My advice is, and this is something I struggled with growing up: “Do your best, but don’t get hung up on everything being perfect”.
For example, I could never draw hands well. I learned techniques but somehow they just never came out right. I pitched a fit, threw my sketchbook, cried, etc. all because I couldn’t draw hands right.
Turns out it wasn’t the hands themselves making me upset, it was all my pent up insecurities about my art. The hands, in my mind, represented my shortcomings as an artist - reminding me how I knew, deep down, that I’d never be “good enough”.
Eventually, somehow, I moved past that and stopped caring about the fact I was bad at drawing hands. Then all of a sudden, I realized I was drawing hands better. Or perhaps I just stopped being overly hard on myself about it so they just looked better, even if I didn’t actually get better.
Later on I discovered that all artists have shortcomings. And sometimes even terrible or bland artists can make it big. And I mean genuinely terrible and bland, like goblin looking human characters that were designed by an SJW Tumblrina who thinks Anime characters (who are Japanese) are not POC enough so they redesign them to be unrecognizable blobs in a very poor attempt to mimic SU’s art style with no consideration for actual anatomy or basic design.
Yeah that sounds a bit harsh, I suppose, but it’s what helps me remember that if garbage like that can gain any sort of readership then so can mine.
But if you want something more optimistic, my dad has been telling me this story since I was very young and I think it rings true no matter what you’re talking about:
He said he used to play badminton a lot, he got so good that none of his friends wanted to play him anymore. So this one day he’s out playing and some random guy comes up and asks if my dad wants to play with him. My dad said yes. My dad promptly got his ass kicked by this random older guy.
So what’s my dad do? You’d expect that, after being beaten so badly, he just wouldn’t want to play the guy anymore, right? A lot of people would just give up... but my dad? He wanted to play this guy again and again.
Why is that? So that my dad could become an even better player than he already was. Turns out he wasn’t even that good, his friends were just worse than him at the game. By playing this guy tho, he got better and better.
The moral of the story being, don’t envy those who are better than you - learn from them to better yourself.
Most people are more prone to envy and thinking “if I can’t be as good as X then what’s the point??” instead of “if I learn from X then I can get better”. So my advice is to reject envy and thinking you can’t measure up to others.
If you want to get better, learn from those who are better than yourself. And keep doing it, keep improving. Practice. Learn on your own. Don’t aim for perfection.
Also: Create what you want to create and don’t let anyone censor you. Censorship is bad no matter what’s being censored, if people don’t like what you create then it’s okay - they can just avoid it. But don’t let other people’s hang up prevent you from really creating.
That is also something that took me a long time to figure out.
Also, as far as comics go, learn paneling and scene set ups. It can be tricky but it will become second nature once you get it down and you’ll be amazed how creative paneling can make up for anything lacking in your art and story. Just follow the left to right rule best you can.
