How to gain motivation after losing faith in your own art?

[BobbyjoeX]

so throughout the couple of years, my comic, Royal. has been on repeated hiatuses due to many issues with my mental health but the recent ones were for another reason.

I've had instances where i was told that my style needed to be changed.

one was by someone who is not my friend anymore and he's told me that my style needed to change to better my skills, after i was done, i kinda was unable to continue working on the comic cause the new style was kind of uncomfortable to do (the examples of the new style is from the very recent pages of Royal in chapter 5.)
I did show my discomfort but was told it was ten times better this way than how i drew it before that, As an autistic person. took it blindly and tried to push to get used to the style

After having a falling out with this person. i started to despise this style.

Now I'm taking advice from another friend that told me to scale it back to chapter 4 style and go along a different style development branch, but that seems to be really difficult for me to do. My motivation seems to be all over the place, how do i push through and keep going when this style changing, depression inducing..... thing...?

[mrtoontastic]

Gaming. That's how I motivate

[feuersichel]

Phew, not an easy question. I think best would be, to ask yourself first, what you want and where you want to get. If you want to get famous and earn alot, you might want to change your style to what most people want but that also means, loosing alot of artistic freedom. Thats something I personally decided against.

Also I figured out with my own comic, peoples oppinions differ alot. A friend of mine liked my older style more than the newer, another one likes the backgrounds and doesn't care about the characters much. In the end you will never please everybody so don't spend to much energy on it. Listen to every advice though! and then decide for yourself, if you want to look into it further or not.
I once was told, my color pencil pages (suuuper old) looked messy. And they where right! I felt the same but couldn't see it before. There I decided to look into different techniques and it helped Otherwise when you have a person, that just likes the anime / toons/ or whatever style, of course that person wants to push you more in that direction. Do you want that? Yes? Then study more in that direction. if not, thank for the advice and leave it be.

In regards to your (ex)friend, maybe he just wants to help you and is just not realy great in comunicating that too well :,)
Anyways, when you know what you want, it's so much easyer, to deal with such advice. Especially the nagging ones...

So for getting back motivation... Not sure if I can help you that much as every person is different and you are in a very different situation. For me personally it helped alot, to get a nice cup of tea, relax and go through my finished pages. What are the things you like? What are the things YOU like to improve? Do the advice you got help in that regard? Just look at it with a neutral view. Congrats you have a new focus to study on! Now use that focus to draw. That brings you motivation automatically.

I hope, this bulk of text was of any help to you.

[ghostmaya]

Change is part of nature~ If you truly and believe in your series, then go and continue experimenting~ Don't just focus on art but also on narrative~ I've seen many amateur that manage to become successful~ One Punch Man, Mob Psycho 100,
Ranking of Kings, They have terrible art but they're so good at delivering stories~
I think everyone start at terrible art specially on early stage but if you go further and if you're really into it then i'm sure you have plan to improve yourself~ For now, just continue until you reach certain episode like 50+ or 100+ then see if there's progress or not~ Coz it took me many years until i decide to redraw and I redraw 3 times my series~

[liamnaughton7]

@ghostmaya has a point about narrative.

If at all, try to put the question of style out of your mind and let the story make its own demands. Scenes will have their own demands and sometimes they will necessitate differing approaches. Don't be afraid of this. Let your story encourage experimentation and evolution and you will never stay still.

It's not what your friends like or even what you like, it's what the story commands of you and you will always grow organically.

(That's why occasionally indulging in short stories can be great because you can entirely change your approach without fear of commitment and often you come back to your main work much stronger for it.)

[potatogirl]

(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)

[BLTX]

Competely agreed! My brother was the first person who saw my art style and his immediate reaction to it was not exactly positive. So I said, screw it, and just kept it anyway. And I don't regret it.

[darthmongoose]

So I know this is advice I give out fairly regularly, but I personally always think it's useful. In UX design, there's a phrase that goes like: "Users are very good at finding problems, but they're really bad at suggesting good fixes for them." In UX design (the field my partner works in and I've worked in a little myself), standard practice is to write down everything a user said about their experience using or testing a product; everything they did or didn't like, everything they got stuck on, anything that confused them... but then to ignore and not write down any suggestions they give for fixing the problems. How to fix a problem is generally better left to a professional who has more tools, data and experience at their disposal. User suggestions are nearly always coloured by personal taste or what pleases just them the most, or they're short-sighted "bandaid" solutions that don't fix wider systemic issues.

