TaRtOoN-Man94

Hi everybody!

Long time no see, huh?

…Who am I kidding? That’s an understatement.
Nearly a year of inactivity in a time of my life when I should have been the most active ever!
So many things have come out this year, cartoons, movies, games, so many events in my life that I wanted to comment on. That I wanted to leave my impressions on, that I wanted to immortalize the only way I knew how. All sailed by in silence.

It’s about time I came clean to the world about it.

The trouble started (or ended depending on your point of view) back in September 2018, when after nearly 9 years of dating (though she only counts 7) ScarySponge decided enough long-distance was too much, and we broke up. We’d been growing apart for some time. She was growing up and changing as a person, but I was still the same inside as I’d always been, and that was the problem. It was really for the best. I wish her nothing but the best, and now that she’s free, I have confidence she’ll find it now. Regardless of whose best it was for, my heart beat alone and broken ever since.

That was at the start of a very creatively fulfilling, but more so creatively demanding school year.
The free time I had that I used to spend making art for deviantART now became time I should have been dedicating to making art for school. And the consequences of not choosing to spend those moments responsibly had only gotten harsher with every new project.
Some artists coat their brushes with the ooze from their broken heart, but for me, a broken heart meant broken muse. A true artist suffers for their art, or so the romanticizing goes, but my art suffered for me.
There’s a reason my featured arts have been tributes to the departed for the longest time now.

Inspiration aside, another reason for my absence was that I’m a slow artist. Art from me takes long. Plain and simple.
I had always been a perfectionist who was never content to call easy work finished. Even back in my MS Paint phase. The older I’ve gotten, the more critical I’ve gotten with my work, and the slower it became.
 I’ve never been short of ideas, just short on time and muse to manifest them. But I always operated on the mentality that there would come a time where I would find the time and start cranking content out daily.
Throughout the year I locked myself in a vicious cycle of “I’ve got a lot of ideas, let me wait for my schedule to clear up so I can start with the first piece on my list!”
The reality was my schedule never cleared up to satisfaction.
The reality was I had also found other means of creative fulfilment in the meantime. Ways outside of visual art and deviantART that could be made and finished much faster.

I just realized that going further into this would lead to places that would darken and gloom this journal more than it already is, so I’m just going to skip to the epiphany I had:

The plan simply wasn’t working. The path I envision crumbled before me and the amount of preparation it kept taking to start, kept keeping it from starting. The TaRtOoN-Man94 I wanted to be when I first joined this site in 2007, lives in an alternate dimension where he already has several years animation industry experience by now. He’s already bought the ring to propose to his sweetheart. He’s in another, happier dimension living his best life and I’ll never be him. And if I keep trying to be in this way, I’ll never become a great artist I could be. So I need to stop operating on that vision I had of myself and start working with who I am now and how I can get to my new dreams based on where I am now.

What this means for deviantART is, I need to drop the mentality that my gallery is a show I need to put on. That it has a scripted narrative that I need to follow with a beginning middle and end.
I looked deep inside and realized what’s really important. What made deviantART matter to me in the first place. And it’s not what I post in it, but who I post it for: You guys.
A lot of my closest friends on this site have already migrated to tumblr. And since the porn purge, they’ve fled to twitter.
Personally, I promised myself I wouldn’t get a twitter account until November 2020.
So in the meantime, I’ve decided that I’m going to treat this account as a way of keeping in touch with my friends here who haven’t left yet and with whom I don’t have other means of contact.
I’m commenting and favoriting art again, but when it comes to posting, if it happens it happens, but I’ve made a point of not having anything planned at this point in time.

I’ve embraced my slowness as an artist and if this turns out to be the start of a true return to form for me, it will be a slow one. But much better than a delayed return that never happens at all.

That’s about all I had to get off my chest at this point in time.
See you around - TaRtOoN-Man94