Why do I do this?

Art is hard.
Art is unforgiving.
Art is risky.
Art is me at my most vulnerable state.

So why bother? I ask myself that all the time. Fact is I cannot NOT do it. I even tried.
I entered art school at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids Michigan right after High School. I barely managed to make it a year there. I am tremendously grateful for the experience because I received very strong foundation training there. It would serve me well later in life.
Due to financial issues and frustration I was able to allow the voice, the resistance in myself, to convince me to walk away. I gave almost all my art supplies to my brother and what ever was left I allowed my parents to sell off.
It took me almost 6 years to go back to school again. I was terrified. My foundation training that I received at Kendall allowed me to shoot to the top of my class. It allowed me to focus on a lot of my computer work since I was now studying to be an animator and digital artist.
Many people may not know this but I do 3D Sculpting as well.

I am looking to start messing with creating my own model reference for my paintings

I am sure many people are like, "What's so hard about your life you make art all day. Its not like you are scrubbing toilets!"

Whoever came up with the not scrubbing toilets line, I hope is burning in some circle of hell.

Yes I could also say ,"At least I am not being ass raped by inmates" if you want to paint a not so pretty picture. The reason is I worked very hard to make sure I did not go to prison. Just as I worked very hard to not have to scrub toilets. (Which for the record I did do at one point in time in my life as well as working on the slush floor of a slaughter house)

The fact is working at art is what I do to make a living because when I am doing anything else I want to make art.

I want to make art right now, but another difficult part of being an artist is, in order to live on it, you spend a great deal of time marketing yourself. I would say at this point a good 75% of my life is marketing.

What you hope will happen is you get noticed enough so you don't have to do that much non art things.

To be honest artists are weird individuals, most do not like to do self promotion. Society has trained us from a young age that it frowns upon us calling attention to ourselves. You are considered to have a bloated ego or a narcissist. I will be honest, I do suffer from a level of narcissism but I am trying to get better.

But really you have to sometimes except the fact that you may not see any success in your lifetime.

Vincent Van Gogh's work is some of the most prized and sought after work of the past century.

His paintings sell for small fortunes. But Van Gogh never got to reap the fortunes of his work. In fact he spent most of his life trying to paint through bouts of mental illness. (Diagnoses include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, temporal lobe epilepsy and acute intermittent porphyria. Any of these could have been the culprit and been aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia and consumption of alcohol, especially absinthe.) 

That last bit was from Wikipedia. Fact of the matter was through all that adversity he just wanted to make art.

So why do I do it?

I feel I do it because the universe wants me to do it. I am a vessel of a muse.

Throughout mankind and its history it has always loved monsters. I feel my muse loves monsters.

I know this because the universe always responds positively when I make monsters.

I just need to remind myself that the muse does not always reciprocate with money.

But my Muse has always found a way to take care of me.

That said I could really use an agent or a promoter.

Because ART IS HARD!