I've been told to make some changes that would have been pretty bad in the past. For example, one guy in Uni really didn't like that I was making a modern-setting Fantasy story because he felt that was overdone, and his suggestion to "fix" my comic was to...er....make it steampunk (yeah because Steampunk totally wasn't overdone in the mid 00s lol). Or for an example of where there was an actual issue bigger than "this one guy personally doesn't like that setting", my readers often used to complain that they were struggling to tell who I intended to look male or female. Okay, that's a fair complaint looking at my older work. The problem was that the fix they suggested was to give female characters bigger boobs and prominent eyelashes and to make them more delicate with exaggerated curves and more "girly" clothes.... looked.....bad. Worse, it felt bad; just getting told "the only way you can make good work is to stop being you" is just an all round crappy experience and it really shook my confidence.

So how did I fix the problem in the end? The problem was a real one, but the answer wasn't "big boobs and eyelashes", it was in how I give my figures and faces (on all sexes and genders of characters) volume and depth. Studying some good books and looking at the artists who influenced my work and how they fix the problem and fixing it myself in the way I wanted to fix it. Not ignoring the problem existed and saying "but it's my styleeee!", but making the changes based on how I wanted my work to look and while maintaining a visual identity I felt was "still me".

Ultimately yes, your style will evolve over time as you improve, integrate new techniques, pipelines and your understanding of how light, shadow, mass and motion work grows from study and experience, but it should evolve on your own terms. Don't completely change or reinvent the identity of your work (unless you want to. There's no shame in an image change if that's what the creator wants), but rather evolve towards making it the best version of your style; keep everything you love and just tweak the areas that could be better in a way that fits in with the things you love.

Also: You do not have to please people who don't like you or your work! The only opinions that are truly important are those of people who do like your work or who might potentially like it (because they like similar stuff or fall in your target market) but are finding it hard to get into or are put off by lack of polished presentation or similar. You don't have to give a rat's arse what this ex friend guy said. He's not reading your work. Chasing the approval of people who will only like your work if you change it beyond recognition into something you wouldn't feel happy with just isn't worth it. If somebody doesn't want to read Errant because the art style is weeby or they think the colours are too bright or the ladies aren't hot enough or it's "too cheesy"... I don't care. I 100% do not care, they can go read something else, because changing these aspects that a bunch of my existing readers like to appease a person who currently doesn't like the comic at all isn't worth it.

[nekoendy]

I started my comic in 2008, in those 13 years all I come up with were a handful of terribly drawn chapters everybody pissed on lol
I could have worked daily on that comic for 13 years, but the risk of screwing myself for nothing was just too great, so, I wisely did not follow that path ^^
Human brain is a gelly, you would need an iron brain to spend 13 years doing nothing but "warm up work", tss, tss, tss.

[JoblessInUSA]

I just checked out your comic, and I could see how much love and effort you put into it.

Style change is fine, I looked at the beginning, middle, and latest art.

What I found most important was not the style change, but the anatomy and overall quality went up. Like you draw hands more comfortably, and that'll carry through any style changes.

So keep up the good work and draw what you want to, not what others want you to. Don't burn out by forcing yourself!

[liamnaughton7]

Everything is "warm up work". Even that that we perceive as perfect. Pages are only food for the next pages. Comics food for the next comics.
We die daily and become fertiliser for tomorrow's selves.
Our lives swallowed up in an Ouroboros of comics to only be viewed from the outside as some kind of constant, unaware of the rolling tides far beneath our feet carrying us off to destinations yet unknown.

[BobbyjoeX]

a lot of you had very encouraging words and one... i feel i was more insulted by but it might have been a joke???

I've once again hit a depressive streak but i figured to get back to doing my art, i should just do things that are for fun.... so i'm playing around with rotoscoping.

[LadyN]

If it’s a problem with the style that you have now then I would just experiment and implement the things that you personally like in other people’s art and put it into yours.

If it’s a completely motivation issue then I say either do something you really enjoy that ISN’T art related, or redraw an old piece of art, and I mean really old.

[system]

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