I feel like I broke through a wall this week. I am still surprised where I find myself right now and scramble to adapt.
Remember how we left off last time? I was worried because Instagram does not seem like a viable platform for me right now anymore. Well, the next day I started streaming on Twitch. You got to interact with the world and bring your comic to the people somehow. And it‘s going very well so far! Apparently, writing this art blog since months has prepared me well to talk for hours, even if I‘m not given cues what to talk about.
What I also learned very quickly is that if you have to show and explain your own process to people, you think about it differently than when you are staying just in your own head. I realized that my current process is working but probably not the most efficient one. I left that first stream so inspired that I practised and experimented for hours the next day to improve upon it. And then I actually had results!
Both of these things combined, realizing I can „survive“ in a public space and the successful drawing development, let my confidence shoot through the roof and it is great. I like to know that what I‘m working on every day is meaningful. That I actually have a grip on my process and can change things. My new best friend is Krita‘s clipping mask equivalent alpha inheritance now. I seem to really like the crisp edges this gets me. Now I have to follow up with a mountain of color studies to back that up with less guessing and more informed choices on what to actually do with it.
I‘m not planning to leave Instagram anytime soon, though, I am connected to some friends and colleagues that are very dear to me over this platform. And some of them do come to my gallery every day to look at the new panel.
Saturday I spent a very important hour with administration work, restructuring how I organize and view my tasks and finally thinking things through. In the past I might have avoided that not to feel overwhelmed, but I have to face it now. A wild garden also doesn‘t care whether you like it that way. If you don‘t tend to it it just continues growing in all directions it wants. There are always many projects, opportunities, ideas and responsibilities crying for my attention. And finish one, two new ones pop up. Everyday life really is a hydra that grows more heads.
My plans concerning my own stories had always failed in the past. Sometimes I still feel the crushing echoes from this. As I hadn‘t ever finished anything of significance I was also lacking the experience of how to plan, creating a loop of failure. But then the 100 days of making comics happened and I‘m farther into Street Prey than I was into any other personal project ever before. I wasn‘t stupid or lazy, I was just inexperienced. It happens. Time, patience, especially patience with yourself and hard work resolves that. You just can‘t see that when you are walking down the path through the fog yourself right now, especially in the beginning.
So after my initial unease to think about and prioritize everything in Street Prey that I haven‘t done yet but could and should be doing to push it‘s quality, I had a lot of ideas. I wrote them down. If my husband and me could finish a videogame, if I could finish all my smaller tasks so far, why shouldn‘t this work? And when I decided that it must work and I must find a way to make it work, I started to see it. I had made a whole mountain of tasks ahead of me visible by writing them down. I should be grateful for it, as everything is brightly lit and accessible now. I can walk the way, take the steps. It sometimes just is hard to determine which step to take next. Fumbling and falls are inevitable, too. But this is just a new adventure on the big journey.
