This is a personal question because at the moment I'm feeling lethargic, stupid, and slow. This is gonna be a rant but just skip to the bottom if you want the actual question.

How often do you just give up? When are the times when you just toss down the controller, or the pencil, or the fork and knife or whatever impliments you have, and just shout out "I don't give two pieces of manuer for this anymore"? What caused it? Was it the glaring masterpiece of someone who can do better than you at the specific task at hand in every way, put up right next to your piece of garbage? Was it your own criticizing mind, looking at what you've spent hours working on and realizing that there is pretty much no value to it whatsoever? Was it the knowledge that you could continue practicing, devoting your life to this one task, and nothing would ever come from it?

Right now I'm in a mixture of all three. I've spent two years now drawing and sketching. I've tried drawing practically everything; I've tried scenes, objects, poses, people, faces, colors, I've drawn a t-rex in a three piece suit telling police that the pile of bloody gore around him wasn't his fault. I've never been able to even afford a sketchbook until recently, so I always used printer paper. But now that the paper has value, I don't even use it.

Why is it that after two years of drawing, that I can barely draw a straight line? I'm almost absolutely sure that before I began to draw I could make a decent circle, now I'm lucky if I can get the bare outline of a circle by gyrating my wrist on the paper. If I've devoted the past few months just to learn how to draw a hand correctly in one position, why is it that I have to give my paper to a girl two years younger than I am so that I can get a hand that doesn't look crafted by a three-year old with legos? Why is it that after all this practice the best I can do is make a trapezoid, tack on an odd thumb that's too big, and then make spaggetthi for fingers?

After all the practice, and all the hiding my stuff from friends, I sit down in my room and draw for an hour straight. I look at it when I'm finished and decide that it's ok at best. I then go online and look at pornography, and the pornography was made with better care and done so much better than what I did.

It's not a good feeling to know that pornography has more going for it than anything you've done.

Through the years I've seen improvement. I can sort of draw a lizard's head now, although most people would say that it's a wolf (happened about five times now, dunno why.) I've definitely gotten better after a while from my practice, but up to a certain point it seems to have begun to reverse it's effects. The things I draw now look worse than the things I've posted here, and I've no idea why.


tl;dr : For some reason my drawing skills have gotten worse, and seeing as how they weren't very good to begin with after two years of practice I'm about ready to give up entirely. It seems like the things people do just because they are bored here are twelve hundred times better than the things I spend hours practicing on.
Is there something that can motivate me to draw, that would make me want to try and get better? Whenever I see someone's work that looks good I just want to give up.