This August, I broke my arm. More specifically, my wrist on my dominant hand while I was roller skating with some friends and I fell. As someone pursuing animation, you can see where this would cause problems. This was at a really inopportune time for me too because I was planning on creating a comic with over 200 panels by mid September for a contest I had no chance of winning, but that I still wanted to meet the deadline for. That idea was immediately crushed (although I do hope to come back to it once college apps are over and I actually have free time again). Speaking of college apps, I am trying to get into art programs for college, and breaking my arm horrified me because I had just come back from an art intensive and I was ready to make amazing stuff for portfolios. This injury didn't allow me to make much art, and what I did make looked something like this: Just this picture took me almost an hour, I was using a brush stabilizer to make my lines more smooth, and I was really trying just to make something, so I wasn't really employing a lot of design principles. With more time and more planning, I might have been able to make something slightly better, but it would have taken a lot of effort and still not produced work that I was really happy with. So what did I do instead? I took a break. My life became consumed by D&D (which did force me to do a little bit of drawing in terms of making maps and such, but overall, I was not making visual art nearly as much as I normally do.) I could have been working in 3Ds Max a bit more if I wanted to still make art, but I think at that point, I really needed the break. 3D art would just remind me that I couldn't draw 2D art, because at the time, I wanted to do a mixed media project that combines both (which is currently in the works. Stay tuned...) So D&D, world-building and designing my own game, as well as listening to other people's content became my main hobby, and since it was summer and with a broken arm I couldn't do much else, it became most of my life.
And it was great. It took away any feelings of being burnt out and got me excited to create again once I could use my wrist. I listened to The Adventure Zone, a popular D&D actual play podcast and it made me laugh and cry so much, and that really motivated me to keep working on storytelling because it reminded me of how powerful that can really be. I think having this break was tough for me, and did set me back a little while in terms of artistic improvement and assembling a portfolio, but in the end, it's something I've very grateful for because it helped me refocus.
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AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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