REFLECTION ON PROCESS - BEST PRACTICES

It's Fall now. A lot has happened since my last post - death, moving, selling a house, a new position at work. Coming up - more moving (to Olympia from Seattle) and a change of jobs. Regardless of all this, I do my best to direct energy into the book. Our last meeting which was early in October, let us see we were ready to attack colorization - to start working with color in earnest towards finished art.

Looking back at my process and the evolution of my artwork for this, a few things stand out:

· IT'S BEEN AN ORGANIC PROCESS - I had some strong influences along the way but mimicking isn't my wont and I how they were going to influence me I wasn't going to dictate. After some early explorations, I decided on the level of cartoonishness but beyond that I have been mostly feeling my way.

· FIRST IMPULSES ARE OFTEN CORRECT - I struggled plenty with the face and head of the toddler and some with the mom but Dad, Sister, Grandma, and Scout worked right off the bat. Also, the look of the pages; the art was a very natural development that established itself at the very beginning. Blue Colerase pencil on light blue paper. I'm not sure anyone in the group understood why I was doing it - maybe thought it was some eccentric artist silliness - but, eventually, they grew to accept it.

· STAY TRUE TO YOUR ESPRESSION EVEN IF OTHERS DON'T GET IT AT FIRST - If you are working within a group that gives you leeway to explore, the best choices get a chance to prove themselves and eventually be embraced. If you don't have that freedom, well, that is unfortunate. The best books are often by creators that are given (or insist on) creative final say.

I feel very fortunate to be working with this group. They have brought out some of my best work.

copyright Cafe Maroc 2018

Upcoming Meeting - Getting It Together

A meeting has been scheduled for April 10th. The creation team will assemble and review where we are and decide where we are going. It's been a couple seasons since we've done this. In the interim, I've been chipping away at my self-assigned drawing challenge - all revisions. Now what needs doing before this meeting convenes is to supply digital files of my new work to Chad (our graphic designer) so he can have his go at constructing the book, as an InDesign file.
This will be a major step towards completing the book. So far, our earlier iterations were done before all the drawings were complete and therefore it was just a taste of what Chad can do with my drawings, or, I put the book together and it lacked any of the design work from Chad – this was the naively designed update shared at the last meeting.
During the last meeting we were contemplating hacking the story and pictures back until we had a shorter more suscinct story. We finally decided against it and I'm excited to be making the needed changes and to see this book come closer to the final vision we've held for so long.

Here is an example of the kind of revisions I'm doing.  

Bottom image is the revision.

This is our hero and his assistant heading off after the mystery.

Pain and Healing

I have multiple things that keep me from this work of being an artist and illustrator. Some are psychological/behavioral along the lines of procrastination. Some are responsibilities and life, such as being a father and helping my partner take care of her ailing mother and being the father of a toddler. Also, having a day job (BIG ONE). A really problematic one has been something a lot of artists deal with and that is muscular-skeletal pains in the arm, hand, neck or back. Drawing or painting can be hard on the all the parts of the body involved in sitting for long periods hunched over a table while focused on making careful marks on paper or canvas. For me it is pain in the back, neck, trapezius part of shoulder, and thumb. That is accompanied by numbness in the arm and hand. The pain often gets so intense it is absolutely prohibitive to working on my art.

After suffering with increasing levels of ouch for several years, I got myself to my general doctor to discuss this pain and see what could be done. After getting an x-ray of my neck at a subsequent appointment, it was determined that I have degenerative arthritis. This was disheartening but not surprising. Armed with this fact, I have booked physical therapy sessions which will focus on alleviating some of this pain and strain though massage and whatever other means.  These begin next Monday and if my insurance can cover enough of the cost this will be ongoing.

Another tack I am taking to alleviate the symptoms I'm experiencing is meditation. I have increased mindful meditation to almost every day for 40mins. This it making a real difference in my baseline bodily tension that I carry around with me and has lowered my general levels of pain from an average of 4-6 to a 3-4. These numbers are based mainly of how I feel while at my dayjob which can be the most challenging time to stay relaxed. A good deal of the pain I experience is, I believe, the result of a unwieldy amount of anxiety and PTSD-based tension I carry in my body.

I am hopeful that I can feel better and do more drawing in the near future. Reversing some of this debilitating pain has become a real priority and I'm doing what I can to take care of my self.

Photo of latest drawing pre-coloring

Age-Old Pitfalls

I am guilty of succumbing to the syndrome most new bloggers fall victim to: loss of momentum. No posts in, like, forever, right? Well, I became overly concerned with following a preset narrative, one I decided upon myself. I want to describe a narrative of progress and overcoming barriers, not of back-sliding and difficulty, creative blocks and overwhelm.

If you go and read the previous post back in (Holy crap! Just checked!) late July (this is mid-November), you may have gleaned that I was reeling pretty good from a meeting we had. That meeting left us unclear on our path to completion, but I realized (and was told) I had a lot of reworking too do. A lot of art was inconsistent in character depictions and I needed to fix that. This didn't feel like a simple, straight-ahead task. The challenge of it made me very uncomfortable, raising too many questions in my head – about the quality of my work, stylistically how the characters should look – would I have to draw everything over again? – do I have the grit, the stick-to-it-iveness to finish this book?

