#sometimes ill just spend like two days drawing a funny meme with my ocs

[citrispace]

how do u keep the motivation? i want to get better so i like my art better but i genuinely just... do not enjoy drawing in my current state T_T feels like a chore

This got a lot longer than I was expecting so I'm going to put it under a read more!

Unless you're drawing for a job, art is all about fun!! If you're not having fun with what you're doing absolutely change it up. I've gone through periods where I just hated what I was drawing and honestly if you don't enjoy it, it's hard to improve!

When I'm in a rut I just go nuts and start drawing stuff completely out of my norm. If you normally do really polished art, do a whole bunch of pen on paper scribble drawings. Try abstract stuff. The first step is to just loosen up and have fun with art again. I go through phases sometimes where I can't stand lineart, so I just make lineless art. Figure out what you don't enjoy about the process and scrap it! Or, if you're really feeling burnt out, it's okay to take a break entirely. I've had long stretches (sometimes a month or so) where I drew very little, and returning to art at the end of the break felt refreshing in a way it would never have without that break.

Only work consciously on "improvement" when you're enjoying making art. Studies, gesture drawings, anatomy stuff, etc is always great, but always work on stuff you genuinely enjoy, as well. Turn your studies into your own characters! Doodle fanart on the margins! Drawing what makes you happy is the best way to be happy with your art.

And as hard as it can be, try your best not to compare your art to others. It's so easy to get discouraged. Your art is great because you made it with your own hands! Where your skill is now is not where it will be in five years! If you see someone's art you love, don't think "I'll never be this good", try to figure out what it is that you love so much about the art, and try to work on that. And not everything you do yourself has to be shown to an audience! I do lots of art just for myself or friends that doesn't get posted here, and I feel better experimenting with styles or making goofy bad art, because nobody will see it but me.

I'm sorry you're feeling frustrated with your art - it's a horrible feeling, especially when it's something you love, or have loved to do in the past. I hope some of this might have helped, and that you can get to a point again soon where you genuinely enjoy drawing. ❤️

#not art #asks #im not the best with advice but #enjoying the process of art is something ive struggled with a LOT over the time ive been drawing #sometimes i wonder why i draw at all!! #in the end. i enjoy making characters. i enjoy drawing things to make people laugh #art is the way i connect with the world. but thats just my reason #and everyone has a different reason for creating! #but regardless of the reason enjoying creating is the most important thing #sometimes ill just spend like two days drawing a funny meme with my ocs #and its the most fulfilling thing in the world #i hope the heart at the end doesnt seem condescending i was trying to be sincere #im just terrible at ending my sentences #tldr i love you anon and i empathize i am wishing you the best #the joy will come back to you some day #it always comes in goes in cycles #long post

[mstigergun]

OC Kiss Week, “the temple of pride”

OC Kiss Week, Day Three! (”A Surprise Kiss”)

ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE, JACK. So, Leonid Trevelyan and Tristran Lavellan (who I’ve chosen to run with in his alternate incarnation as Tristran Samahl from the Companion meme @neurotrophisfactors did -- linked earlier). On the one hand, this was hilarious to write, because Leonid is a bag of trash. On the other hand, Tristran is pure and good and Leonid is a corrupting force, and so I also felt slightly bad. Especially because of the blowjob joke at the end. OH WELL.

Set pre-Haven. All of the liberties taken with plot, lore, etc., etc., because I do what I want.

[~2500 words, because whoops]

the temple of pride

In his short and illustrious years, throughout which he has acquired no small amount of worldly knowledge, Leonid has come to realize several things.

The first is that everyone with a set of eyes and even a vague sense of what’s bound to be a good time will want to kiss him. Which is sensible, really: he’s always been wonderfully handsome, and he’s a great deal of fun, and even if the poor, beleaguered parties involved only manage to wrest a single kiss from him –

Ah, well. The stuff glorious memories are made of.

