Uncomfortable

2023-04-12 18:04

While AutoModerator explained why this community isn't the right place for this question (and recommended some other options for it), I did want to mention one thing in response.

It's hard to say in what form the skills you'd developed when you were younger still linger - whether simply dormant and something you can awake to some extent, or rusted away from the years of disuse. And unfortunately, I don't think you'll really ever be able to look back in hindsight to answer that question either. After all - you won't really know if what you learn now is simply you building up from scratch, or if you're filling in the gaps from whatever is left over from before.

What I can say however is that if you can choose between looking at it one way or the other, it will be far more beneficial to you and to your own growth to look at it as though you are starting from a blank slate. Ultimately if the past skills you'd developed are still present, they'll help you progress more quickly, but you'll still be following the same path, building up solid fundamentals and progressing from there.

Conversely, if you worry about recapturing what you recall of your past (which may be accurate, or it may not be, as memory itself is fairly unreliable especially if you're going back a decade and more), you will feel more inclined to skip steps, to judge whether or not you need to invest time in one area or another, in the hopes that those prior skills will "reawaken". In the long run, it just results in a lot more wasted time.

My situation is different from yours in a lot of ways, so there isn't a lot I can offer based on my own experience (although much of what I've said is also influenced by the thousands of students I've taught), but there is some small overlap. I drew a ton in my preteens and my teen years. While I wouldn't say I was impressive by any stretch, it pretty much was as it is with all things - if you put time into something that other people don't, you'll probably develop well enough to be impressive to those others. I didn't really "practice", but rather spent that time drawing whatever caught my fancy, or chasing whatever fleeting glimpse of inspiration I could, but I definitely improved over the years... just not in a very consistent or reliable manner.

I abandoned the possibility of pursuing art as a career pretty early on and went more towards game development and programming, but I never did stop drawing as a hobby. It wasn't until I'd graduated and started working in my field, that really started to feel that pursuing a career as an illustrator or a concept artist was what I wanted. But it was a goal I felt entirely ill-equipped for. Approaching drawing as I had up until that point (just doing whatever I felt like, no exercises, no structure) gave me the impression that I had hit my ceiling, and that I wouldn't really get past it. I also have aphantasia (the inability to conjure mental imagery in one's "mind's eye" - not something I'll expand on here but I did make this video for the Proko YouTube channel that explains it further), which further made me question whether this was simply the best I could do.

Looking back on it now, I realize that I simply wasn't approaching learning correctly (in that I wasn't really trying to learn, I was trying to perform, I was trying to produce, and I never allowed myself to do the things I found boring and uninteresting at the time). But that's simply the path I ended up taking, and I do feel that I simply wasn't ready to go back to the basics, to swallow my ego, and to accept that what I'd done wasn't really what I could be doing if I really wanted to pursue that goal. At least, not until that point in my life, when I was seriously considering this career change.

Ultimately I did change how I was approaching things, and through a combination of structured self-study initially while working full-time to save up, followed by six months at a school across the continent under the instruction of respected instructors (this was back in 2013/2014, when online training wasn't as developed as it is now), I was able to fundamentally restructure how I approached the work, and learned the skills that would allow me to contribute to a team as a concept artist, ultimately leading to being hired before the end of 2014.

Bringing this back around to your situation, what I was doing for the first decade prior to that shift, is similar to what you might be inclined to do if you look at it as relearning the skills you feel you had before. It's more likely to lead to cutting corners, to skipping things that may well be important, and to ultimately make you take far more time than you strictly might otherwise require. Conversely, approaching it from a blank slate and accepting that in order to develop the skills you need to concept out your own game, means accepting that a good bit of the process isn't going to be fun, there will be a lot of boring things involved, but that ultimately that's OK and you'll get through it.

One thing I would advise against however is setting a specific deadline for your project, or at least doing so right now. There's a lot of unknown unknowns - you don't know how long it'll take to learn each individual skill you need to build this whole thing out, what the project itself might entail in its entirety, and how long all of that will take. There's nothing wrong with that at all, I think it's an excellent thing to set out a project and gradually learn all it involves - but it is important not to give yourself a reason to rush. That's pretty much the biggest issue my students run into - they come in with deadlines and goals, and all I'm teaching them are the core fundamentals that'll get them started towards learning the more interesting stuff they're actually interested in. But even this takes 5-6 months at its quickest, if done as instructed (although lots of people are doing it alongside full time jobs, families, etc. so it can easily turn into a year or even two). Those students who try to decide how long they're going to take end up rushing through the work, having to go back and redo sections, and ultimately just take longer than they otherwise needed to.

Focus on doing it all to the best of your current ability at every stage. That current ability will grow over time, but trying to dictate how long it should take, how it's all going to work out, etc. but holding ourselves to deadlines we invented when we had no real sense of what that task or project would require of us means taking on an amount of authority that our existing knowledge does not support.

Anyway, I hope that helped give context to your concern. Best of luck on your pursuits.