Quitting art
I think I might just quit art.
Posting this from an old account since I gave up on reddit many years ago.
I've been drawing my entire life, but only started doing it seriously around nine years ago. Drawing was a joy and I tried out many drawing many different things- animals, humans, characters, sceneries, that stuff.
Now you might think that drawing for nine years would make me really really good at art. Nope. I can't even draw as well as people drawing for two years. Truth of the matter is that I still don't know how to work with color theory, how to do anatomy, how to shade properly and all that stuff. Whenever I post my artwork, people assume I'm a beginner. They usually say I should start learning anatomy to do proper poses.
I have studied anatomy alright. Did drawing exercises, look at faces from different angles, played around with dolls to see how joints would move. I did figure studies. Used references, broke them down into simple shapes.
I still can't draw a face without making major mistakes. Every single art piece takes over 10 hours to finish. Mainly because I'm erasing every single mistake to replace it with another one over and over again until it starts to look okay. By the time I am done with the sketch, I don't even bother with lineart. I just color it in and then get frustrated over shading. By that time the art piece has taken so long that I can't be bothered to shade properly anymore, so I just slap a darker color on it, set it on multiply and call it a day. I flip my images to double check. They still look okay. But the problem is that there are still grave errors even after I'm finished and I just don't notice them after I'm done.
Daily I see young artists figuring out how to render after one try. RENDERING. The thing I tried so many times and STILL don't know how to do without my drawing looking like washed out greys!
I studied color theory! I know about values, and focal points, and primary colors, shading, mood settings, all that! Yet all my colors look grey and garbage!
When I post my art, nobody reacts. Literally nobody. No matter which platform, nobody as so much even gives a single like. I know that social media is a bad place to measure these things, but I just want somebody to react positively to my art..
And worst of all... I'm not improving. At all. My pieces from years ago look way better than what I draw now. Why? I don't know! I tried looking into potential causes of that, took breaks, approached it from another perspective... But it just does nothing. I look at my art gallery and I just can't like a single thing there. Everything looks bad, anatomically incorrect, unappealing, washed out. I used to be proud to finish art pieces, but now I can't stand looking at any of it. I feel ashamed and embarassed to be an artist for such a long time, yet not even reaching a fraction of what other artists achieve. I gobble up every single piece of advice and way to learn, but none of it actually ever affects my art. I feel like I failed this hobby and just should never show anything to anyone ever again.
So... Yeah. That's why I'm thinking of quitting art. I'm already hurting a lot from other things and I don't need the additional embarassment of being such a bad artist. I don't even know why I'm posting this here. I feel like I'm mourning a hobby I only hate.