"Dear readers,
Drawing is fun. People who hope to become professional illustrators study special techniques and in due course get better at drawing. However, often as they make progress with their technique they lose their spirits which is the most important thing in illustrating. This is no good. Drawing technically well alone means nothing. Unfortunately, spirits cannot be taught. That is the problem. Obviously, professionals need to draw well or they'll be laughingstocks. In that respect, amateurs can be more easygoing because they don't need to concern themselves with technique. They can simply enjoy drawing for themselves what they see and feel without worrying about the opinion of others. For professionals this is not the case. They have to show off their skill to the world, which keeps them from seeming relaxed. In point of fact, an old man who hasn't drawn since childhood may draw primitive illustrations which moves the viewer deeply. Heta-uma (Bad-nice) illustrations fascinate me because of this kind of inversion of value.
You should believe your talent as an unskillful illustrator is equal to another's skillful talent. I hope this book will be a bible for such readers.
Please enjoy this book as you draw with your family and friends.
Love, peace, happiness,
King Terry"
The Secret of Heta-Uma Drawing
Drawing is fun. People who hope to become professional illustrators study special techniques and in due course get better at drawing. However, often as they make progress with their technique they lose their spirits which is the most important thing in illustrating. This is no good. Drawing technically well alone means nothing. Unfortunately, spirits cannot be taught. That is the problem. Obviously, professionals need to draw well or they'll be laughingstocks. In that respect, amateurs can be more easygoing because they don't need to concern themselves with technique. They can simply enjoy drawing for themselves what they see and feel without worrying about the opinion of others. For professionals this is not the case. They have to show off their skill to the world, which keeps them from seeming relaxed. In point of fact, an old man who hasn't drawn since childhood may draw primitive illustrations which moves the viewer deeply. Heta-uma (Bad-nice) illustrations fascinate me because of this kind of inversion of value.
You should believe your talent as an unskillful illustrator is equal to another's skillful talent. I hope this book will be a bible for such readers.
Please enjoy this book as you draw with your family and friends.
Love, peace, happiness,
King Terry"
The Secret of Heta-Uma Drawing
"Because it matters to YOU. Because it makes you happy."
2023
if there's one thing i wish i could've told myself from the start, is that art doesn't need to be perfect - you don't need to be good at it. being imperfect is not a bad thing. all your art needs is to be important to you, for it to come from a personal desire to translate the world and what you love as you see it, to take what you love and control your thoughts for just a little while and have it immortalized forever. over time i'm trying to teach myself that the process and release that comes from drawing is what makes the drawing good and not the result. i mean, look at at all this - none of it is by canons nowhere near skilled: it's simplistic lines of code barely holding eachother together, constructed under weird symmetry and colors that please a little sick mind. a colorful, unique little sick mind - just like yours, no? and all of these flaws do not make it - us - any less special. in fact, i tend to often dislike the perfect: the overly refined, the widely desired, the palatable, because it's sanitized and made so widely acceptable that it loses anything that makes it feel organic and intimate. instead i'm fascinated by the sincere, the homemade, the unskilled, because it comes from a desire to simply make what you know and love without needing to show off. art is like this to me - being is like this to me: as long as it matters to you, as long as it makes you happy, i implore you to make and create as you know best and as you enjoy without letting an invisible audience ruin it for you!
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i wrote the above text in 2023 (although i refined it a bit in 2025, the year i'm now writing this). i still do think this way, despite how more cautious my mind has gotten in recent years due to the fact that yes, i may think one way, but i still experience many doubts that make my actions not as coherent as i'd like them to be... that's what's inspiring me to write the following. i think more than ever now you need to let yourself be sincere and make mistakes (never lose your critical and introspective eye, please i beg you), do what feels like 'doing you' and not what you heard on some rando's art critique youtube video telling people some regurgitated bullshit about character design shape language this shape language that (that method carries harmful bias btw so don't do that shit). never fall into the trap of doing things because you want others to see you do them and not because it's just something you wanna do, or worse, do things because you believe it's the only way other people will like you.
being creative has been tainted by this constant need to be perfect immediately and nothing else. especially online, where only the best of the best can be displayed - even works in progress are only shown when they're pretty and polished, to be framed in a pretty little screenshot. and if they ARE a little wonky, a layer of self-irony and insults towards the self and the work will do the trick. why does this happen so much? why has this become our automatic response? it's not sincere to expect everything you make to be perfect, or to like it all the time (i dont like a lot of the things i make at first, truth be told, but i let them grow on me), but for the love of god at least let things exist and breathe!! let yourself make clumsy things and not in the 2017 calarts watercolor blotched sketchbook way but actually just let the embarassment breathe and let sincerity actually make you enjoy creating something for once, rather than it having to be a performance for social media all the time!!
with all that being said. i guess this sentiment is something that really drives this website altogether. i'm not the first person to say how much they wish to escape social media or has already done so thanks to neocities - i have not left entirely, i probably never will, but i understand the sentiment - but thing is there is a sincerity here that i like and hope will not be lost. my website is... messy. it's weirdly coded. it's not structured clearly at all. that's okay. it's a very selfish project because i'm just putting things i like and make with little filter and bearing my heart out for strangers to see, and it's liberating that way. i'm talking in circles with myself about things i like and people are free to sit down next to me and listen along and i just Love when personal websites feel like that.
ironic to say this but i tend to second-guess myself to an obsessive degree. to be fair i have a mental illness with obsessive literally in the name but that's another story. i like to be chatty and honest, yet at the same time i don't deal the best with vulnerability or being under spotlights. i put so much of myself out in the open with this site and at times i stop to ask wtf am i doing. will anyone care? am i making a fool out of myself? and if you experience these thoughts too the one thing i'm going to tell you is to knock them away as far as possible. you have no idea how fun it is to get these glimpses into people's lives and minds through their sites. i may not know what you're talking about but that shrine about your interest is a delight to read because i can see the enthusiasm in it. i've never heard of this music album but the way you express how the lyrics make you feel will stick with me whenever i'll come across the artist's name again. and so on. what i'm trying to say is that we're not always gonna be proud of everything we make but the joy that comes with sharing parts of outselves like this and how it can connect with someone completely overweights anything else. your art and site or whatever else that applies doesn't need to prove anything else but that it can make you (and by result someone else like you) happy.
you're free to disagree with all of this and that too is the beauty in sharing. thx for reading if you did. i suggest you go rest your eyes a bit