/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>2588333
oh hey trips get
anyways
this is more recent stuff, within the past year. the cat was painted last week(fuckin lol at the placeholder background) and the "realism" portrait was painted yesterday, with a reference. i can post the ref if anyone's interested. i wanted to make a realistic version of one of my characters and that's what came out of it.

those two aforementioned pieces are intentionally more detailed than the others(not so much that cat but yeah), especially the portrait, because i'm wondering if i fucked up by focusing on just drawing my own way rather than learning from realism and life. i'm not even sure if it's better for me to just start studying real life and drawing realism at this point, but it just makes me feel bad and unoriginal. i don't know where to go from here and what specific things to focus on. i've read shit tons of books and tried some studies with faces and bodies....and i've looked for good background references. now that i'm serious about art (cause i just graduated and i'm a hopeless case in every other area and really have no choice but to be serious about the only thing i can kind of do) i really want to improve quickly. i just feel so bad because i see other people that are my age and so much better than me and i sperg out before i can ask them what they used.

posts like >>2588266 give me a little bit of hope for myself, since /ic/ seems to be intensive and harsh but effective.

sorry for the autistic mess of a post but yeah i just don't know what to do.