Good Thing I Stopped Drawing Haikyuu Art: a fanart retrospective

are you a hq fanartist? does twitter stress you out? yeah same hat friend but i died and was reborn as a naked babe etc so i'm going to talk about that here n___n

housekeeping: this is purely subjective. i send my best wishes to all hq artists. you are braver than the us marines

JANUARY
this was my first taste of ''clout'''. it's not very impressive from a technical standpoint. nothing's happening. i drew the background in 15 seconds. the contrast was so bad i posterized the whole thing, but it did numbers anyway because it was a Panel Redraw

so ok manga panel redraw kenma got like 1000 likes or something and a few thousand notes on tumblr but it didn't really register to me as an Event so i said fuck it and went back to drawing random shit that pleased me and doing stuff that i wasn't necessarily already very good at

but then i started seeing these really cute manga panels and i was like What If I Redrew Them....and eventually i was like What If I Redrew All Of Them because by now i had registered that my redraws often got anywhere from 2-4k likes. the math was starting to Get To Me

if you were following me in february-march-april you will probably remember the term 'manga panel redraw' cropping up a lot on my account because they were basically all i was doing. i drew 1 for every week's chapter. i opened redraw commissions. i talked about how fun they were

and how Helpful they could be to growing artists because i was Learning about furudate-sensei's style and about different Perspectives and ways to do the same thing, and this knowledge would be Useful for me going into my own, not-explicitly-referenced art

UNSURPRISINGLY, I WAS COMPLETELY WRONG

there were several reasons for this. one, the only panels i redrew were 3/4 or front-facing headshots. i was essentially drawing the same thing over and over again like a clown. two, i wasn't applying any of the headshot wisdom i'd learned

because i wasn't fucking drawing any non-referenced art to begin with. i'd stopped doing it seriously in early march. panel redraws were the only thing i was fully confident of putting on twitter and everything else just looked Bad. i was so fucking embarrassed of my original art

but perhaps most importantly, i'd begun to think in numbers. i realized that non-referenced art got 5-10% of the likes that panel redraws got and concluded, like the massive fucking idiot i was, that this meant my 'original' art was simply awful. yes, i said, i Suck at drawing

i realized some time in may when i tweeted a non-referenced hinata, went to get coffee, came back after 10 minutes to 29 likes and had a breakdown at 4 am that i had somehow managed to completely fuck myself up in pursuit of anime volleyball. so i stopped panel redraws

and then, as we all know, i didn't draw for most of june because i was busy working on juno with june, & while i was stressed in the ancient ways of Fomo i was also at peace for the first time in months. it had felt like a competition up until then to draw fanart of each chapter,

to get the most likes, to tweet at the right time, to make sure you redrew the right panels & memes and referenced the right things, but now i could tell myself 'bitch you're writing a novel' to alleviate the guilt

and then i stopped and was like wait. why the fuck am i guilty?

after we dropped off juno in july i decided to start drawing again even though i was scared SHITLESS. i had been away from the whole weekly guillotine situation for so long that i had no idea how i was going to deal with it now. hesitantly and timid as fuck-ly, i began tweeting

BUT SOMETHING WAS WRONG. drawing was stressful. twitter was stressful. tweeting art was absolutely terrifying i would be sitting in front of my laptop at 2 am with my finger poised on the tweet button and i would be shaking like the fucking eiffel tower had crashed into the moon

and you could see this in my art as well. how come all i did for two months was draw headshots and busts? how come i stuck to single color backgrounds or shitty default cloudy skies? how come everything looked so Samey when i used to be the guy who'd spent 5 hours on a grape???

let's talk about some other developments that had cropped up around this time

1) i finally realized, completely without meaning to, my bullshit gauge for fanart clout in the haikyuu fandom. it was possible for haikyuu art to get 50k+ likes. this happened weekly. 'good' art got

5-10k likes. 'average' art got 1-5k likes. note of course that this is all wrong as hell and i had clearly pulled the entire thing out of my ass but the point is it scared the living shit out of me and made it very hard for me to interact with pretty much everything

2) some really cool artists i had always admired followed me. this was of course cool until i started tweeting art and they liked it instead of retweeting it or retweeted it but didn't leave a reply or broke into my house and ate all my corn and so i sold my self worth to satan!

3) by july i had zero confidence towards my art. i was completely dead inside but had started muting art tweets and avoiding looking at numbers in a desperate bid for sanity, so instead i attached my art's value to who left a comment. obviously this was a fucking terrible idea!

these are the last 2 haikyuu drawings i made in july and august respectively. i drew them purely for the sake of drawing them. i opened twitter and saw all the cool people on my timeline, panicked, and thought to myself 'if i don't make hq art, everyone's going to leave me'

this was a thought that haunted me for eight whole months. if i didn't tweet art then people would get bored of me, but when i tweeted original art no one seemed to like that either, so i stuck to panel redraws. so i didn't think about what i thought looked pretty

so i scrolled through twitter for hours each day in a never-ending cycle of "if They can draw that and get tons of likes for it, why can't i?" i drew because i wanted to prove something. i wanted to prove to jesus christ almighty that i deserved all these followers

AND THEN I LOST INTEREST IN HAIKYUU

Looking Back, i realized that the issue ran deeper than i had anticipated, although the anticipated depth was already really fucking deep. when was the last time i tried to draw a background? march. when was the last time i drew a full body? february. when was the last time i?

when, when, when? when did i last like drawing, anyway? january. always january. when i drew that first kenma based on a tiny screenshot i'd taken of one of the nationals chapters on a complete whim, and my first thought was 'this is cute' and not 'i hope this gets 1k likes'

and so i was absolutely mortified that i had accidentally walked out of the fire, because the fire was Fast and Cool and if you flirted with it right, you could make a living out of it, but i was also relieved. i was no longer angel with a shotgun. i was an ed sheeran track

i wanted to talk about this here because now that i'm several paces away from the giant writhing cerberus that is haikyuu twitter, i've been able to process the sheer kinds of stupidity i put myself through while i was still there, and i want you to know that you're not alone

haikyuu is a big fucking fandom. it's easy to get caught up in numbers and pride and external validation. if you've ever had one drawing that accidentally took off then you are likely also acquainted with the disappointment of seeing your next drawing fail to reach those heights

the moral of the story isn't 'don't do panel redraws' or 'don't draw haikyuu fanart', it's to take care of yourself. it's to remember that fandom isn't the only thing that gives your art meaning, and that you can always take a break. it's not a competition. it's a circus

after eight months of gray backgrounds and headshots, manga panel redraws, and 4 am breakdowns, i'm drawing backgrounds! i'm absolutely terrible at them, but who gives a damn? i'm having a blast. i'm celebrating figuring out this sky gradient instead of reaching 5k likes

so to everyone, in and outside of haikyuu twitter, i hope your art means something to you. not just to your fans, not to the twitter algorithm, not to the trends or the quote retweets or the shitty tiktok reposters, but to you. your swag is unbeatable. happy friday

downloadable content https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs/status/1325166497690349568?s=20