So in the previous blog entry I laid out what is currently holding me back – ambitions running wild and too high expectations. I want to solve this problem of course and adjust my process, but how and where do I even start doing that?
I discovered game dev for me, so let’s play a game! A game of ambition!
Okay, what is an expectation that is definitely too high? Write down an the first random ambition that comes to your mind, no self-censoring, the most random ambitious thing that comes to your mind. Ready? Here goes mine: I want to move the planet from it’s place, just like Superman! The universe of ambition knows no conceivable limit, that is the nature of it. Now it doesn’t make much sense to move earth that way, I will admit it sounds fun though as long as you don’t think about the consequences. What about your ambition? Does thinking about the implications of that make you uncomfortable, too, looking at it from a logical standpoint? That shows to me that wherever ambition is coming from, it is not sitting at the same place as reason. Like a mimic uncovered and hit over the face with a hammer it crawls back into it’s shadowy emotional cradle, for it has been found out.
Blogging is great. It helped me to get through some stressful times by blogging daily reminders about my mission and my general thoughts about my progress to myself. Also, it made me write. Don’t underestimate the power of giving your thoughts and ideas a written form over a prolonged period of time. That’s how you get better at writing. And it changes something. My confidence to write anything down went up. Lately though, my original way of blogging stopped working for me and I only realized that after a couple of troublesome months.
How were things before? I took “just write” as a guiding principle and was writing like the words and topics would come. There is nothing wrong with that. Most writing starts like this. What else informed my writing though – I was under pressure a lot and worrying about how to get to success as fast as possible please. I didn’t really define what that success was and I couldn’t. Things began and ended in comfort and comfort was what I reaped. Seeking comfort is not a thing that brings you ahead in life though. You will not live a life if you want to avoid the pains it brings. For the sake of it I was not always daring to observe things as they were or think thoughts until their end. It’s hard to do that when you are rushing by and hoping you are not hurting already or hurting yourself more. You cannot escape the pain though, not without even bigger pain later on once you can’t run anymore. And delayed pain that comes back to you has the potential to be even deeper. Regret and shame are never far away, but you can have them without any particular reason as well.
So what? I’m telling you to not live in your comfort zone? You’ve heard that before. Have you considered how deep such a comfort zone can run as described in the paragraph before? Things are getting better for me lately. I would say I have found calm in myself that is not temporary. And that is also what causes problems for this blog right now. I’m feeling the lack of the spite and pressure that usually was there and don’t know what to do with that gap. I am not lacking anything that I would miss. I can still work. I can work even better than before. But I guess I wasn’t ready for a good change, good emotion. I am questioning myself, how can I be so at peace and happy when I’m not “there” yet with my life. I haven’t made it yet. I guess you don’t need approval or certain metrics to be allowed to feel a certain way. There is a lot of work to do on the way ahead, but I’ll gladly face everything.
So dealing with one’s own emotional development is a thing, at least it is a thing for me on my road. You could encounter something like this on your road, too, and when it happens, you have an edge now. You are not hit by absolute surprise. You can ask one question more what it could be that blocks your path. Embrace that you change. Be curious about it. Dare to feel what you feel and feel it until it is over. You will meet the peace you made with yourself on paper again when you look at your writing or sketches later. And don’t forget that you are in charge and don’t have to accept you developing into something you don’t like. You are free after all.
It’s time to share some observations I have made on the journey recently.
1) Reading…helps.
First of all, having taken up reading as a daily task pays off and keeps paying off every day. You may wonder whether it is worth it sometimes. After all you might have to read a (nonfiction) book for four hours to get to what feels like ten minutes or less of bits that are relevant and actually have the power to change your way of thinking. But sometimes it’s more parts of the book that are like this and you never know beforehand.
2) Accepting Intuition
At the moment, I feel especially inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind”. I’m far from finished having read the book, but even the first part had a huge impact on me already. Haidt claims – based on his own research – that we are actually rather driven by our intuitions and feelings in the first place and tend to rationalize afterwards why it was the right thing that we did or chose to feel and think.
In Haidt’s example, imagine yourself as a rider on an elephant. The elephant is subconscious and doesn’t give a damn about your rational opinions. The rider has some ideas where the elephant should go and what is right, but ultimately it’s up to the elephant what happens in actuality. And changing the elephant’s way or the elephant’s environment is hard. The rider can’t ride without the elephant, but without a rider the elephant has no direction, so there is power and merit in the rational rider as well.
Now there are people like me who tend to completely live in their head and constantly train their rational rider, believing he has somehow more impact on the elephant that way. He doesn’t. Example – I will still choose my colors intuitively and afterwards fabricate a lie why this color was the best choice by color psychology or for compositorial reasons. With more training my lies and justifications will get much better and my color choices possibly a much smaller bit, too.
I bet some people like me would absolutely rail against the idea that they are analytical as whatnot but still controlled by intuitions. I don’t. I don’t even view this as battle because I know what involuntary mood swings are, pain and desperation, envy, serenity and so many more emotions we humans tend to feel. No rational thinking can do away with that and that you will lose control sometimes. That is life. The elephant tends to win, and yet you can serve him and yourself well if you are a good rider that suggests him a great course throughout many small decisions, every day.
3) Immediate Reflections
But this also opens up a new questions and perspectives immediately. Are we artists secretly absolutely dominated by our own tastes outside of the realm of what we can rationally explain? There are still visual problems to solve that require knowledge of art fundamentals and that can be very technical and rational. But there will always be several ways to solve a problem and we will choose what our elephant likes most, whether we like our personal elephant or not.
