how do you feel like youre making progress?

[thecatscanvas]

I have been thinking about this more recently both with the turn of the new year in the US and because I've gotten a small injury and have needed to be resting for the past few days.

I feel like I am continuously being put off my art. I'm either busy and exhausted, or letting myself get distracted. I want to improve and have been studying, trying to hit my weak points one by one, but I feel like I'm just pushing the boulder up the hill over and over again.

I'm getting visibly better at my art, but I don't really feel like I have much to show for it besides piles of sketches. There are opportunities in my area to share my art, but I either don't feel confident enough, or like I have a big enough portfolio. I don't have any series of work, because my attention has been so scattered.

I've tried to make a spreadsheet, lists, plans, etc. I've started journaling about it. I still feel like even if I become technically skilled enough, I'm just going to be stuck in a cycle of never making anything of actual substance because it feels too overwhelming to start. It's not the planning process that is the issue, its the fear that I'm never going to finish anything in the end.

I made myself stop caring about progress for the last year or so, because I needed to unlearn and relearn a lot about why I make art and to build a healthier relationship with it. But now that I want to do it again, I don't know how to keep track of everything. I always feel so stagnant with my art. I don't have a lot of artist friends, and most of them work in different mediums. Even though I never mind when they show off their work, I always feel like I'm doing something wrong by showing mine. I feel like there's something stopping me from engaging with my art with others, as if I'm somehow not allowed to. So I always end up hovering around the edges of art communities and never reaching out. It feels very lonely.

I just feel like I'm throwing pieces of myself into the void forever.

[Corrupted Unicorn]

Ooooh, I think I have experiences and strategies to share about this 

I'm pretty much like you right now, getting better at art but only having a pile of sketches to show for it. My mind is also very scattered and likes to jump from project to project, from idea to idea, the same way a squirrel jumps from tree branch to tree branch.

Just about recently I figured out things that work for me. I'll share them, in hopes if not all at least some of them work for you too 

For me, it's very important to visualize progress. I can't ask to my mind to keep track of how many days have I been doing X on top of everything else it does!  I tried journalling about it, but for me it didn't work because I don't tend to read my past journal entries. I read that the key to many things is to make them very obvious and simple

So I began putting post-its on my walls. One post-it stating the habit I am trying to form, and next to it I add a post-it everyday if I accomplish the task related to the habit: kinda like a progress bar in a videogame  These post-its are blank, easy to take down and interchange.

The key to this is to start small. If what you want is to read more, read one page a day. If, in my case, I want to animate, the bare minimum is always one frame. For "static" art, it could be one "step" of the process (sketch-lineart-flat colors-rendering-backgrounds-etc...). This doesn't mean you are limited to just "one", you can always do more if you feel like it  But at least for me, this works, because
1- Once I get around to doing one I end up in the same state of mind that makes me want to keep at it, and instead of just one frame I end up doing a good chunk of the animation
2. If it's one of those days where you aren't feeling as proactive (specially taking into account you're recovering from injury!), one is enough to earn you that one post-it, that one point in the progress bar.

If you manage two weeks in a row (14 post-its), you can crank the lever a little higher: two pages. Two frames. Two steps of the art-making process.
If you skip a day, you take down all the "progress-bar" post-its and start again. It was a bit hard for me to do this when it happened to me, but it was good because I understood it didn't mean I failed. It meant I'm not ready to take it "to the next level" just yet.

 If you try to start big and do a lot in too little time with no flexibility, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Or at least, that's my experience and I hope I'm not the only one  . But if you start this small, you slowly convince yourself that you can do stuff consistently, and you're achieving things along the way 

This is something I adopted about last month, and I think it's my best "system" to get myself to do things so far. I'm two thirds/halfway into my animation project thanks to it, among other good habits  It's cheap and it won't ruin your walls 

I have other systems that compliment this one, such as rewarding myself by playing little bits of videogames as a reward (more about that here) and gamifying the habits as well (when I mean "level up", i kinda mean it like a game, I have also a little creature drawn on each "habit post-it" that I draw "evolutions" on everytime I get two weeks in a row on that specific habit)

I don't know if this is the kind of answer you expected, but I hope it helps! I'm very passionate about self-improvement and I like sharing my strategies in hopes it helps other people, as well