15+ years of digital art but I’ve hit a hard wall. (Full aphantasia + ADHD). Looking for anyone who relates or works like this.
Before reading.. please be gentle i have wanted to post again here after years and i didnt do it because im scared from people being harsh.. know that it took me so much time to gather courage to ask for help...
Hey everyone. I’ve been a digital anime-style artist for over 15 years now. I used to be really proud of my work, managed to build a decent following on Instagram, and even took real commissions. But for the last three years, I’ve been stuck in a brutal burnout loop and complete artistic paralysis. I feel like an absolute alien in the art community, and I'm posting this because I desperately need to find out if there are other creatives out there who share my exact wiring or if I'm just fundamentally broken.
My main issue is that my mind's eye is nearly blank. I have hypophantasia. When I watch traditional art tutorials, every single one of them tells me I have to learn anatomy by drawing 3D construction boxes, memorizing muscle insertion rules, or mentally rotating geometric shapes in a void before I sketch. Every time I try to force my brain to do that, it completely lags out and gives me an intense headache. Because of my ADHD, my working memory is terrible, and trying to hold all those abstract, hidden rules stable in my head while looking back and forth between a separate reference screen and a blank canvas completely drains my dopamine. It triggers severe task paralysis, and I end up giving up before I even start.
My entire life i have been using procedural learning method without knowing until now. It has been my default way since i was a kid, from learning english by speaking with others rather than the usual educational way at school (grammar) to playing video games with high mechanical skills without investing much in theories. I have always been bad at anything with conceptual or abstract learning like physics and such which is why i loved art a lot and it was my only subject that id get A with effortlessly.
Except now... because i fell into a trap where i have been hearing lots of different opinions about learning art from youtubers or even here.. i became paralyzed with fear. I wanted now to only do the right thing.. the right path but when i tried for the first time to learn art in the way that i rarely do.. like studying it by understanding theories... no matter how much i tried i always failed.. didnt matter if i watched different way of teaching the theory i would always never understand it.
I stopped for the first time 3 years ago and i dont want to.. art is a big thing in my life.. without it i feel souless. I have been trying years to find answers by understanding myself more but its still difficult for me to start. Its sad that i became someone who would die to wake up in the morning to sit and draw im his tablet to someone who cant even bare to look at it now.
I hope i can get the help i need.. i feel like im getting closer but all i know is i need my own method of learning art to the way my brain is wired. I was told that in order to improve i need to learn theories and stop depending on my method of doing things.. sadly when i tried that i burntout and been in a state of confusion where i hated art so much
Does anyone else with low visualization or ADHD traits work this way? Can you actually reach a high professional level using external software scaffolds and visual-reactive tracking instead of abstract mental geometry? I just want to know if my method is a valid way to exist as an artist, because I would rather keep drawing until the day I die, but the isolation and the fear of doing it "wrong" is keeping me completely frozen. Thank you.