This week saw rather inner growth than visible artistic output, but I’m almost sure, it’s legacy will show in future art. A rare occasion of health problems knocked me out for three days while I lost the others to coping with a steep increase in anxiety. Apparently, The War of Art is affecting me more than movies like Event Horizon, and that one affected me. On the other hand there would be no resistance if there wasn’t some great potential for growth for me in it, right? Something I can’t even completely understand from my current perspective, otherwise it wouldn’t scare me.
I stunned myself writing about the mere concept of “things I should have drawn years ago” last time. I nervously avoided thinking about what that would be for me. Thinking about taking action felt even worse. So after all, does it turn out I’m still avoiding the main thing? My actual, real authentic work that is meant to be created? How can this be? I’m making SPREY and that one fights a lot against me already. I wondered whether I got too comfortable and too slow with it. I wondered whether the scope of the thing is just too big for me. But then I remembered myself that looking for flaws will always be successful, because all and everything is flawed, while working on the thing or improving the quality of said thing actually takes effort. I will not give in to any drift away from SPREY. No matter what happens, I have to keep learning with that comic. It will never realize it’s full potential if I don’t go that road until the end. SPREY lead to a myriad of improvements in my art and artistic process already and is hopefully entering a new era soon where things start to become a little bit more consistent.
Growing as an artist is as uncomfortable as something can get. I thought about my recent improvements in understanding of light and color. It would be a nightmare to try to teach that. I would sound like I was rambling about the soul of a piece while I’m actually talking about a complex interconnected system of art fundamentals that will never work out for you if you don’t put in the mileage and personalize it to you. And then you must do this in tandem with reminding yourself of the theory and the works of people you look up to again and again and again, because you will forget a lot. This naked truth of how things go and it doesn’t sound too enticing. I think it’s actually comparable to creating a comic, writing a novel or other projects. Prepare to write and draw several drafts if necessary. I can see why resistance would tell you nah we’re good, don’t attempt to climb that mountain. Especially if there isn’t any guaranteed reward. And there isn’t.
If I wasn’t working on it already, SPREY would definitely be on my “things I should have drawn years ago” list. I am not on the quality level I want to be with it, but at the same time my idea and understanding of that desired quality level is shifting. And no, it doesn’t go up. When I started I wasn’t even sure whether SPREY should be a webcomic, a print comic kept in bookpages or a pseudo interactive light novel. It showed. Chapter 1 is so raw it’s actually awesome again, chapter 2 showed me my limits and actually broke through them, making chapter 3 possible. Chapter 3, again, is an uncomfortable hybrid that has left behind interactivity, but isn’t fully in a webscroll format because it has too many panels in the same row for that, while it doesn’t fully break out into a “proper” printable page size either. What will prevail for the future? I was surprised how simple that was to answer. Apparently big singular panels that are too close to me make me anxious. I don’t want to be that close. Hello printable book as my future standard format then, not only for comics. It would be nice to know my works are kept in a timeless shareable format. The Instagram square is nice and all, but harder to translate away from social media if Instagram once dies for art like it did. Books and zines don’t die like this. And no, I will not rail against their digital counterparts, those are awesome, too. So, books, ebooks, videogames it is.
