Days like today, I feel as if there is a race I need to excel at. I was watching a video on the very impressive Kim Jung Gi and suddenly here I am again, trying to improve my skills at drawing things into perspective. Some days (most days in the recent past one year or so) I work for hours inside small digital gray boxes (so I don't feel the pressure of wasting paper), filling them up with skulls, faces, body postures, vehicles, architecture and all things into perspective. This has been an improvement since two years ago. Back then, I'd fill sheets of paper with hand-drawn lines, triangles and ellipses. A whole lot of pages.
I wish I could call this warming up and maybe it is too, but the truth is that it's a self-worth deficiency response mechanism (in my own words). When I don't feel enough (worthy of, capable of) doing anything remotely creative, I tend to do repetitive and measurable things that I call practice. On one hand I get the feeling that eventually I will improve by doing them, and on the other, I get some measurable success in something measurable. It's easy to tell that this line is straighter that the last one. Needless to say that in the end it doesn't work for my self-worth; On the contrary, when doing it for a few days, I start dreading doing anything else, anything more unstructured or creative. I hope to curb my urge for "more practice", and instead focus doing more complete pieces of work like yesterday's piece.
Today there's been some twist: At some point I started adding some narrative elements like the tower on the gigantic animal (actually, the other way around: the gigantic animal under the tower) and the little guy riding the giant. To be honest though, if I wasn't planning on exposing my half-assed modest efforts of the day, I probably wouldn't bother spicing it up. Yet, a victory because mood-wise I'd rather be drawing ellipses all over again.
More good things to be making mental notes of: The spaceship's articulated arms that had always bothered me, the character in the bath and the one overlooking him (I don't do much play with characters on different planes). Well done, deep breath, and release.
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