According to my status on the STC-O message boards, I am an artist hume, but do I deserve it? This is something I think about a lot. My artist status comes down only to a single strip I did for the comic for the last Christmas Special. I've had other artistic project to work on since (including redoing all my old pages to produce a higher definition version of them), but I just can't see to motivate myself to do artwork any more. Before I did the STC-O Christmas issue I was forever producing artwork, my DeviantArt profile is full of sketches and stuff I produced in my spare time just for my own enjoyment, and as you look through the timeline you could see the progressive improvement in my technique as I taught myself how to use the digital colouring software, but since the comic strip went out I feel like I've lost my niche. Perhaps it's because my one strip was received as well as I'd hoped (it was generally something of a mixed reception), perhaps it's because I feel genuinely dwarfed and humbled by the quality of talent shown by my fellow artists on the comic (all of which are younger than me I might add), but whatever it is I've just lost my enthusiasm for just drawing whatever comes into my head. A woman at work had asked me to do some art for her that she planned to use for business cards and even offered to pay me for my services, and I've done nothing, I just can't get back into my artist head, and it worries me. The fact that I've had a knackered shoulder, ever-mounting financial trouble and (lately) and ingrown toenail getting infected hasn't helped, but I really need to get past all this.

I know this is partly down to artistic temperament, I doubt there's a genuine artist on the planet who is able to look at their own work and feel confidence in it, almost every potential artist I've ever met has the same habit of bad-mouthing their own work while praising all those around them, and even I've spent a lot of my life receiving plaudits for my supposed artistic talent, but I can't take it on-board. I see the other artists I have to contend with on STC-O and I really do feel inferior. Their artwork (most of it) looks very well done and very professional, you could easily believe the comic was still professionally produced seeing the talent that goes into it. My artwork by contrast looks decidedly amateurish, the lines are never as sharp, the shading is notably poor and I have a severe problem coping with the burden of trying to fill strips with detail and elaborate backgrounds.

I'm realistic about my ambitions. Ever since I was about 6 or 7 all I ever wanted to do in my life was draw cartoons for a living, and who knows, maybe if I'd carried on working on my skills all these years instead of letting them stagnate for so long it could have still been possible. I'm 26 now though (as of a week and a half ago) and I have to be realistic about my hopes, I'm pretty sure that if I was ever gonna get plucked out of the air and offered professional freelance work it would've happened by now, which is a crushing disappointment. To have spent so many years of my life dreaming of being an artist (even through the years when I wasn't practicing) and suddenly be forced to come to terms with the depressing reality is hard to take, but I don't want to spend the rest of my life holding myself back from getting a stable job and a normal life because of a yearning urge to fulfill a lifelong dream that I'm either not good enough for, or have already missed the boat with.