Just as the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani is the rarity in baseball that can both hit and pitch, I guess I’m something of a two-way player myself — in my case, a writer and an artist^{1 2}.

And just as Shohsei Ohtani the pitcher is making his return 1.5 years after being sidelined by an elbow injury, Jeff Van the artist is also trying to get back into it.

The search for my former glory as an artist has been rocky, to say the least. Back in the days of my (now-defunct) Instagram art account, I used to be able to crank out decent ideas — political cartoons in my earliest days, mini comic strip stories as time went on. But since I hit the pause button on art around late 2023, it just hasn’t been the same. All I can muster are Vaniverse-centric character designs and slice-of-life scenes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but a far cry from what I used to be able to do.

And given that my technique has rusted, I take a lot more time — and a lot more second-guessing, erasing, and redrawing — than I used to. Drawing more complex scenes, something that I never excelled at to begin with, seems impossible today. Even a simple sketch is an hours-long Herculean effort — each time I pick up my sketchbook feels like running a marathon after years of eating junk food on my couch.

I think I’ve accepted that this slump is an inevitable part of the process. As such, I am, quite literally, returning to the drawing board — in other words, doing my best to try to hone my skills and produce decent art. And at the very least, I am free to draw what I want, whenever I want, irrespective of any algorithm to appease or people to please.

It’ll be a while before before artist me returns to full strength and finds my groove again. Until then, I’ll continue using this space to experiment and to share my progress.