Has anyone else noticed how, the better you get, the worse you feel?

Or rather, the better you get, the more you become aware of your own inadequacies and the time and effort required to become GOOD. This, I believe, is the cause of the bizarre phenomenon that the truly talented are, more often than not, far more insecure or modest than the truly useless.

Another example of this is the time I happened to mention to a (non-artist) friend of mine that I was going to be selling my origami window decorations at this arts and crafts thing. She said "Oh, that's nice. Like, for a penny each?". Because she had never attempted origami or anything similar she had no concept of the work involved and hence assumed it must be very easy. (Incidentally, I don't remember exactly how much I did sell them for but I do know I made enough money to buy my self a really good printer. So nnyyyaaaaah.)

My point is that it's very easy to look at something you've never tried and think 'I could do that, no problem'. Not to say that this is inherently bad. In fact, it's probably necessary. I was talking with the other day and we both agreed that, with any decent drawing there has to be a phase during the sketching process were you are convinced that it is THE GREATEST picture that you have EVER DONE. Similarly, if things didn't look easy before you tried them, you may never actually try them. However, I think that it's equally necessary to grow out of this. Like with a drawing, once I have all of my ideas out of my head and on the paper I need to come out of my 'Oh my god, I'm a genius' bubble to start looking at things objectively. Is the anatomy off? How about the perspective? Is the composition balanced? etc. etc.

Of course, art is a phenomenally vague and intuitive medium and this is all much easier to see in the more technical art forms. In my case: comics.

A while ago (god, now that I think about it, it must of been at least a year ago. My, how time flies!), a montage of things combined and resulted in my decision to start making comics. I was incredibly optimistic and thought 'Hey, I can draw and I read allot of comics, this ought to be fun and easy!'. HA! I can honestly say that, since I started on this project, I have developed allot and my comic pages are far better than they were at the start. However, my estimation of my ability as dropped drastically. You know the saying 'One step forward, two steps back'? Well, this is more like, every time I take a step forward my destination takes two steps back! Oh dear, that came out sounding far more depressing than I meant it to... Let me try a more optimistic simile: It's like the difference between being observant enough to see the nature of a problem and come up with solutions and not even being aware that there is a problem. The latter is nice, in an ignorance is bliss kind of way, but it doesn't allow you to develop.

If this all sounds really preachy, I'm very sorry. I'm certainly not presuming that I actually KNOW anything, it's just that all these thoughts have been whooshing around my head for the last couple of days and I felt the need to talk about it. So why post it on DA? Because I find all this kind of thing very interesting and I would love to hear anyone else's opinions.