Hey everyone,

I last updated this blog in May 2024. What a long time! I am going to be honest: I have not been very active with my art since then for two reasons. First, life got a little stressful last year, and I have not had much energy after work to do anything creative; I have even been very slow with my science comic project, psychoSoph, which you can read on my other website.

The other reason, though, was that I overworked myself on my art when I was still uploading this blog regularly. At the time, I tried to maintain a weekly upload schedule to soothe the algorithm. Because back when I started the blog, it was gradually growing and receiving a lot of attention. At some point during my doctoral studies, it became difficult to uphold that, though, and I started uploading only every two weeks. The impressions on the blog immediately collapsed, and when I had the mind space to pick up the weekly schedule again, they did not recover.

At the time, I thought that had been my fault. That I had not maintained the blog diligently enough. I eventually realized that this was happening to many blogs. It was the time when Instagram was gaining so much popularity that the online art community migrated there in droves. The era of the blog was over. But in the meantime, it sent me into a spiral of forcing myself to produce more and more, just to have something to upload, in the hope that the blog would regain its following. At some point, art became a chore. My heart was not in it anymore. I was thoroughly burned out by it, and I had no ideas left. So, I quit the blog and the social media channels I was maintaining with it.

Many times since then, I wanted to post here again, but I could not motivate myself to. That bothered me. Art had been an integral part of my life since I was 11 years old. It had always served as an outlet. Now I was having imposter syndrome whenever I picked up the pencil. At the same time, I got immensely bored by my own drawings, and I could not – and still cannot fully, to be honest – put my finger on why both of this is after more than two decades of passionate artmaking.

About a month ago, it started to bother me so much that I forced myself to draw at least a small face in my sketchbook every day. I have not been entirely diligent with it, but it kick-started something in me. At the same time, I decided I needed to change my approach to my art a little because many things started to bother me about it, too. The biggest is that I am not as good with color as I want to be, and if you scroll down the blog, you will see that I have avoided it almost completely for a long time.

The thing is, you need to suck at something first to become good at it. But when you are already on a higher skill level, sucking at something again is immensely frightening and frustrating.

Anyhow, I decided I just have to power through this. I will try to make more experiments with my art style in the future, one of which you can see here. A colleague recommended the KOH-I-NOOR mechanical pencils with 2mm colored lead, and I have been drawing with them a lot since then instead of with my usual 0,5mm one. Also, I will not be posting on a regular schedule anymore. Soph’s Sketchpad is a blog where I upload private art first and foremost. I want to have more fun with it. Do something out of my comfort zone, explore media I don’t usually use, and maybe make the fan art that I am not allowing myself to draw, damn it! 😄

This means I am not sure when I will upload next time, but I hope I will come up with interesting things and will be more creative if I do not stress myself this time. I hope you will be here for the journey!