I've finally gotten the itch to draw again. Feels good.

Things have been going great at work, and I managed to create good designs and never looked too long at a blank page, but it was different at home. I hadn't felt motivated about anything for a while. Not just art, but other hobbies and projects as well. I'm not gonna dwelve too far into the details, but I went through a lot of self doubt.

I didn't think my comics were that good. I've always had some natural talent at it, and I still believe most of them are pretty funny and the ideas behind them are rather novel/unique, but as far as the art itself went, I wasn't feeling satisfied. Most of the comics are honestly, a mix of laziness and simply doing things wrong because I didn't know better. I created nice cartoon designs for the horror icons, yet could only draw them in so many poses and copy/past these poses every other panel. No thought went into the composition of each panel as I drew the characters separately most of the time and they didn't react well to each others poses and action, leaving most of the layouts to be cluttered messes. Garfield is copy/pasting at its best (worse?), but each drawing is clear and the actions read well. I've also done about every wrong step about actually creating the comics themselves, and used photoshop and illustrator wrong for this kind of work for a long time.

I lost a lot of interest about what was going on in the horror genre. The only thing I enjoyed anymore was seeing friends because I didn't feel like I wanted to commit into any other activity.

My relationship with my fiancée was strained, and bordered more on a toxic co-dependance than on love, and even though in the past I always hoped things would work out, after too many false promises and empty threats from her part, I decided to leave her.

Now that obviously didn't help the creative slump at first, but time heals all wounds, and I started to enjoy myself some more. I resumed the hobbies I had almost given up for so long. Playing hockey, watching movies, a little gaming and I actually started to show some commitment about learning how to draw well. Progress is slow but steady, and I've been doing visual studies and drawing cartoons in different style with actual compositions and lines of action, without losing my personal style which I guess you all find appealing, or else I wouldn't have so many people who read the comics.

Life is good now. I've met another girl, who is in no way needy/clingy, and she supports me in my hobbies and passions. Drawing became fun again instead of feeling like a chore, and by setting myself the goal of actually becoming good at it, I'm only gonna have more fun seeing my progress.

[link] John K.'s blog has been one of my inspirations to start doing this again. The guy is really amazing and he explains the fundamentals in a way that's easy to understand.


So, all in all, thank you for waiting through this "sabatical" of sorts, and The Slashers will be back sooner than later, hopefully looking better than ever.

At least halway decent.



Ciao!