WHY SO SLOW - A wall of text

Hello,

I stated a few days ago that I would try and explain why the comic side of my activity is so inconsistent, not in the form of a litany of complaints (I’ll try to restrain myself!) but rather identifying a problem that is not uncommon in the artistic field and exploring leads to address it.

Please keep in mind that what I’m expressing about my work doesn’t devalue your enjoyment of it, I am proud of what I do and very thankful that your support affords me the opportunity to dedicate more and more time to art. Also, I am not saying it will never happen but I am not having an existential crisis bringing my personal investment into question, I love drawing, it’s a passion, Thick women are also a passion, the intersection of both is where I want to be, I am optimistic in that I do not envisage a future without art in one form or another, the only way is forward.

My problem is rather about an untapped potential that I can’t seem to “unlock” because of issues with my approach, as made evident by that block with the comic.

Lack of confidence

I am not the most confident person art wise and these last few years my process has revolved around finding tricks to circumvent this fact rather than address it. I'm always questioning my style, my abilities, my choices, and not really in a constructive way that marks progress towards a resolution.

If you have wondered why I don’t post simple Pinups, Polished Sketches an overall bite-sized fun things, it’s not because I don’t want to, on the contrary I love this stuff (Ah! BoBoBo), it’s rather because I can’t really do “simple”. It takes a looooong time for me to build up and idea into something I am happy about, it’s a pretty messy and convoluted process.

One of the tenets of a good problem-solving system is to go from simple to complex, get the core elements down and break them down into smaller bits, and so on. In Art, this is what the fundamentals cover, Gesture, Perspective etc., if you have control over these core elements you have a solid foundation that you can attach complexity to.

In my particular case, I never seriously learned these fundamentals, when I began getting a bit serious about art I just learned anatomy, and my process when drawing a character is still largely based on the idea of building a figure anatomically in a linear fashion. This is a problem as I don’t really apply the “simple to complex” system effectively, which means in turn that I have difficulty coming up with a good solid core for any given picture fast enough.

What I mean by that is that when I see a leg, I see a myriad of little anatomical bits interacting in an intricate way, and not the big forms of the leg.  Without much exaggeration when I want to draw a leg, I pretty much have to rebuild it from the ground up rather than call upon knowledge of the big forms.

Now, I’m not saying it’s a full on trainwreck! I am able to tweak and tweak and get to a point where that legs looks good, but it takes me much longer than someone who knows how to simplify a leg effectively. If he wants to change the angle of that leg they just shift the big forms around! I on the other hand, have to shift my entire perspective on what I see as a complex system, it’s heavy work, and it makes solving problems scary.

This is why I can’t do “simple”, I don’t have a solid base to confidently simplify things so for every drawing, whether what I want to represent is simple or not, I know I’ll be investing a lot of time. It follows that since I’m investing time I might as well make every page very full and dense, hence the focus on Doujin-Style compositions.

Furthermore, for single pictures (Commissions etc.) I can “cheat” that lack of confidence, spend as much time as I need to on the piece, layer in as many modifications and overhauls I deem necessary to get it to a satisfactory point where it’s out there, set and done.

 

With a comic it's different, I can't do that for a project that spans over ten or fifteen pages (spoiler!). For the PG+Eleanore comic I got four pages pretty far into inking but then I started to wonder If I made the right choices, went back on these details too many times, questioned the layouts, the character designs, the inking style, overall I got bogged down with technical stuff to the point where instead of evoking passion and enthusiasm it became a source of tension, bringing about the risk of losing the creative connection with the material. 

From there, discouragement and procrastination took their toll, opening up the file meant being assaulted by waves of questions about choices made before that just seemed wrong.

Resolution?

It’s becoming clear that my shaky process does not work for large projects (and very small projects!) and that while I’m comfortable with my single pagers, I want to be able to do more.

I want to be able to draw a quick and expressive picture of Pipe Girl and I want to be able to tell a longer story as a backdrop for good porn, either way, I have ambitions >)

I feel going back to the fundamentals is necessary to restore that confidence, although there are some obstacles to overcome in regards to that.

The first is that having no experience with formal study of the craft I don’t have much discipline, resources are widely available for artists these days but there is so much out there it’s actually a complicated task to organize that overwhelming mass of information.

The second challenge is that I am now very set in my ways, being in my early thirties and used to a specific routine and approach, in many ways my personal experience can be a bit parasitic and distracting, it’s always harder to reconnect with the basics and develop new perspectives when you’ve marinated in your own sauce for so long (hazardous translation of a French expression).

As to how I’m going to deal with this, I quite simply don’t know in full yet. I need to find an angle, something to channel my efforts, perhaps an art mentorship, probably life drawing if I can find a venue, something to establish a structure and get solid input, I’m doing my research =)

How it will affect my production

I’m going to need some time to work on my fundamentals as previously mentioned, but I intend to achieve that by taking less commissions, my commitments to Patreon In the form of Rewards and sharing all my content will not change, there just might be one or two less non-Patreon related pics to share monthly until I improve enough.

When it comes to the comic, finding an angle to keep working at it is very much a thing, mostly by strengthening the outline (compositions, scripting, layouts). I probably won’t be pushing the pages into deep sketching and inking just yet, gotta clean up that process. I am attached to SilenceSoLoud’s Eleanore and PG’s dynamic in this little story and I will see it through, I just don’t feel I can do it justice within the time frame I had loosely hinted at.

Thank you for reading all this!

I’d like to reaffirm my commitment, sounds like a political speech but I don’t want to give the impression that there is pain on the horizon, I’m having problems which run pretty deep, they won’t be solved instantly either, but it’s my love for the medium that’s making me realize my current approach, albeit successful beyond my expectations, is limiting my progress in terms of artistic expression. I don’t want to stop doing what I am doing, I want to do it better, be more flexible, and build a consistent pipeline between my ideas, the canvas, and you comrades.

Don’t we all want a world where I can draw a sweat-drenched MILF anal ahegao in less than 20 hours? I know I do.

Thank you for your support,

Cheers =)