I think my creativity is strongly connected to avoidance as it relates to executive dysfunction. Dishes are piling up, and even though they’re easy and sometimes even enjoyable to do, I’d much rather plan out a massive epic with all new lore. It’s exciting to draw a character or two for the story. But what if I actually have to make it? I mean, I have so many dishes to do. All the cooking and healthy lifestyle things I want are on the other side of dishes. Or, more accurately, as has happened lately, I get serious about planning one story, then start sketching different characters as practice, planning out their story, and then thinking I should look at a third story as my next big project, before backing down to the first story as a smaller project, with breaks to do dishes once a week. What do you do to get yourself to do things you want and need to do? I’ve noticed that I have more luck when I picture a plan for what to do in a day, but I’m stalling on how to plan beyond one day. After all, I have no idea how long anything will take. Because of that, I usually imagine that everything has to be done in an impossibly short period of time, because for all I know, I’ll be dead first if it isn’t done today. It’s easier not to start, because that speeds up the time I have to face the disappointment I can imagine.
Anyways, you’re not my therapist. Last week, I talked about wanting to be more deliberate about what I post to social media. I then started working on a large and complex illustration, and thus did not post anything most of the week. Here we are, at the end, with a glazed final piece! I got Cara recently, and seeing all the artists posting these great, full illustrations made me want to do something like that for once. I went with all the couples from my short comics hanging out together. I was originally going to include Frankie, Brooke, FC (Fabian, specifically), and Renee, but twelve was too many people for me to fit onto the page, so I pared it down to published characters. I’m really happy with how it turned out.
I tried a new thing of replacing the inking stage with a 6B pencil drawing, thinking that I have a lot more skill and control with a pencil than a pen, and there are details I’m better at with pencils, so that might be my preferred way to make comics. But I realized pretty quickly that using such a soft lead pencil isn’t ideal, and the lines don’t have the quality I was looking for. Not to mention how, though they turned out well enough, digital colors and digital line fixes don’t agree with pencil marks so much as they do pen, given the nature of my hybrid workflow. And there’s no getting around how inconsistently colored lines makes for a strange outline to black fills. I want a solid black mass, edge to edge.
All of this actually brings me to another thought that’s been getting at me. I heard a saying that the hand does cannot grow faster than the eye, and I’m getting to a point where I’m starting to see more and more what my art lacks that others have. There’s still a deficit in skill I can address easily enough, and now I’m thinking about the more abstract pieces of composition and theme. Looking at people on Cara, it’s been really easy to see the difference between artists in my level, who like to draw and have some skill, and those who know how to arrange their composition and such in a way that elevates it, aesthetically and symbolically. For as much as I don’t want to keep mining for a sense of what my style is, especially since I know what things I keep coming back to, it’s making me want to figure out what my strengths are and how to best accomplish these larger goals with them. This piece really drove that home for me. It’s technically well-composed, and there’s story bits that I like and work well, but what gets me more than the technical shortcomings is that I know this isn’t the best way to make this picture. It’s just the way I could pull it off.
Life in the Gutters 
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