Passionate Artists

   I fucking love artists that are clearly very passionate and put a lot of love and care into their works. Like, fuck yes draw your original characters like renaissance paintings, sculpt them, cosplay them, 3-d model, make merch of them. I want it all.  It always amazes me. And the skill level doesn’t really matter honestly, because the love is there. It’s in the way people keep drawing their characters over & over again. It’s in the way artists do redraws, revamps, just to have their OCs grow up with them. 

Which is why I've been trying to get out of my habit of lurking and comment on oc posts when I see them. 

   I love a passionate audience.Especially when the art captivates, and seeing people react/gush about the Character presented to them like a meal on a platter. It’s one of the many rewards of posting an oc publicly.
  It sucks when characters don’t get noticed, or a certain type of design is popular. But it never should be the reason you draw them. Draw them because you want to.  

Because you want to tell a story. Because they bring you comfort. Because you love drawing them. And if you want to share that story do it. But you don’t have to, they can just be for yourself 

   I remember about a year or 2 ago, my mom and I had a conversation about my characters. Since at the time I had it a creative spike and was drawing them constantly.  She said something along the lines of, ‘Are you going to make something out of that character?  You’ve been drawing them a lot but is it for anything’. Again, very loose quote. But she asked if they were going be Something. Like a comic, or an illustration. Because to her, it seemed like a waste of time. To make something for fun and not apply it in a profitable way. Initially I was thrown off by it and slowly stopped drawing that character (A spidersona I had made when Beyond the Spiderverse came out).

 
Looking back on it now, I see where she was coming from. But now, I don’t necessarily have to follow that mentality. I’ll still write and make my story, still make my own comic of fun. Doesn’t mean I’ll expect it to blow up out of nowhere. It’s for myself and I want to put it out there. And since that conversation I have still made OCs for myself or just for fun with friends. 

  It’s a sense of whimsy and wonder that gets me. We’re just kids playing with dolls and making things up. And we do it because it’s fun, because we love imagining greater and grander or mundane and odd things. We can capture whats around us and spin it to our will. I think it’s why people struggle getting artists? They may like what we can make for them, yes but I think the average person would struggle to grasp that, genuinely, We do it for the love of the game.