Here's another journal about art.
There's this frustrating emotional element to it that some people may get, some people may not. The most frustrating element is I feel like it's very unrelatable to other people and I'm guessing most people who don't work on art don't understand it. But it's the pure frustration and sort of anger you get at yourself when you're trying to create something, you know what it needs to be, but for whatever reason your skill isn't enough to accomplish what you are trying to create.

There's something that just creates the worst feelings of self-hate and unhappiness when you are trying to create something, and you can't make it look right, and your references are all taunting you. It's like, I can SEE what it needs to look like, right here, and yet somehow I can't make it happen. Why can't I absorb what I see in my references? Why doesn't my picture work? Why is it that some people are able to perfectly capture what they see but clearly I am very blind? Perhaps I am dense, perhaps I am not trying hard enough, but either way I feel like shit because I am so very aware of how short what I am creating falls of what I can see it should be.

Usually this happens with the technical and theory parts of art. It's the technical aspects that are generally undetectable to the untrained eye and you have to learn to see them because usually your brain is ignoring them when you look at pictures. Perspective issues, color theory issues, to some extent anatomy and other theory aspects of art all are things that make pictures subconsciously "click" when done right and look completely off when done wrong - but often unless you know how to look for them you can't tell what's wrong when they're done wrong, you just know that it looks wrong. It's extremely frustrating to be on the side of that where you are aware there are things going on that are not as they should be, but you can't see why because you haven't developed a sense of what to look for.

This is one reason, on an unrelated note, why even though I don't mind "critique" when I post art online on public sites like this, I don't generally ask for it because the kind of "critique" you get is people pointing out things like "your lines look wobbly" or "the head looks too big" and stuff like that which may or may not be true, but usually are the kinds of things that you can observe, and really, anyone can observe - you don't need those pointed out to you, what you need is help understanding how to fix them, and usually you can only get that when you have someone who can explain things in terms of theory, or offer technical advice on how to get a better result, photoshop advice, advice on art technicalities, etc. But that isn't always the case obviously.

Anyway...What I'm trying to say is, sometimes I try my best, and it's not good enough, and sometimes it drives me to tears, just staring at the screen, wondering why I can't make it good enough, why I'm so dense, and so on. The more you understand about art, I think, the more and more you realize how limited your skills are. I also don't feel this most other times I encounter my own limitations...if I'm struggling with a math or programming problem, I might get a headache, but I never get moved almost to tears, and that just shows I guess that I have less emotional engagement with those things than I do with art.