Here's why you need to draw what makes you happy.
In 2008, I was hanging out in the fandom community for House MD over on Livejournal. I made little House/Wilson pencil drawings. They were tame and simplistic, nothing like the supercharged digital photorealism I make now, but they were nonetheless realistic and quite popular.
Basically, I had fun making harmless art and sharing it with my friends.
That changed when a group of women—women older than I was at the time—took offense to the praise and attention I was getting for my little drawings and decided to make an "evidence blog." They gathered my drawings and overlaid them on screencaps I used for reference, and they created an elaborate exposé describing how I used Photoshop filters, tracing, and other tricks to fake my skills.
It was total bullshit, but thus began a nearly 15 year struggle sharing art online in the face of enormous (and sometimes enormously absurd) harassment.
I make fan art and share it on social media, which means my art is often an avenue in for people who don't know anything about art. I catch the attention of people who never look at art. I catch the attention of people who think the characters I've drawn belong to them. I catch the attention of groups within fandom communities who are very possessive and protective of characters and actors. I also catch the attention of the actors themselves. Very publicly receiving that attention has at times made people upset and has made me a target.
I know what it means to make and share popular art online. That being said, I cannot possibly explain in a paragraph how much harassment there has been and how bad it has been. It would be too traumatic to write it all down or even to summarize. Suffice it to say, the more art I made, the better I got, the more praise and attention I received, and the more I was pushed around. Or pushed out entirely—isolated, abandoned, blamed, ignored, accused. One foot in fandom communities and one foot in art communities and belonging to neither.
I have deleted dozens of social media accounts because of harassment. I've wanted to kill myself many times. Much of that is now behind me. Some of it remains.
I've been making realistic art since I was a child, and hearing things like, "You traced" and "All you did was copy" and "Why did you draw that" and generally being treated as a threat or a fool or a liar is absolutely not new to me. I'm used to being asked if I cheated by my own elementary school teachers. I'm used to being bullied by resentful or jealous classmates. I'm used to being question, isolated, dehumanized, and put up on a pedestal by people who are happy to add a talented artist to their novel collection of people they want to show off but never wants to be friends with. I'm used to being disqualified from contests or denied reward because adults can't handle the insecurity they feel when a child is good at drawing. I'm used to hiding behind my dad at art shows while he explains how I didn't trace to adults who should know better. I'm used to thieves and stalkers.
I'm used to hearing every hyperbolic and dehumanizing remark there is. I grew steel in my spine as a child, and it's still there. I'm used to hearing hate, and I'm used to reactions like those from the women who made that exposure blog 15 years ago. I'm used to being made to feel guilty for doing what I love.
But no one has ever stopped me. Not once in 15 years, during the most mind-fucked and relentlessly terrorizing harassment, did I ever stop doing what I love. Not one time did I decide "They're right, and I should quit."
After receiving thousands and thousands (literally!) of cruel, stupid messages and struggling countless times just to get to the next day where there was no guarantee the hate wouldn't happen again, I'm still making the art I want to make for the reasons I want to make it.
Those bitches didn't win.
Draw what makes you happy.
