What is it that frustrates me so much when I'm drawing and makes me feel like I am destined to forever be stuck in amateur hell? I attempt to find them.
Struggle 1: The missing thing
An artist never knows when the art is complete.
It always feels like something is missing. A finishing touch that will make a difference to an otherwise regular, uninspiring drawing.
When you can't find what that is, you will be left feeling wanting, dissatisfied.
An unhealthy spiral of negative feedback to end up in, if you are not willing to make compromises and try again.
Struggle 2: The breaking flaw
There will always be something in your artwork that could make or break your entire piece.
Incorrect anatomy, false perspective, unfilled colors, "wrong" decisions. A single mistake down the line could be the difference between getting attention or getting scrolled off.
Depends on whether or not attention matters to you, but that's besides the point. Not bothering to fix things early on or even being aware of things needing to be fixed is what's holding you back from being far greater than you could be.
Struggle 3: The lacking identity
This is exclusively a me problem that I could not easily put to words.
I don't feel like I have an identity for my artworks. Most ideas solely come from external means, be it a song, an aesthetic, things I find interesting in the moment.
It makes my artworks a sporadic series of experimentation, hoping something would stick.
I don't feel like its a problem, nor do I feel like its a good thing. I certainly gain a lot of knowledge and versatility to work on anything, but eventually, I will have to find myself in my works.
...
These are the things I that I tried being aware of as I go through a particular drawing.
At times I get very dissatisfied with how things were going, but I realized that I just need to keep going, slowly fixing the little things, and encounter happy accidents, and discover approaches that I wouldn't normally go through.
And when the art is done, I was left speechless at how I ended up here, with a wonderful masterpiece I could call my own.
And at that moment, all the struggles that I felt earlier seems to have dissipated.

Struggling in Amateur Hell