Weekly Update - 129

Alright, look, you guys.  I was TRYING to be a sad, mopey artist, and I was TRYING to come on here today being all sad and stuff and worrying about whether or not my comic was any good or whether anyone was still enjoying it, but now we have TWO new subscribers I need to thank. Alarm Frog and Henry Jesionowski! Thank you so much for subscribing!

But seriously, you guys (all of you) are awesome, and I can't really explain in words how much it means to me that you're here, throwing real money at this crazy thing I'm making.

Now, that... sad blue, lumpy potato up there is supposed to be the Citadel.  Normally I'd be too embarrassed to share a panel that's in such a sorry state, but I'm immensely unhappy with how it's coming along and I've decided I need to redraw that panel entirely, from scratch. That up there, is trash. And it's the primary reason I won't be posting a comic this week. I feel like it may be (long past) time to investigate and learn entirely new techniques so I can at last give my backgrounds the quality they deserve.

Comic this week?  Not this week.  I doubt I'm going to be able to learn entirely new techniques and apply them to Page 150 by Wednesday. But I'll post a sketch or something instead. Send some suggestions if you like!

Drawing: Max Character Sheet, Page 150

Playing: Starting tomorrow, I'll be playing Total War: Warhammer 3, Immortal Empires (beta). (Seriously, what is with the big-budget games industry and their titles? It's ridiculous.)

Reading: Heroes by Joe Abercrombie

God Slayers Volume #1:  The book is still on the table.  And hopefully it will be on the ACTUAL table by early next year.  Thing is, it's not progressing as quickly as I would like it to be, and that's largely my fault for being slow (in general, but particularly) at making the touch-ups and clean-ups I want to make to those early comic pages to get them ready for printing.  As such, it may be that I'll have to slow my regular posting schedule in order to get it done.  I'm thinking, for now, that I may need to cut back to about one comic every other week, at least until Volume #1 is off to the printers.  (I'm also far behind on other promised art, like all those character sheets I still need to do for the $10+ patrons. I hate slowing my posting schedule down but I feel like I might be able to focus more on writing without the guilt of all this extra work hanging over my head.)  Anyway, today I've sent over the first ten pages, as well as the cover, to Fenris Publishing for review and feedback.  Hopefully they will get back to me and let me know if I'm at least on the right track or if I need to do it all over again, this time without embarrassing myself.

Ramble:

Ah, ye olde faithful Ramble. Ye where I vomiteth mine brain words directly out onto thy screen each week and nay few people readest thee.

And probably now fewer people still will read this one, after that awful fake old English atrocity of an introduction. A veritable mockery of the language. But that's okay. This is mostly for me to help sort out the thought-spaghetti and free up some brain RAM for writing and art every Monday. You guys ever see one of those really awful spaghetti factories from Satisfactory with the belts going in every direction without care for organization or aesthetics? Yeah, that's me most of the time. And the Ramble is when I get to select like half of the factory and delete it, freeing up space for yet more terrible spaghetti to take its place.  And now that I've sufficiently lowered your expectations for the following many paragraphs, let us begin:

There's never been a happy artist. That's a statement I believe is true with very few exceptions. No artist can ever be happy, and that is because we are slaves to a very dominant part of our very existence: the creative process. (As an aside, I'm being a little bit facetious here. I don't really mean that an artist cannot ever be happy or that we should stop trying to be happy, nothing is so simple, blah blah blah, but the point I'm trying to make is that something that is very core to our existence as creative people is a very difficult thing to live with, and it requires special attention and extra care to manage on top of everything else in life, and I think failing to at least acknowledge that is a mistake.) The creative process is not a kind, forgiving or pleasant process. It is a process of constant ruminating, self-doubt, self-questioning, everything that therapists tell us we shouldn't do, and in the end there's the realization that anything we make will never be as good as we imagine it to be. It is a process of envisioning what it must be like to be these fictional characters, living in a fictional world. It is a world over which I have total control, theoretically, but in actuality I am instead at its mercy, trying my very best to tell the tales as they are told to me. These characters and these worlds become things in our minds that we love and cherish to the point where we want to share them with others so they too can love them as we do, and that is where reality ruins everything for us. I liken it to trying to capture the dreams I have while I'm awake and then struggling to reshape and retell them in a way that makes sense to others. Can there be anything that's more frustrating than the creative process? Is it any wonder that so many famous artists throughout history are legendary for their depression as much as they are for their art or other creations? Capturing a dream and smushing it into some form of reality-based dough is impossible. And yet we try anyway. Madness.

The past five years have been a lot of ups and downs for me.  I think it's safe to say this is another "down" week, but rather than suffer through it in misery I do like to reflect on why that is, when it happens. To take a step back, to acknowledge and recognize the poor mood, as that is the first step to reversing it. There are parts of my story I really like. There are parts I really hate. And I expect that pattern to continue long into the future. I've been fighting with burnout a lot lately. When I'm burnt out, I don't do my best work, which makes me feel worse in turn. And while I'm still really excited for the upcoming chapter and the events that are meant to occur within, I'm worried that, because of the burnout, I won't do it well enough to produce very satisfying work. I'm used to disappointing myself, but I worry about disappointing all of you. And I would much rather produce better art at a slower pace than produce more of the same art at a faster pace.

I learned of a rather troubling pattern during my 10-year internment in the games industry. What kept me going all that time (and by "kept me going" I mean staying just barely ahead of quitting or killing myself amidst years of non-stop life-crippling "mandatory overtime" in a toxic crunch-first culture) was changing roles or teams roughly every 2 years.  After about two years, doing the same thing, staying on the same team, the burnout would start to creep in really strongly. What was interesting and even fun to me at first always eventually became tedious and dull. It took about two years for me to run out of new things to learn in each new role, and the only way to stay engaged with the work and to keep myself invested and interested was to move to a new role where I had new things to learn. If I don't feel like I'm learning anything or improving my skills at all, my motivation just tanks and the burnout creeps in all the faster.

To keep myself engaged with comics, it's both easier and a little harder. Easier because drawing comics is something I've always wanted to do, even since I was young. But it's also harder because in order to keep myself engaged, I have to self-motivate for literally everything. I am alone in this pursuit. Nothing is getting done if I am not doing it. Drawing as a way to practice and improve is one thing, but what am I supposed to do when my art begins to stagnate? When I feel like I'm not improving much through simple practice and repetition. That's when I need to seek out new techniques, look up new methods or tools, and find other ways to supplement my skills so that I can continue moving beyond any given plateau. Even in the creative space, it's important to apply some logic and organization to keep the process on track, two things I am historically bad at. I need, perhaps, a goal-based system that goes beyond the simple goal of posting one comic every week.

So for now, at least I have a clear goal: looking into how to draw a damn frikking spaceship so it doesn't look like a gods damned lumpy blue potato all the time.