Ryan, the guy who brought me onto the Light's End project was at one point complaining that I was taking too long producing a piece of work for the game. He realized that I suffer from being a prefectionist when i came to art. I have to agree with him. Perfection is something that I seek to an almost destructive end. It is a mental hang up that keep me from letting any of my art hit the airwaves until I know that it is perfect, or I am so sick and tired of the piece that I cast it out to the Internet as if it were the sea. The latter is often what comes out and keeping with the metaphor, I am often surprised when I get a bottle with a message inside, commenting about a work I disliked.
In order to shake me from my bad habit, Ryan reminded me that "Perfection is the enemy of the good." What an amazing quote. Thaks to that mantra, I was able to finish Light's End and took the negative reaction on the chin happily. I've recently found myself falling into my bad habit again until last weekend.
While perusing news sites, I came across a professional artist's painting tutorial where he also offered the brushes that he used to create the image in Photoshop. Happily I downloaded them and tried them out. I definately liked them over the standard issue ones, but I became puzzled when it came to dealing with the ink brush... My lines weren't perfect and maintained the sketchy style I used.
In university, my art profs hated the fact that I used short strokes to do curves, that I didn't have confidence in my lines. In truth, I didn't and using a tablet certainly wasn't helping at all, given a much smaller workspace. Using the tablet was a double-edged sword when it came to inking: I could be accurat but lack confidence, or have confidence but lack accuracy. The end result was a feathery or wobbly line. The other option, paths, was a terrible choice in and of it's own right because of the massive time sink it was.
Using the ink brush as a sketching tool however, I remembered something important. If I shrank the size of the final image, the overall look would be clearner in theory. That is what I did, and lo and behold, it looked much better. (Certainly not the magna carta, but it was a lot better than it felt before.)
I suddenly felt empowered and I looked at other bits of artwork all over and I saw the same thing. People would ink their work freehand, clean it up, and then shrink it down. Some had little to no errors, while others had plenty, but the work still looked good at the end of the day.
This week has been an epiphany with regards to my artwork and I am so glad I have discovered it. It feels like a breakthrough for my art, so much so that I really ought to start putting more of my work up on this site for comments and critiques. I feel stronger, thicker skinned, and happier with this knowledge.
I feel awesome.