I took a long vacation over the holidays. I didn't go anywhere, I just relaxed and tried to reconnect with my interests. This break gave me a lot of time to reflect, and one of the things I concluded was that I hate sucking.

Even more than that, is that I hate that I accept it in everything I do. That's why I hate my job. That's why I don't draw as often as I should. That's why I don't make creature models as often as I used to. That's why I haven't made a game since 2012.

Laziness won out, it made me depressed, which made me even less willing to really put a real effort into things, which further killed my motivation to do them.

Look at my drawings. Most of the recent stuff is just line work. I can do more, but I've been phoning it in since the Tolstoy gift a [insert time here] ago. This bothers me because I never really figured out how to replicate that in Photoshop, and I never did something like that on an entire figure. So I opened a window looking on what I can do, and instead of climbing through it and doing more, I made more scribbles every other month or so.

I have a unique approach to furries and I should respect that and make myself produce better work.

I'm working on a new project now for Rovest. It was originally a paid commission from last year, but I'm doing it for free (my choice), since it took me so long to get to it. I spent a few days... maybe about 16 hours total... on the line work. Most of the stuff you see in my gallery took no longer than a few hours in a single day when I felt good. I started this one on a day I wasn't "feeling it", and I didn't like the body initially and had to fix it to make it work.

I'm about to color and shade it, and I decided to look at it from a 3D approach and [i]texture[/i] it instead. Like a light bulb over my head, I suddenly knew how to make realistic fur and skin. Basically anything I'd do if I were texturing a 3d model, like using stock photographs and custom paint brushes, I should do for a 2D picture.

I've even referred to the drawing as a model when talking to Rovest about it. The lines on the page exist in 2D space, but they define what's in front of what else in 3D space, just like a z-buffer does in a computer. In this way, I can hate the lines a little less (I hate that most of my work is so dependant on them when people like Sugarboy or MeanBean are producing art where the end result often has no visible). I'm thinking of the lines now as a way to get to the point where I don't need them. That's not a novel way of thinking, I know, but I have to put myself in the right mindset.

And how about that Torvus model? Why don't I ever finish that? I finished one before (and it sucked but at least I tried), why didn't I finish the new one? I have an excellent understanding of topography, and I've been subdivision modeling since 2005. What do I have to show for it? My best work is from 2008 and 2009.

But now I'm climbing through that window I mentioned earlier. I put so much into something I almost didn't want to do, and now I can't wait to get back home from work to return to it. I'm excited about it. It's like the little fire that almost died within me has been relit by a bolt of lightning.

And all of this after I decided not to be ashamed of my greatest strength and interest. I'm weird and I like fat things, I should allow myself to fire on all cylinders with that instead of being afraid of attracting too much attention and being called weird.

I had a theory anyway: That if you're good enough at what you do, you can be as weird as you want to be and most people will still respect it. So I should try to be as good as possible at what I do, because I'm very weird.