Turns out talent is just a habit.
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Despite having many ambitions that basically revolve around making art and drawing, recently I have not been actually drawing that much. And when I say recently, I mean the last 2 years. There always seems to be some kind of pressing demand in the here and now that needs to be attended to, or some other excuse, instead of investing in yourself for your future skills. An investment that may not pay any dividends until years later. And in the meantime, you may be asking yourself, why am I doing something that I'm not good at?
Well, I have been through that process and I have reached to the other side where I have reaped some benefits from my hard work and the development of my talents. Which was achieved through constant practice. But now after going through a period where I was only drawing something once a week or sometimes once a fortnight, I picked up the pen again and I tried to do something that I used to do before quite easily: drawing in ink without any pre-sketching. I found this extremely difficult.
When I was at my previous peak, which was also during a time period of constant practice, I almost found it reasonably easy to visualize the next part of the image I was going to draw. I had a real feel for it. Quite often I could also draw object after object within a scene without using any kind of perspective guides and keep everything in perspective anyway. I just knew what perspective the next object I was drawing had to look like so it didn't look weird compared to the previous one. But now that has become a challenge.
So not only you can become physically unfit, but also your skills can become unfit as well. And for me, two years of casual drawing is all it took.
Come to think of it, I think my main problem was that I stopped drawing for myself and was only really was drawing to maintain the existence of a YouTube channel which revolved around art. Which I only posted a video for once every month or two.
The good news is that it only seems like those pathways in my brain have ceased to exist. I don't have to start all over again. I know from previous experience that those pathways are still there as if they are a garden path which has become overgrown with weeds. I just need to take out the brush cutter out and clear it away. This does take a bit of work, but nowhere near as much as making a brand new path. And then once the path is clear, I just need to keep on walking on it so the weeds will be kept down from the constant stomping of my feet.
The brush cutter being education, and the stomping being practice.