I have been working on correcting the drawings and straightening out the inconsistencies but it has been slow going. Some weeks - no progress is made, no action taken. In truth, this post itself is a breakthrough. There is a certain shame in having a calling that you are having trouble rising to meet and writing about it helps ease that.

So, yeah. Stay with me. Keep coming back. This is going somewhere. I promise.

The ongoing struggle.

Uniformity Required

We had a meeting earlier in the month. Everyone was present; Chad, Steven, Keith, and I. This meeting started with me previewing for the others a digital mock up of the book. All the images that we felt the book required were used in the PDF I shared. There are a lot of new images and this was the first time the rest of the group had seem many of them. They were well received, some with great enthusiasm. However, there was a general problem with the images.
I've had my nose to the grindstone so closely - had my blinders fixed to block out extra work until I finished all the "pages" - that I was taken aback when it was brought up and discussed how the Toddler's appearance has not been consistent throughout the book. I had been keenly aware of this but had accidentally erased it from my mind. You see, his face and head was much more rounded when I began drawing him and had acquired a block structure somewhere along the way. And his nose became bigger and more block like. I simply forgot this looming issue, how fixing it was a necessity.

 

As you see in the top image, created a few years ago, the Toddler's face is quite rounded and his nose is smaller and less square. The second image has a completely different color palette, too, but that was just an experiment and final coloring is a later step. But yes, the difference is clear and there were other less obvious features that changed like the teeth (the gap developed later), and rounded hair ends. 

Don't expect a highly uniform appearance with any of the characters in the book, but Toddler is such a central one that special attention will be given to him by the reader and so I must get it right. Nevertheless, I enjoy giving his face some flexibility based on its expression and forces acting on it such as his own nubby little hands.

———

It is always difficult to take criticism, artist or not, and this meeting was no exception, but I have some new tools to deal with this difficulty.

(Continued in the next post...)

Four Heads/Are Better Than One

I've been playing around with a bunch of head drawings I did in the last couple weeks of the Toddler and his Companion. This is one configuration I particularly liked. Remember!.. Color will come later/next.

That Thing I've Avoided Sharing (Until Now)

This is a post that I have repeatedly thought about writing but have questioned the wisdom of sharing each time. Sure, I have alluded to it, mentioned it in passing, but never directly, and never with the weight it deserves. The post I'd like to write is about self-doubt. Often times I feel like it's the elephant in the room. It seems to be too important a factor in the process of making this book to give short shrift. If I am going to share this creative process with all of you ( and I really want to because it is something of great importance to me) it's import to express it in a forthright way. To convey the story behind the storybook, and more specifically my story as the illustrator, all the relevant and interesting bits should be included even if some of those things feel quite personal.

...Isn't this the new way? -Marketing (believe it or not, Drawing A Conclusion is me marketing this book-to-be) should be thought of as sharing, and with a kind of informality and transparency that allows for connection - trust. I don't have any training in marketing, I don't know about clicks or eyes or interest, how to attract them. For sure I've been doing it wrong because – too shy on social media, too hesitant; too few posts, not enough about me, my opinions, my life. Too infrequently have I commented on others posts, started a conversation that bonds and brings together. I have my habitual behavior of being reclusive, staying insular, not reaching out to others. But I very much want to reach out and connect with you. I want to create something that for you is joyful and meaningful. You being able to see what me and my friends have created and sharing it with the young people in your life would be a very special connection!

Of course the fear in sharing what is surely a weakness is that you are painting yourself in a negative light for others. Many would say, "Don't do it. You are giving yourself a reputation". Honestly, I can't see how that wouldn't be true, but, taken as a whole, revealing your weakness need not be a negative thing. By revealing my difficulties, I hope to help the reader identify with me and my journey. The self-doubt feels like a unique and personal debilitation, but, in my more grounded moments, I can see it as a quite universal and common affliction. If it were not so, there would be a heck of a lot more people going after their dreams. This seems like common sense.

To put this into less wordy, more everyday language:
Guys, making the pictures for this book is really challenging me and making me confront my insecurities and reckon with my negative habits. In my core, I sense this will be a pretty awesome book that has the potential to get a lot of attention that could translate into sales. I've never had anything resembling that kind of success and the possibility of it is causing me to subtly drag my heels — put off completion. Even if the only success this achieves is the completion of a project that took years, I am daunted!

When I have attempted to support myself through my craft it has been a losing proposition, I just couldn't sustain it, not enough gigs, under-estimating how long it would take me to complete and therefore under-bidding. It was a couple years of being broke and going further into the hole due to the interest on my credit card debt. It was a couple years of struggle. I lacked the inner strength to self-promote, to network, to push forward with confidence.

All I could see were my negatives, how I could only barely muster the focus to work on my portfolio and add new pieces. It seemed I didn't have the resolve or discipline to put in as much work as animators/illustrators that were having success and believed that if I did the same as they, I too would have success and my work might even be of superior quality. This may be true, but it is a sort of excuse. It is part of perfectionist's dilemma; too self-critical to create, never having to see if your work measures up to your high standards. Never trying, never failing. The only solution being: to do the thing, to take action, to risk failing, give myself the only chance of succeeding.

The bottom line, thankfully, is that here I am...doing it. Not just to make a living, but to take full control of my success and consequently my life. Not creating for a client, but for myself, for everyone. I'm proud to be inching toward a goal that I have worked very hard on and represents my best work to date.

Thank you if you read to the end! I'll try to keep future posts shorter.