Rather a Breakdown

The challenge hasn't gone as planned.

My internet has been down all day so this post is a bit late.

If you've been following my progress in this triple art challenge (nobody is following my progress in this triple art challenge), you know there are two major breakdowns going on in my work.

First, pose drawings from reference are really hard for me to do. Not like, I can't do them, but I can't convince myself to start doing them -- and once I do convince myself to start, it is difficult to convince myself to keep doing them.

I don't think I do a good enough job. It's demoralising and upsetting and I don't like it. Which, of course, means it is exactly what I need to be doing more of. I don't like that. I don't like that one bit.

I did everything for all the other ones. Even stayed on schedule.

As usual, the character part was the worst bit. And then I hit the blocking issue.

Pose drawings from photo reference. I picked the references, I did the first five, I got very frustrated.

I moved onto the next day without finishing the pose drawings. I didn't do the face drawings. I felt like I had to do the pose drawings first.

This one I actually have a complaint about. I am absolute dog shit at drawing recognisable features. I can draw a nose, no problem. I cannot draw that nose to save my life. I don't even have five things to work with here. Face shape, eye shape, and... uh... hairstyle? Eyebrows? Give them a hat? None of this even makes sense to me.

Put the head I didn't do on a body. Didn't do one, nothing to put on a body.

This "elements from five references" things is also annoying me. I don't like this "mix and match a bunch of other characters" concept. It is going to have a shitty visual style. It is not going to mesh.

And then it was day 30 and I didn't have day 29 to keep working on so I just did the other two bits and not the character thing.

Now, there are a couple things I can take away from this. I might beat myself up for not doing the three challenges, but I did two of them for the entire thirty days. I stayed focused and consistent on two out of three challenges, and I was consistent on the third for about three weeks. I did two-thirds of the third challenge. So instead of doing a single thirty day challenge, I did two and two-thirds of a challenge.

That's pretty good, considering I also did them in 27 days. So I did about 81 days of challenge in 27 days and hey presto that's an average of three days per day. I feel like I did okay in that regard. That is what I wanted to do in the first place.

As far as things to actually improve my art, I have a definite problem doing certain exercises I know I should be doing. I don't want to do them, because I'm bad at them. But I do need to do them, because I'm bad at them. Rapid pose drawings from photo reference is the elephant in the room, but there are other things too.

I suspect I would benefit from "five minutes - fifteen minutes - one hour" exercises. Start from a reference, which should be a photo and not a screenshot from anime, and give it a varying amount of time. I need to teach myself not only how to do things faster, but how to slow down and do them better.

This is probably something I should do on a daily basis, although I am very much not good at "same thing every day" habits. I'm just not good at them. Doing the same thing every single day doesn't typically go well for me, and I think what helped with the 30 day challenges is that every day was different.

I am debating whether I should have like a weekday-based challenge. Like today is Monday, so I have to do this. Tuesday, I do a different thing; Wednesday, another different thing. That has worked well with my videos, and my blogging, and indeed everything I do: "today is X, so I do Y." That might be a good way to do things.

Someone told me not long ago that a great exercise for artists is that whenever you see anything that inspires you, just take five minutes and draw your favourite bit of it. Not the whole thing; just the cool part, the part you like. The important thing is to grab that inspiration and give it five minutes and don't make it a chore. I should do some of that.

I think there's a danger a lot of artists face that when an exercise isn't working right now they think it doesn't work at all, and whenever they stumble over the right thing at the right time to level up their work... they think they were "missing" this and should have just started with it. 

But it's all context! Everything is a matter of context and timing and if you hadn't done what you did before this you wouldn't have gotten the same results. This exercise isn't magic, you just did it at the right time. And I think we're all struggling to put together a series of meaningful exercises that get us where we want to go. 

I'm still working on it. I don't have answers. But I do think I am asking the right questions. So I'm going to keep asking them, and I'm going to drill farther into it starting next week, and I hope you'll come along for the ride.