One of the many things I really admire about you is how you DO things. You want to make a comic, you do it. You want to make an edit, you go and do it. You wanna do gifs, you figure out how to do it. You're constantly setting a goal and seeing it through and learning and growing as you go. And I admire that so so much because that's honestly not easy (at least it isn't for me). And I just wanted to let you know that
WOW I’ve never received an ask that made me pace around the room so much!! Thank you for telling me!! Forgive me for rambling in this response but I want to talk about the creation process a little bit— at least how I personally experience it.
Every project, no matter how large or small, is largely a fight between vision and pain. If my vision beats out my pain, I finish the project; if the pain becomes too unbearable, I hit the bricks (willingly or not).
Pain can mean a lot of things. It can mean frustration and dissatisfaction with your work in progress— a lack of technical skill that you can visibly see. It can mean the fear of ruining your vision by putting it down on paper. It can be the feeling that what you’re doing doesn’t matter. And in the context of this ask especially, it can be running headlong into wall after wall while learning how to use a new software.
I suck at learning new software. The learning curve for me is often so steep it feels untenable at times. Why can’t I do the simplest things? Why can’t anyone teach it to me in a way I can understand? I don’t even know if this YouTube video will teach me what I want to learn. And you’re saying I’ve got to watch 20 minutes of it to even see if it’s what I’m looking for?
I need you to know that for everything even remotely complete, even if it’s a work in progress, is built on a mountain of failures, of incomplete works, of past trials and tribulations. What I have of the music video for the SCP antimemetics division, built painstakingly in one of the most inaccessible and unfriendly video editing softwares, AVIUtl, dragged itself out of earthen trenches so that my music video for Pathologic could crawl pathetically. And that paved the way for the bits and pieces of the Kekkaishi music video, which walked so that the things I do for BIRDMEN could run.
I don’t think it’s really as simple as saying, “You want to make a comic, you do it.”
I think if I had never done any comics before in my life, I’d be so fucking frustrated with the process. But because I’ve been drawing comics since middle school, because I drew things and gave up and drew more things and gave up more, I was able to learn the language of comics by the time I entered high school, and by the time I entered college I had fought tooth and nail to learn how to use digital art softwares (I sulked a lot about this. I hated that everything I learned about making manga traditionally became essentially obsolete. I sulked soooo much about it it was unreal. don’t be like me).
That’s why I could finally, at that point, after almost 6 or 7 years of drawing, finally finish a 16-page oneshot for the first time in my life. Because I had hundreds and hundreds of pages of shitty pencil sketches of catgirls and schoolboys and what have yous. And knowing I could do that let me push myself further. I said to myself, I bet I could draw a story longer than 16 pages. I bet I could draw a story that’s 100. And I did. I had to sacrifice vision so I wouldn’t encounter so much pain, but I did it. And that’s why I think I can draw 600 pages now. Because it doesn’t hurt so much anymore, these days.
That’s not to say that drawing comics for me is an entirely painless process. It just means that the only thing I’m fighting is my self-esteem and perfectionism for the most part. I think my technical skills won’t fail me, not for panelling, not for compositions, not for art. It’s all about convincing myself that what I’m doing is worth it. Not the easiest, but certainly much less painful than having to fight that PLUS technical woes.
I think I understand what you’re going through, just a little bit. Maybe you don’t experience things exactly as I do, but I think you’re going through a lot of pain right now. That you have a vision, but you have trouble carrying out, whether it’s because of technical issues, unfamiliarity with the medium, a fear of beginning something you won’t end up finishing, or something else entirely. I don’t have too much sage advice for what to do here, but I want to assure you that what I do isn’t nearly as effortless as you might perceive it to be.
I want to take this chance and say to you that just from looking through your archives I can see that you’ve improved so so so much over the years. You draw often, you do lots of character design work, you’ve got a lovely and distinctive style. I know you mentioned one time that you wanted to draw a webcomic— and I say do it! Just dive into it.
The reason it took me so long to get to my level of competence in comics is because I had to reverse engineer a lot of shit. I used to draw things panel by panel, until I wanted a 2-page spread and realized, “Shit! I have to plan and pace out my story so that everything before the 2-page spread comes to a neat end on the left-hand page!” I used to freehand dialogue until I grew so frustrated with the fact that conversations seemed to constantly go off the rails that I realized, “Yikes, I gotta script this out beforehand...”
And so on and so forth. And maybe you’ll feel like you’ve wasted time and love on something that isn’t good, but just DOING things will teach you so, so much. It’s okay if what you make is bad. You can always start over, do it better this time.
This offer goes out to you, but really it goes out to any of my mutuals— if you ever want to talk about making stuff, whether it’s illustrations or writing or storyboarding, I’m always down. Whether you want technical advice or simple encouragement, feel free to reach out to me. I love seeing what other people are doing, and I know it’s really frustrating and scary to feel out a path by yourself when you feel like you don’t really know what you’re doing.
Art is so scary. It’s so painful. But even so, we can’t help but want to carry through with it, right?
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it's Six Sentence Sunday and I actually got tagged, so please enjoy these seven sentences from my Kanej love language WIP:
She has feared his anger. She has feared his apathy. But somehow, she cannot find it in herself to fear his touch. Not now, not when he’s just handed her freedom like it was a debt long overdue. Not when he’s finally giving her a glimpse of what lies beneath the armor that hides him from the world.
“Go on,” she breathes into the air. Finish what you started.
tagging @oneofthewednesdays, @ptork66, @patrocool, and anyone else who I didn't tag but wants to participate!
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wip titles tag game/ask game
tagged by @djthedumbass, thanks for the tag!
Rules: Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Send me an ask with the title that most intrigues you and I’ll post a little snippet of it or tell you something about it! And then tag as many people as you have WIPs.
oh god, half of my wips are just untitled google docs spread randomly across my google drive LOL so i won't include those but here's some of my notion/gdoc wips (that aren't dead and buried). most of the titles are literally just descriptions lmao
here there be dragons
hiraeth (come back home)
cinderella wip
the real treasure
letters wip
urban fantasy murder mystery
atla murder mystery
travel story
scifi thing
lake poetry ig
WONDERLAND
fairytales
apocalypse au
i have an entire system of folders dedicated to c&g so. yeah
and here's some that exist in theory but don't have files (yet)
witch wip
friendgroup wip
ghost wip (may merge with another wip)
apocalypse bringers au
cyborg au
i don't think i even have 19 people to tag lmao so i'll just tag a few: @novaliae, @djthedumbass, @iwanttoberecycled, @allthecastlesonclouds, @aalinaaaaaa, @viola-cola, @gelatinous-jellyfish
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After two days of attempting to find a good Dracula casting from the small pool of actors I can remember, I finally have a finished Fancast for the novel. I’m more satisfied with some than others, but it’s the best I can come up with. Shoutout to my mom and friends for their contributions to the list too!
Paul Rudd as our good friend Jonathan Harker
Jenna Coleman as Mina Harker (née Murray)
Lily James as Lucy Westenra
Stellan Skarsgård as Professor/Doctor/etc. Abraham van Helsing
Cory Michael Smith as Doctor John “Jack” Seward
Liam Hemsworth as Arthur Holmwood (Lord Godalming)
Diego Luna as Quincey P. Morris
Michael Rooker as R. M. Renfield
Willem Dafoe as Count Dracula
Michelle Williams, Katie McGrath, and Michelle Gomez as the Weird Sisters
And last but certainly not least, Peter Capaldi as Mr. Swales
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