For them, really. Leonid can’t be bothered to remember all of the people he’s fucked, much less the innumerable number of people – from every blessed and wretched corner of Thedas – he’s kissed. In taverns or on street corners, in servants’ kitchens or on ballroom floors.

Once, he even kissed a city guard who thought Leonid’s public drunkenness was a little too drunken and much too public. Which had been all well and good: kissing while being very nearly arrested turned out to be as effective as a key to a lock in getting him out of trouble. Especially when kisses were followed with a terribly unsubtle mention of his family name and an additional… private moment or two.

So, yes. He understands that everyone would like to kiss him. Well, everyone with even a scrap of good taste.

The second thing Leonid realizes is that circumstance makes even the most circumspect of men a great deal more free in their affections. No one likes to be uncomfortable – which is why, in part, he’d been able to so efficiently fuck his way through Haven. A new man each night – sometimes more than one! – with what amounted to very little of Leonid’s usual eyelash fluttering and clever lines (or blunt suggestions that are inappropriate for any sort of public space, which has never stopped Leonid before – not once in his life).

When men are sad, or cold, or in unpleasant circumstance of any sort, Leonid is, he knows, the balm to that particular wound. He is a breath of fresh air, a sweet moment of amnesia and a reminder of much better things. It is, he has come to think, perhaps one of his life’s purposes: to be so truly spectacular a lover that he actually improves lives.

Why else would Andraste bless him with his face, or his particular talents? Her plan for the Herald was simple enough – save the world from being torn apart – and so Her plan for Leonid – save the world from being boring and save many men from not having a truly spectacular lover – might be less grand, true, but it is certainly no less important.

So, first, he understands that everyone would be fortunate to kiss him. Second, that misery – miserable places, wretched circumstance, ill-fitting clothes, a bad hand of cards – makes his particular abilities rather more effective.

And if ever he has been to a miserable place, the Forbidden Oasis is it: an Orlesian hellhole of rasping sand and too-bright skies that make sleeping off even part of a hangover impossible. The tunnels and pathways that twist around the oasis itself make as much sense as this whole blighted escapade, which is to say none. He nearly brings his own life to an inglorious halt when traversing a particularly rickety platform, and is only saved by the elf who’d been sent along to parse out whatever it is Solas’s stupid shards are for.

“Careful,” says the elf, his broad hand firm on Leonid’s bicep.

Leonid squints at him, his heart still fluttering from how very near he came – again – to falling from a ridiculous height and presumably breaking one of his limbs. The sun hangs in the sky behind Tristran, his ears a pair of broad and pointed shadows.

“I hardly need to be careful if you’re going to hover behind me and make sure I don’t die,” Leonid says, shrugging off the touch. “Which is, I can only assume, what we’re doing, as we haven’t gotten any closer to that blighted shard –” with an accusatory finger pointed to the glitter of light above them, on a platform that must require some sort of magic, or wings, or perhaps a gryphon, to reach – “in the past two hours of wandering around this Maker-forsaken dust pit.”

Tristran blinks his eyes, which, Leonid has to distantly admit, are a rather lovely golden brown, even in the shadows of the cliffs around them. Then, with a breezy sigh, “You caught me. It’s true: the shards are a ruse. The Herald really just wanted you to wander around, cursing and complaining, and I’m just here to keep you safe. With, you know,” he reaches one hand down, taps it against his leg, “my agility.”

Leonid snorts despite himself. He'd hate for the man to think he's funny, even if he is, but the endless hours of sunshine have addled Leonid’s brain and left him without his usual stoic good sense. A battle lost, then.

Leonid half-turns, casting a look toward the path below them. It had been full of Ventari earlier, before the Qunari mercenaries had cleared it out. “It’s why I’m testing you, with the nearly plunging to my death. Keep you on your toes. All five of them.”

“You’re too kind, Trevelyan. A paragon.” His voice is dry, but when Leonid glances back, Tristran’s mouth is tugged up at one corner. Amused.

