NevynS

Dear deviantart,

Returning after a 3 year art break and similarly long break from the site, I find the utter lack of any kind of mass editor absurd. I'd like to be able to mass select and actually delete or sort my own works, without having to click through every individual piece in my gallery. I don't want to lose the horrible ugly anime teenage art completely, it's part of my past and I learned from it, but I'd like to delete a lot of it, not just stash it. I'd like to easily just click through to sort it into my gallery folders, and I'd like to have the arrange feature in my main featured page not just within folders. I'd like to be able to say, select an entire category like I can do in my stash area, and then actually delete it. (scraps and old teenage poetry can all go lol)

I'm also horrified, having finally figured out where to find all the groups I'm in, (I had to add the group widget to my profile and go from there) that I have to go to each page, click leave and then two more dialogue boxes confirming I want to leave the group. Why not a private 'manage my groups' feature, where I can see which groups I'm in and leave like, I don't know, about 80/90 of them all at once? This is taking forever, I don't want to see the same things I did in my teens and it's a huge mess to clean up this page so I can get back into the site. Similarly cleaning up my watch list, what a pain, though at least I can mass select there, I have no way of knowing who they are without visiting each page anyway, a small window popping up with a preview of their page would go a long way there.

Just some ideas to make the site a bit more functional.

Hello everyone, it's been a very long time and I find myself surprised to be posting here again, but here I am. Nothing is quite as convenient as dA for sharing and searching art, and after a nearly continuous 3 year hiatus from art, thinking I had given it up forever, I've decided to take it up again. 

I found myself in the trap that a lot of young artists find themselves in, I wanted to draw comic, anime inspired art and neglected the fundamental skills I should have been paying attention to in art class, because they were difficult and boring. Then I found myself in a rut, a bad one. I just couldn't see any improvement in my art for years. So I finally, after 3 years of almost never drawing anything, I decided to quit. I realized it was ok to let go of the ideas and goals I had around art, and I freed myself entirely from the trap by deciding I'd give it up, and that it was ok. I finally made my peace with being an artistic failure, as I had perceived myself for a long time, and in that peace I found room to grow.

I found myself missing art a few months later. I have bought a couple paid lessons and I'm doing some free ones, and I'm focusing solely on improving my fundamental art skills, in all areas, before considering stylization. (Which I still default to when doodling and that's ok too, but it's not my current focus.)  I realized I had some serious burnout, largely because I had such unrealistic expectations of myself, and I wasn't doing the less fun work that might have brought me closer to those goals I had set.

So I'll be sharing some art again, now and then, but focusing on realism, technical skill and accuracy, values, color theory, and generally drawing what I see when I look at the world, and I hope that I'll still find the critique here that I found so helpful in growing as an artist early on in my drawing days.

I know that I want to learn to paint finally, and focus entirely on traditional media for the forseeable future. I want to do portraits, in the style of the old masters, and more too, but that's the thing that sort of made me want to do art in the first place, so when I looked at where I went wrong, I think part of it was straying too far from what inspired me in the first place as a girl. I'll be improving my drawing skills, and learning to paint effectively for the first time (I've done like 3 painting assignments ever in art classes in school) and I'm also playing with colored pencils, and I still have my copics, but my current focus is on drawing in pencils, and learning to paint. I have a set of goauche to play with.

If you followed me for fandom and anime type stuff, way back in the day, don't feel bad if you want to unfollow me, I don't plan to do a lot of that right now. Maybe someday I'll do more, when I know how to draw it 'properly' before stylizing it.

"NevynS, where have you been the past year" you ask? Well my friends, I got married over the summer, a new laptop but an old off brand tablet turned me off digital art, and I admittedly haven't been drawing much. Just ordered a new tablet though, an actual wacom, and got a subscription to photoshop (their new model is odd but there was a deal so at $10 a month it's not bad) and I look forward to making some new art soon.

Also I've more or less been playing Dragon Age nonstop for the past 5 months. Expect lots of that.