can make me happier if I'm not doing art.
But I can say that one thing I learn during those time is that it will pass, not immediately but until I feel like I'm ready enough to do art again; During those time when I'm not doing anything, I realized I'm not wasting time, I'm just taking it slow -- and it's okay not to be okay.

[ButterflyEmpress]

Maybe not depressed exactly, somewhat hopeless (I guess that’s kinda synonymous)

• Sometimes I wish I was either never into art. My brain was and still is hyper fixated on it, but not enough to be good at it. It’s especially depressing when social media keeps making it hard to build a brand from it, sites that do host art are either ghost towns or full of fetish material, and society in general devalues art. I remember quitting art a bit when another artist berated me. I’m over it, but it still stings thinking about it.

• Other times I feel discouraged from working on my comic, feeling like I bit off more than I could chew. I really wanted to tell THIS story and didn’t really think much of it until I started illustrating. I worry that it may come across as shallow and convoluted due to there being too many characters and plot lines to flesh out. Or my audience might not like the direction it’s going and unsubscribe en masse. I should have took more time to read over my outline before getting started. Sometimes I wish I could reboot, but I made my bed, so I gotta lie in it. Because if I do reboot, I’m gonna want to do it again and again.

[AmandaJ-art]

Honestly, yes, It was mostly due to my comics' story. It's a bit gruesome. I recently learned that drawing characters in traumatic situations is not easy. I love the story, but sometimes it's hard to draw a scene with the characters in a dangerous situation.

Easier said than done, right?