“Yes, yes,” Leonid says with a wave of his hand, a little flush of pleasure prickling between his shoulders. “It’s not easy being this virtuous, you know. I can’t expect you to understand. All that time spent reading and writing reports – why, it’s a good thing you were paired with me today. How else would you understand what dutiful acquiescence looks like, when your nose is always buried in a book?”

“I can’t possibly imagine.”

A pause, as the pair of them look around the canyon, the curling pathways, the series of platforms and ladders that ultimately go nowhere..

“Maybe that tunnel?” Tristran suggests, leaning past Leonid to point at the dark space below them. And while the shadows are cool around them, he’s warm, as if he’s been baked in sunshine. Cured with firelight.

Leonid suppresses a little shiver. Instead, he nods. “So long as you deal with the spiders that will inevitably come crawling out of every blighted shadow. Do you know what spider innards do to my skin?”

And so onwards they go.

And although the elf doesn’t complain while they climb up and down what must be a hundred ladders, or while he does, indeed, kill a great number of giant spiders, or when they eventually retrieve the shard only to find that their way up cannot also be a way down and so spend the next hour sort out how to return to camp without, say, leaping on a passing giant and riding it toward the tents –

Well. Leonid knows what suppressed pain looks like. A tight mouth, twitching downward at its sides. Pale skin, even beneath all those freckles. Short and sharp breaths as they make their final walk toward camp. The merest hint of a limp.

And, really, Leonid thinks as he downs his ration of wine and sneaks around past the requisitions officer to get a second, he’s passable handsome, Tristran. Rather broad-shouldered for an elf. And he laughed at Leonid’s joke earlier by the fire, and so he must have at least an iota of good sense.

Leonid watches the researcher across the camp, feigning interest in the story one of the soldiers is regaling him with and being very careful to observe Tristran out of the corner of his eye as he downs his slightly sour wine. Tristran’s legs are stretched before him, one hand massaging the muscle just above his knee, the other paging thoughtfully through some dreadfully dusty tome.

“And so,” continues the soldier, “I told Bess not to fuss around with those ladders, not if she wanted us to be able to find our way back, but you know what Bess is like –”

“Hm.” He reaches out and plucks the soldier’s tin cup from her hand, replacing it with his empty vessel. “So you’ve said. In any case, I’ll be off. Things to do, you know. Letters. And things.”

She blinks up at him, but he’s on his feet and across the camp before her complaints about his thievery can reach him. Leonid edges around several of the small fires, sipping at his commandeered wine, until he draws to Tristran’s side.

“Just let me finish this passage,” says the elf, before Leonid can so much as get out a word. His finger – calloused, Leonid knows, and warm – traces a line of text, the skin of his forehead creasing with a thoughtful frown. Then, quiet and under his breath and said entirely and unacceptably to himself, “The spirit calmed, then elgar’arla, but…”

Maker help this sad elf. If ever there was a man in need of cheering, who could stand to be prised away from his blighted research and do something more fun than reading about lost elven temples and artifacts, then it is Tristran Samahl. And Leonid Trevelyan is quite naturally the one to do it. The fact that he rather likes the strength in Tristran’s hands, and the shape of his shoulders, and also is rather intrigued by his expressive mouth, is entirely beside the point.

“I need you for a moment,” says Leonid, plain. “Urgently.”

That wins his attention. “Of course,” Tristran says, closing his book and standing. The usual smile – slow and amused – is replaced with a more serious expression. Concerned. Noble, even.

Disgusting. If Leonid weren’t so inclined to be charitable, he might just shrug off the entire interaction.

But the night is young, and the next day bound to be as miserable as the last, and since the Qunari mercenaries are camped on the other side of the canyon – not, mind you, that he’s looking to repeat…

Leonid tilts his head to the side of camp, past a shallow brook to a small copse. Trees are few and far between in the wretched place, but do provide enough cover for a great number of things. As Leonid well knows. They splash across the water, climbing the small embankment to the trees, which curl into gnarled shadows around them.

Above, the sky is draped with stars – bright and cool after the blistering heat of the day. Leonid downs the last of his wine, tossing the cup at one of the trees. It pings off a low branch and thuds on the ground.