I was complaining I had no identity from time to time. Nah, I’m fine. I’m quite average actually. I was just oblivious about the huge elephant I’m sitting on. It happens. Just turns out neither me nor the world are as complicated as I thought, they’re objectively complex still, but manageable.
My blog so far was oftentimes a rider wondering why some detail things aren’t working or wondering why they do work. I was missing the bigger picture.
4) Conclusions for Comic Work
And what does this all have to do with SPREY? Everything. If you change the person creating it, the comic will change. My prediction is that the story will not change much and also not in parts that you would know already, but the art style will either go through another shaky period or we will find ourselves in another Back to Black phase where heavy black ink will dominate the panels. I feel this is some part of the later Styx cycle where I always always return to that.
I had an interesting idea while browsing through a book on character design yesterday night. Instead of adding even more influences to my art I should reduce the influences I go by, at least for my current workflow. At no time in history could people access all the world’s styles, art instructions and process demonstrations as easily as it is today. Back then they had like…one teacher and were stuck with them and everything they were lucky enough to find on their journeys throughout their lives. Today’s situation on the other hand creates the opportunity for fantastic and bizarre mixtures of influences, but it can also lead to an information overload. How should you know what works best for you? How should you know you aren’t missing out on the best thing for you if you don’t keep digging? When is it time to settle and is settling bad? I’m happy and sad that I’m quite versatile. I can make a lot of things work pretty quickly. But the cost is I’m not particularly good at anything, not in a specialized manner. I have the suspicion that a 2D outline heavy comic and animation workflow could be my thing as I have trained that intensively since a while. Designing in that style is no problem either. But I would have to put more emotions into my lines and risk messing them up here and there for the sake of the raw emotion that must be slumbering somewhere in me.
The best thing is, I don’t have to change much about what I’m doing with SPREY already.
The timeline in very short: after finishing chapter two of my webcomic I decided to take a week off – and then never came back, ended up doing an online design course to fill the most glaring holes in my drawing skills. That succeeded. I learned a lot of things, improved my design and perspective drawing game as well as how to harness the power of 3D, research, and learn my drawing programs faster in the future to use their juiciest features. The price was that I completely lost sight of my comic. It is not as if the wish to continue it wouldn’t have been there. I just couldn’t. I was so strained, stressed out, probably anything could have made me tear apart. That happened in the end, and after some confusion and recovery time, and also listening to the life and business advice of many voices on Youtube and in books, I yesterday returned to drawing SPREY. Chapter 2A is now chapter 3 and has a cover. It is not as if I didn’t do anything about it ever in the meantime, I have some notes and storyboards as well as partly reorganized folders with references. Also the comic haunted me in my dreams. We’re good. I am continuing in the system that worked, at least one panel a day, square format, updating it on my site, on the discords, and eventually on Instagram again, too. I just want to work consistently for a couple of days before I make big announcements, just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke and I’m still super dead.
I guess the past months were a good lesson in failing and why you would prefer a sharp cut end to something over slowly dragging along and bleeding out any time. I didn’t bleed out on my comic though, I snapped back in the end. My vast insecurities got the better of me and led me astray. I hope I am not taking all of them back as were into SPREY Chapter 3.
I have humble goals. I really want to make this comic and finish it. I owe it to the readers and to the comic, and to myself. I am standing a 100% behind Street Prey and will do my best. A chapter takes me around 3 months so far and I suppose we will at least have 12 of them (but the number is everything but exact), so that’s some time working on it ahead. I do think that I will become faster as time passes and with more work I have done. My planning skills might become better, too, but only with the experience of hindsight on having substantial amounts of work done already, so everything I make in the future after it profits from SPREY.
I am also eyeing at a day job in concept art or videogame making in general. I have fun designing or just creating games in general. But it takes time to cross over. I am also not a big fan of crunch culture. During the design course I have found out that I can crunch if needed, but that it is not a sustainable way of working, at least not for prolonged periods of time. What do you do with your fast big gains if you lie exhausted on the wayside after the rush? But I will not allow anything to get into the way of me making SPREY. It is too important.
Please call me out if I slip again.
It might happen that I miss a day from time to time when things get very rough or rougher than now, but I don’t want to. I never want to. It is a panel a day or not being me. And why would I not want to be myself? In that sense, see you after the next work session on SPREY later today. A blog can’t be a distraction when it documents action, not dreams about things that never become action.
Annotations to the cover (hey, you should have something exclusive if you read my blog):
If you know the backstory laid out in this blogpost, you can see how the chapter cover is less of a literal depiction of a sad Rich, but the manifestation of the devastating shame and guilt of being a failed creative, a failed creator. I have failed in creating. I have failed everyone, I have fallen. I have a hole of three months in my comic work. And yet here I am, I’m back. SPREY is back. Just taking action again and continue sounds like an easy thing to do from the outside, but do you know about the abyss of strong emotion on the inside? If we didn’t have that, everyone would just do what they knew was right and they should do. Anxiety is a big one here and it will never go away. But apparently you can learn to live with it and not get lured into comfortable inaction that makes you feel even worse afterwards.
Happy new year, everyone! I was quite exhausted before christmas and spontaneously took the holidays off. It turned out to be a very good decision. Apparently I was in dire need of a break and some room to step away to look at the bigger picture. Whether you want it or not, from time to time you have to do that to make sure you are still working into the right direction – that is the direction your set goals are in.
I am happy with how 2020 went for me artwise, mostly, and I’m even happier that in the end one or two good ideas came along on how to do even better in the future.
While I focussed on relaxation and reading, I documented my wellness and mood journey with a couple of post-its. Enjoy and see you tomorrow, back with Street Prey!
About the artist
Styxcolor creates freelance concept art and illustrations. She blogs about storytelling and art since 2020.
E-mail: info@styxcolor.com
