But That's Not the Point, Though

Naturally, there are some things that you just have to know as an artist.

You need to know how to balance values. If you don't, your grounds (foreground, midground, background, and everything amongst the three) will get jumbled and everything will get muddy. You need to know how to create distinct shapes and volumes. If you don't, your forms will be shapeless like limp balloons. You need to know how to not make your colors look stupid. If you don't, your colors will look stupid.

BUT...

There are non-essentials, things you really don't need to learn. How to digitally paint without hard lines. How to create wildly detailed backgrounds. How to do a bunch of crazy lighting stuff. Sure, they might be useful to someone. But are they useful to you? Are they useful to me?

For more than a year, I think, I've been trying to expand and evolve my work. A good choice, but the way I was going about it was not good. I was trying to pick up other artistic skills, some useful, yeah, but most unrelated to the type of work I am compelled to create.

Whenever I had a simple sketch, I'd think, "Oh, that's nice for a finished piece," but then I'd think, "But it's not complex enough. Add a ton of background stuff. Add some fancy lighting. It's not good enough just yet." Then, in trying to make it "better," it would not only turn into something that I was both uninterested and unequipped to deal with, it would also turn into something that wasn't my art.

But how would simple compete with complex? It's not even the "everyone else is doing it" thing. Not exactly, anyway. On the face, it seems as though that is just the order of things. One's art is just meant to bigger and better. "Glow up," to use the vernacular. I'd made it my business to do that. However, the more I tried to expand my work, the more I produced things I wasn't happy with or half-produced because I couldn't bring myself to keep working on.

Somehow, it took me well over a year to realize that expansion isn't the only vehicle for improvement. From what I can tell now, I don't need to expand, at least not all across the board. What I need to do is refine. Or else I'll just be miserable.

I am not going to sit here, perched awkwardly on my chair, and tell you to only do things that cause you joy and firewall everything that disrupts said joy. Work (and, life for that matter) isn't about joy. Nothing worth having is that vapid. I don't have an issue with working on things I don't specifically enjoy. No more than the average person, anyway. That wasn't the issue.

The issue was this: it wasn't the point. My work is about simple, strong shapes, clear colors, and expressive characters, all done in a way for you to feel the artist's hand behind the work.

I don't stick to that aesthetic purely because it makes me happy.

I stick to that aesthetic because I believe it is the best vehicle for me to tell a story, so I then create work based on said aesthetic, which as a byproduct makes me happy, which in turn further compels me to stick to that aesthetic.

It's probably the mental illness at play again, but for whatever reason, I felt ashamed of that. It had to be bigger, more complex, more this, more that. For whatever reason, it wasn't enough somehow. For whatever reason, it was just not good because gravy, and the only times I could really be happy with what I did was when I wasn't expecting to see my own work and came across it accidentally or saw something so old, I was disassociated with it, and in that split second before recognition hit, I could think, "Hey, that's really nice," and then I'd remember who did it and remind them that there was still something to fix. My middle name is, in fact, Self-Loathing.

My work thrives in clarity. That's the point. Naturally, anything human can be improved, but it's supposed to be plain. The point is not to be highly rendered or realistic. It's to be clear. If I'm unclear, I may have made a mistake. But if I'm unrealistic, that's likely not a mistake. There's no shame in that. And I know why I felt shame in it, but at the same time, I really don't know why.

Why should I be playing with highly nuanced lighting when half of the backgrounds and characters I design is created to look flat? Why should I be adding so much surface detail when I know more than just a few additional elements will make it look labored over and make me exhausted? Why should I try to put Witcher III in the Game & Watch? What should I try to make Sonic '06?

Why should I introduce other elements when I know they both don't work towards my focus and make me so disappointed in everything I make, I block the feedback loop of productivity and stop making things altogether?

I shouldn't. Because it's not the point, and it never was.

None of this is to say, "Don't try new things, yo!" I doubt would ever tell anyone that. It's about narrowing your focus and prioritizing what is actually worth spending time on. Save yourself the man-hours and save yourself the heartache.

I suppose the other point is that now that I know all of this, it's like a weight lifted off my shoulders. Not the whole albatross but the gizzards and a drummer, surely. Now I can, God willing, be freer to actually make something I'm not ashamed of and refine my work.

Thanks for reading.

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