Tristran stands in the shadows, lined in the very distant light of the fire. His eyebrows inch up on his forehead. “So,” he starts.

“Shut up,” says Leonid, and then he steps forward and kisses Tristran, firm and certain. One hand catches the front of Tristran’s shirt, the other tucking itself firmly against the hot skin of his neck. For a moment, the world around them goes still – blessedly still – and the misery of the oasis dissolves into skin against skin, and warmth, and familiarity.

And just as Leonid is thinking that, even with the wooden leg, Tristran could very probably pin Leonid up against one of these trees, the elf pulls back.

“Right,” says Tristran, a little breathless. Leonid’s hand falls from his neck, and he squints at the elf in the dark. “This was, uh… Urgent?”

It’s said skeptically enough that Leonid feels heat flare underneath his skin, and not in the pleasant way.

“Well,” says Leonid. “Your leg hurts.”

The eyebrows crawl ever higher. The elf is all forehead. And shoulders, admittedly. And freckles, and broad hands. “It does that sometimes.” A beat, then, “Wait, are you – is this pity?”

“What?” asks Leonid, sharp. He scowls, blinking rapidly. “No, not at all! I don’t care about anyone else enough to pity them! But you’re in pain, and I’m bored because we’re stuck in the blighted desert in Orlais and –”

“You’re bored,” repeats Tristran.

Which is when Leonid remembers that, yes, while everyone wants to kiss him, and while people who are feeling especially down on their luck especially want to kiss him, there is a third truth he’s gleaned over the course of his illustrious youth: that things will invariably go sideways on him. And in this case sideways means kissing someone who doesn’t want to kiss you back, and then insulting him.

“Well, what,” Leonid cries, his hand dropping away. He folds his arms across his chest, something sour and stupid coiling beneath his ribs. Something fluttering and uncomfortable, like too many cups of coffee in the morning. “Did you expect me to say that I hauled you over here because I’ve fallen desperately in love with you after a day in the desert? That you’ve charmed me with your stupid books and jokes and swordplay?”

“Ah, no,” says Tristran, dry. “But then I wasn’t expecting you to haul me over here for a kiss either. Why? Have you fallen desperately in love with me after I valiantly saved your life?”

Leonid’s drawn half of a sharp breath with which to unleash a string of protestations when –

The elf’s stupid eyes are twinkling.

He finds this funny. He thinks –

“Oh, fuck off,” says Leonid, though the venom’s gone out of it. “I thought you could use a distraction.”

“As I said,” says Tristran, his lips in a lopsided grin as he leans easily against one of the trees, “you’re a paragon. So generous and thoughtful. Really, if I had to pick a word to describe you, it would be giving.”

Leonid snorts, rolling his eyes. But then –

It’s true that discomfort makes all the world more likely to seek comfort, and Leonid is unshockingly included in that. And the Forbidden Oasis is absolutely wretched, without anything resembling a redeeming trait beyond the fact that it’s not cold, and he hates wandering around looking for shards, and he hates how often he finds his thoughts settling on the Qunari mercenary camp, and –

His stare falls on Tristran again, steady. Thoughtful. “I can be giving,” Leonid says, slow. “And you did save my life today, even if it was mostly for your own battered sense of self-worth.”

“Right,” says Tristran, with a breathy laugh. “Really battered. I’m just standing over here, feeling sorry for myself. I wonder if anyone could help.”

Which is how Leonid ends up kissing him again. After all, one doesn’t just go around ignoring one’s calling.

Besides, if there is also a fourth thing Leonid knows, it’s this: when it comes to correcting a rare misstep, moving ever onward for the sake of his goals – namely, more men in his bed and fewer persistent thoughts of people he shouldn’t be thinking about – is always the better plan. After all, Leonid’s never had a hard time swallowing his pride when other, better things are on the table. Or in the desert. Whichever.

#ockiss17 #oc kiss week #tristran lavellan #leonid trevelyan #tana writes