Moody Blues and Purples

It's funny how creatively I go through so many ups and downs.  How I can be so sure that I want one thing then totally despise it the next.  My perceptions are the things that skew because the work hasn't changed without me knowing.  It's not just creatively-- everything from the way I see my own body to making my supposedly favorite foods.  I'm fickle.  If I waited for everything to be what I perceive as perfection at any one time, I would never be done with anything.

For instance, I am often very satisfied with something I write or draw, but when I suddenly bend it to thinking of how it is received, the comparisons are often unkind.  People won't like the style or the genre, etc.  I've always known that what I do is not for everyone, but I can say with confidence that I was critical enough that it is damn good for what it is-- I can't account for individual tastes and I don't try to.  I write plenty of things that are for wider audiences, but sometimes, damn it, I just want to find who else is like ME.  Who else is swept away in turmoil and romance, who is comfortable in their own skin but awkward around certain people, who has a dark sense of humor, etc.?  That's how I'm starting my journey as an author, self-published, because right now, I just want to see what I'm capable of doing on my own.  Yes, I want to appeal to more people as I go, but if right now I am just appealing to women around my age that like games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Age, then that's fine.  We're not a big part of the population, but we matter too.  So many of us end up writing fan-fiction because we're just not marketed to and that's okay.  We also enjoy taking matters into our hands rather than bitching about it.

As I edit these books and keep drawing, I'm finding that I'm loving to draw slightly more than the million times I'm editing the writing.  Look, I've read my books more than I've reread anything in my life and at some point, as much as I love them, I just look at them more and more critically and yes, it does get old.  I don't like them less, but there's no mystery or suspense like I got when I first started putting words to page.  It has become just work and the drawing part?  Not so much.  The first 15 minutes of starting a drawing session are usually restless times of doubt or frustration, but then I get swept away in it.  Painting for the eventual release of the omnibus art book is still completely exciting.  In fact, the idea of doing the art for the books thrills me more than writing them.  This isn't to say that writing is second banana.  If you know me, you know how much I love writing.  My close personal friends get mini-books every day.  However, even though drawing is absolutely work and problem solving, there is just so much more possibility in presenting visually.  Words can paint different pictures for everyone, but the actual stroke to page isn't exactly a solid commitment.  That's where the intimidation begins in fact.  There is a physical discipline that makes it daunting...  

Maybe math, which is daunting to most people will help terrify you. lol  There are over 171K words in the English language (although we do borrow quite a bit from other languages so I consider that very fluid) and the rules for combining them to form coherent thoughts are rather limited to rules of sentence structure.  Even creative writing needs to adhere to most of these rules to be of any quality.  The combinations are seemingly endless, but from the start of a sentence to the end there are still rules.  Run-on sentences may be some of the longest sentences you run into, but they do have limit. Words are confined by fonts, no matter how many there are to choose from of varying legibility. All of our words are simply combinations of our 26 letters after all.  However, visual control is dealing with way more abstract.  I'll use the digital example since this is my current medium.  A blank page is deceptive.  Were we to completely color it something different, it could be as simple as using a paintbucket Fill, one and done, or we might use a paintbrush from one pixel to thousands and scribble over the space.  Think of where a pixel starts.  To move to an adjacent pixel there are nine possible pixels surrounding it.  However, since there are 360 degrees of movement, you are often touching several points at once while simply creating a line.  It is possible to touch four pixel spaces at once.  When using tools that smooth lines to take away the clusters of movement, you are talking more pixel real estate.  While your brain can topple any visual medium in terms of shooting out pictures, the reality is, those single shot pictures are taking artists anywhere from days to weeks to months to refine, depending on the level of detail because the possibilities are also colors factored into the mix.  There are 256 possible grey combinations alone.  Color combinations available for RGB?  Over 16 million.  Want to see what that looks like if you use one pixel each to express it?  Yup...

Courtesy of Bruce Lindbloom, who is clearly a bigger digital masochist than me.

Now, if you think of even a tiny icon at 100x100 pixels and pound out the math for what it could possibly look like based on possible color combinations, then your head exploded.

It's a wonder I can draw at all when staring into the abyss of overthinking.  But that's just it.  Even when those thoughts are present, you just start doing and yeah, the passion of the moment eventually turns a lot of things into garbage besides the single-minded goals of translating that swirl of head pictures into one snapshot.

Yeah, I'm a creature of logic.  It's unavoidable, which is why I tend to like the chaos of humanity and the ridiculously stupid things we do.  A lot of the badassery in tropes kind of bores me because it is just too neat.  In the same breath, I love how clean martial arts like kung-fu are, how structured and exact.  Trying to make a person like that, no matter how awesome it is in theory, just falls flat for me.  

Even the visual trends in realism are something I only borrow lightly.  I love using a clearly stylized drawing style with only some elements of realism.  Yes, it takes ridiculous patience and skill to do realism, but it also doesn't utilize as much possibility and imagination.  It's beautiful and stunning, but it's still mimicry.  Sure, any style borrows from other styles in many combinations, but there's a certain excitement I get from towing that line between total abstract and structured realism that steals my breath away.  In fact, sometimes I actually have to make myself breathe.  I actually catch myself holding my breath when I'm challenging myself that way.

I'm not going to apologize but this blog post is an absolute mess of topic jumping, but about as real as it gets.  I'm actually juggling doing the final format on my book and made the sudden decision that I want a full color artbook for all three of the first books now.  So I spent yesterday setting up palettes for the characters' hair, eyes and skin colors and deciding to switch to doing full color to save myself from coloring it twice (once in grey, then in color, as I'll have to do for the first two books because they're greyscale...).  Because of this, there will also be changes to the line art and design.  I will be incorporating the tattoo meshes into the sort of lazy placeholder tattoos I did and editing some of the lines I wasn't too fond of.  When I started drawing for the first book and part of the second, I was still a bit like a baby deer, timid about line and form and I've grown more confident since.  I don't just want to do a palette swap for the art books; I want them to get a nice little facelift.  This is something I hope to save for sometime in 2018.  I won't even be releasing book three until sometime as late at the end of January and once I do that, I can start work on the compilation of the art.  I'd love to compile them as coloring pages if there is an interest in that, but I'm not going to do that unless that is the case.  I do want to start work on new drawings for a coloring book unrelated to the books.  My friend wants steampunk fairies and she shall have them!

I do promise that most of my blogs will be more structured and less head-exploding rants on technical bullshit.  I do like to lay it down for people, just how very technical and time-consuming the world of art is.  So often we diminish it down to the level of preschool finger painting or doodling on the corner of a phone book when the real deal artists are dumping 16 hour days, 5 days a week, into one visual project.  And that's on the quick end.  People play with Instagram filters or photo collage things and think it looks pro, but sorry, guys, it definitely shows.  Even when a professional artist 'cheats' and uses filters, there's a very precise way we toggle it to look perfect.  Even when I'm lazy about illustrating, I still spend ridiculous amounts of time on it that no 10 second filter can replicate...

See, I have my creative life planned for years to come.  And I planned zero social life to get it done.  I don't have 40 hour or even 60 hour weeks.  Try 80+.  I don't have guaranteed salary or insurance, I'm completely nuts for choosing this path, but I own it.  It makes me happy, even with the sacrifice of normal human contact.  I have faith that I can reach people, drum up interest in creation and collaboration on a platform of dirt-poor integrity.  We need it again, guys-- integrity.  I'm seeing too many good ideas swirl the toilet because of all the entitlement in entertainment.  Let things suck or not be for you.  Trying to make everything for everyone makes it all suck equally.