Lately, however, I've found myself not listening as much. Found myself telling them to sit down and shut the hell up, in fact. Ignoring them when they say I'm making things overly complex, that the composition is off balance, that a pose is goofy, stiff, or makes for a bad silhouette. Lately I've been deciding what I want to draw, and to hell with 'em if it's cliche or pastiche or fichu or any one of a dozen other foreign words.
Maybe this means my drawings are getting worse, that my skills are retrograding. I'm certainly not breaking any new ground or anything. Tell you what though: I'm having more fun. I remember a time when I would draw for hours at a time for the sheer hell of it, not as an assignment or as an exercise or practice, but for the joy of scratching a mark onto the surface of something. I kept a lot of my old drawings, and when I look back at them now they're pretty terrible. Derivative 90's comic book stuff for the most part, cringe-worthy things that the voices in my head snort at and will certainly never be posted here.
Man, did I have a good time drawing them though. And I won't find the fun again listening to the cranky buggers in my skull.
