We are rarely proud when we are alone.

~ Voltaire
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A few friends will have heard me use this sentence recently: 'I am having the mother of all artist's blocks'.

The illustration which I showed a tiny glimpse of (with that peacock) has gone completely awry. I kept working on it even as it began to show signs of failing, thinking that perhaps perseverance might have rescued it.

It didn't.

I abandoned it and began something else, hoping to submit it in time for Children's Illustrator Club's June theme. Not only have I singularly failed to meet the deadline, but the piece has been a real anguished struggle. Even now, it is not only still far from being finished, the thing does not even remotely look as though it warranted so much time and effort.

And now, having so far got the blessed piece to something mildly satisfactory, one particular problem area plunged headlong into the disaster it was so precariously teetering over...

I cannot begin this piece afresh now. I am trying to salvage this little area by rather drastic means. But my hopes are not very high... I think this will turn out to be a fairly ridiculous contrivance now...

Meanwhile, my attempts to establish something with a few artists here whom I respect and admire have been met with... Who knows what? Indifference? Disdain? I am not to know what to call it. Silence seems to be all I have to decipher. On the one hand, there are artists with so many watchers of their own, who perhaps haven't time to respond. Yet, if that were the case, they seem to have time enough to converse at great length with their firm friends. I do not at all presume to seek the same kind of communication, but how do I know what my poor comments are worth if they seem to be merely served up to the ether? On the other hand, there are others whom I suspect (and it is a hypothesis, merely) are of the decision that my own growing number of pageviews constituted a kind of popularity that they didn't care for...

I am not a butterfly.

And now, 'outside', I have lost, possibly forever, the hope of earning the friendship of someone I care about so enormously. They have, to all intents and purposes, stepped irrevocably out of my sphere of existence. I did not even have the chance to say farewell. Not in person.

However, there is a note of cheer in this entry, in the shape of the wonderfully kind dedication to me of this lovely artwork by *GrendelDemon Thank you so much, Tylor. The silence of butterflies are of no consequence when there is the kindness of a stagbeetle (honestly, can you keep up with all these metaphors and guises? ), among others.

If none of the above made much sense, I beg you all to simply pay no attention to any of this melancholy little sighing. Note this, however:

Thank you everyone for all your continued support.

With very best of wishes,
Niroot

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