Alice Winterhold
patreon
A FAILURE
🕑 Added 2024-07-05 15:44:59 +0000 UTCSo I did a post about my drafting process and I mentioned The Dread. Well, fortunately that piece turned into a good example of why The Dread exists.
I spent way too long on this trying to make it work; coloured it, hated it, shaded it, hated the face, redid the face, still hated the face, said fuck it and recoloured it, hated it, tried to push on hoping that shadows and shit would fix it, hated it more, started fiddling with it, erasing random parts, HOURS upon HOURS completely stuck in the sunk cost fallacy. It took so long that the Mercy skin I intended to parody fell out of relevance and so the whole point of making it became moot, yet I pushed on out of pure frustration and ultimately wasted my time. I called it a lost cause and decided to share it here as a cautionary tale.
Art is hard, sometimes you just can't make the thing in your head appear well enough on the paper/screen to meet your own expectations. It's frustrating but art is something I supposedly do for fun and it's always a learning exercise. I wasn't having fun or learning anything new working on this so I have abandoned it. Maybe I'll come back to it at some point but I haven't returned to any of my previous failures either so I doubt it.
Also please note, I'm evaluating things I make against my own personal expectations, If you think it's cool and good, thank-you. I'm probably being unfairly harsh on myself but I need to look at my drawings and think "That's good!" to feel happy with it, other people appreciating it (While really nice and welcome) won't let me feel good about it, does that make sense? Is this some insane arrogance?
Anyway, After I quit I spent a few hours drawing a lewd picture of myself which I'm really pleased with that I'm gonna post separately because it is LEWD and so will be spoilered. The ashes of failure make great fertiliser sometimes
Comments
Scotty Keister
back when I was a full-time graphic designer and computers didn't have as much memory, frequently you'd be hours into a piece and the computer would lock up. Of course, you never bothered to save mid-work, so you lost the whole piece. You had to start over again. But the second time through took half as long because you'd already made all the decisions and tried all the filters, composition and layers, so the technical stuff was already accomplished. Frustrating? Hell yes, usually accompanied by loud groaning and cursing. Even with the stuff that comes out unsatisfying, you still learn a lot about fixing things, trying new things. Nothing is wasted.
Eric James
Looks very nice. Maybe it was worth the time and trouble.
