Ask Lemmy

I enjoy the process naturally, but it's not joy as in watching a movie or eating some dessert or sex.

It's enjoyment comparable to playing a game, but not quite either. It's challenging, you need to sharpen your skills, you can fuck up at any moment, you can fuck up and not even notice. You will, in fact. And that's just the hands on part, I'm not talking about the ideas or even the sharing and communicating. Which is also tied to it.

For me the most challenging part is overcoming inertia to get started. Finding that motivation when you are depressed is very hard. Once I do the rest unfolds on its own. Problem with motivation is that it's different for everyone and very elusive. For me, I need to either get paid, or have a practical reason to do the art (ie. Someone needs it for a specific reason or cause), or have an audience that engages with what I do. Feedback, back and forth. Healthy competition. Those things used to exist for me online a decade ago, but has been eroding ever since AI boomed, also platforms have been getting worse and worse, designed to curate a feed for you with little to no focus on the comments or community behind the work. Basically I thrive and find motivation in places where I can engage with my audience more personally and become others' audience in that way, where discovery is up to me and not an algorithm that automatically ranks things for you, where I can see people's reactions to my work as opposed to a number of views or likes.

I've been trying to find an online group of people to keep motivation up, something with tasks you are held accountable to similar to a class but with no accreditations or curriculum. So far I haven't been lucky. Things seem to be either courses or prompts given out at large on popular media platforms. Neither works for me. One lacks the peers or is too expensive, the other lacks the interpersonal aspect.

Anyway, end of rant, but imo your motivation for visual art shouldn't be too different from your motivation for writing, whatever that is. I don't write fiction because I know for a fact I have no interest (not consistently at least) in exploring a myriad narrative plots or characters backstories , or to polish my prose, or to figure out how to best keep interest while narrating something. These do occur to me from time to time but I'm not driven to exploit that vein. It's different with designs though, where I do. I look at different materials and I'm compelled to experiment with them at least once. The list goes on.

If shame or shyness is the only thing stopping you, remember, you don't need to publish anything you don't want to. Start, see how you feel, remember you can always revise work later on.