Thanks for your comments and tips!
I have add the caveat that everything I say is equally as correct and relevant as it is wrong and irrelevant.
I have often said that myself haha. I think art is one of those funny things that changes on how you look at it :P
I've also found grief to be counterproductive to creating art.
I nearly didn't produce any art, and I was only able to do what I did because I already had the sketches and I was working to a sketchy quality so I didn't need to think about it while doing it very much. I find that when I am angry or upset though, I do tend to busy myself a lot, such as tidying my room or something, so that might also contribute in my case. When I am depressed and draw I get some crazy creepy art haha, totally self expression changes with mood.
you probably would never grow if you didn't do it.
Ahhhhhhhh yes, so true XD. When and if I finally get the level of art I want, I will look back at the path I took and say "how ridiculous"
Personally when I find anything wrong with a drawing that I don't want to fix, I find it very difficult to keep drawing. It's as if the drawing has been totaled, like a car, and it'd be more cost effective to start over than to fix it.
I used to be this way for years, which is why whenever a drawing went wrong I would move on to the next one straight away. Having a perfectionist streak is only useful if you keep it under control, otherwise it can be frightfully depressing when you don't live up to your own standards. With my WIP processing scheme, I know that I can improve a drawing in the future, so I can progress stress-free through all the car wreck style sketches :P
working from reference may help you deal with proportions even if you reference it loosely stylize it the way you prefer.
Yeah, this is most likely true, but I like my work to feel like it's "all mine", so I don't like directly referencing while I am sketching, so I do studies separately or before I sketch, and then draw from memory or imagination afterward. It's kinda the same thing but in my ind, it feels different. For doing high level pieces though, I will probably use references alongside my artwork, but I haven't ever produced a high level piece, so I wouldn't know :P
Chibi certainly is an unusual proportion styleset to work with, and I admit that my current chibi style is way more realistic than it should be, but for some unknown reason, I really like it, like it doesn't feel out of place to me, which is strange because that's not what I would expect, as you say. So I'm working with it and at some point I will probably lean back towards more simplified proportions, digitless hands and so on. But for now, let's just say it's an experimental style haha
And yes large heads are an enemy of mine, a very old and longstanding habit from when I started drawing manga and thought "hey manga heads are large so I'll draw large heads", If you flick through that huge set of images I posted you'll see the head proportions are wavering wildly between too large and too small :P
having a big head is an aesthetic choice
I suspect on some subconscious level I do really like my own style and proportions, even if it does tend to go against the flow a bit. But I also want to have the skill to chose to not draw a large head, I don't want to to be an unavoidable style choice. Weirdly though, all of my drawings on my request thread have normal head porportions, so I suspect it's a side effect of not having a plan in my mind when I am drawing that produces the bad proportions.
I posted this already but here it is again, a lineart WIP for one of my requests on my request thread
I figured out one reason for that annoying tilt across the whole image - my posture! I literally cant draw a horizontal or vertical line easily - the "natural" lines are a vertical that leans to the bottom right, and a horizontal that leans to the top right. I think basic anatomy makes it hard as well as you need to control multiple muscles, a curve is much easier as you only need to move one muscle to rotate your arm or wrist, say. So I need to draw with my eyes and make sure that I'm drawing what I think I'm drawing.