My third year on DeviantArt

It is already time for my annual journal - how time flies!

This year has been the most eventful of the three that I have been a member of this great community.

Firstly in mid-December 2014 I was surprised to find that my was given a Daily Deviation, very kindly suggested by ChrisBeckerArt and featured by Agaave.

As if that were not enough, at the end of December I received a lovely Christmas gift of a three month Premium membership from pipaspases.  Then in March I was given another three month membership by ZARTAOT!  I am very grateful to these generous members for introducing me to the advantages of Premium (now Core) membership and indirectly for persuading me to keep drawing (see below).

The number of my watchers has more than doubled to over 1000 in the last 12 months and the apparent popularity of my drawings in a Pencil Portrait Girl search has continued to overwhelm me.

I read in the newspaper the other day that Emma Watson had given an interview to a magazine in which she said that she felt inadequate: 'It’s called the impostor syndrome. It’s almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I’m just going, Any moment, someone’s going to find out I’m a total fraud, and that I don’t deserve any of what I’ve achieved.  I can’t possibly live up to what everyone thinks I am and what everyone’s expectations of me are.'.  This is exactly how I feel.  Indeed last Christmas I considered stopping drawing and ‘quitting while I was ahead’ as I felt that I must have reached my peak.  I was then given the couple of gift subscriptions, as mentioned above, by very kind members, and so I felt that I had to continue if only to justify their generosity.  I am very grateful to them for changing my mind as I have actually produced many of what I consider to be my best drawings in this last year, such as and .  This latter drawing had almost as many viewings in its first two days after upload as did my Himba Woman drawing on the two days after it was made a Daily Deviation.    Continued practice obviously can still yield improvement.

Eighteen months ago I found that two artists elsewhere on the Internet were each using one of my drawings to advertise their portrait drawing services.  I was able to get one of these, from India, taken down within a couple of days of my complaining to the website, but I had no joy with the other, from Lithuania, where my drawing is still in use.  These two events paled into insignificance, however, when I recently found that a Turkish artist is using 11 of my drawings to advertise a service to draw from a photo that he offers on his website.  He has also used drawings from five other DeviantArt artists and I have informed them of this.  Whilst I find it somewhat flattering, it is obviously misleading to his clients (although he can draw very well, as the many examples of what seem to be his own work show).  It makes me wonder why he would want to misuse my drawings!  As this is on his own website, if I were to contact him he would find out my email address, so I might open myself up to nuisance emails.  I am therefore leaving well alone!

I still sometimes get the feeling that I have done as much as I can with graphite pencils (and I have no desire to change medium) but it does give me a hobby into which I can completely lose myself, so I am fairly sure that I will continue to draw as long as I can find great photos that I can use as references.