Been bickering with an art block this past couple weeks. At one of those places where I'm not as good at anything as I want to be and so things take longer than I want and there are 50 things I could work on but I don't know which one to choose -- should I work on one of the larger pieces that have been poking around my head? If I do I'm devoting a lot of time to one thing, and there are a) lots of smaller things I want to work on and b) a lot of fundament work that I should be brushing up on.
Should I work on some studies? Well, then I'm neglecting the more personal pieces that I have waiting.
Should I work on the little things waiting for my attention? With the little pieces I run into problems with not really knowing what to do with simple layouts and inevitably having them take longer than I want and being more involved for a product with which I'm ultimately undersatisfied.
The beach drawing from my last post is an example of a quicker piece that still took longer than it should have for a throaway sketch, and has a lot of problems and some style conflicts. This doodle that I made while attempting to try some framing a couple weeks ago is another:
There are some aspects of the design that came out well but lots more that didn't work the way I wanted them to. And, as with every time I try to do a composition other than one fit to the paper size, I just don't know what to do with my negative space/how to frame my design to fit comfortably onto the paper when I'm not using all of it.
So, mostly, i go back and forth. I work on personal doodles and small things, I think I should be doing some fan art for the upcoming convention I'm selling at and get frustrated when a style technique I'm attempting falls flat. I work on larger pieces and having problems with my shading/composition/anatomy, and think I should go work on sketches and doodles and get better.
The worst of it is that I run into the same hesitance to branch out and experiment with style that I had when I was in school, in that the current time I have available to draw is so limited due to my hand problem that I don't want to...I suppose, "waste" it on art that doesn't come to anything. Everything has to be a magnum opus because I can only draw a little at a time, so if I draw something I don't like, that was time I could have spent on something good. It is an awful way to work and leaves me sometimes frozen with indecision. I have some issues I want to work on and what I should be doing is just spending whole days on my weekends experimenting with character design, with color and composition and style and layout...but since I can do one or two sketches at a time right now, and then have to stop for at least a few hours, I squander my time, and worse, put off drawing at all, which is the worst thing I can do.
But I've been kicking myself in the butt.
At home I have decided to start a series of people with bikes because I need anatomy and character design practice and I'm crap at vehicles. So I'm doing everything from Vespas to motorcycles to hipster cruiser bikes, accompanied by interesting people. In theory. I'm still on the first one.
At work, my warmup/lunch project is a present I'm working on for my bestie: A bit of Supernatural fan art featuring Castiel sitting on the Impala (more vehicle practice). I'm trying to go with another looser composition and I'm hoping it works.
Here's a bit of an in-progress doodle with all my rough lines and rewdraws:
I'm still figuring out my background. Maybe the beach. Maybe the desert. Something simple.
Still no word from the lab about how they've discovered that I'm just low on a certain vitamin and as long as I eat cake twice a week I'll have no problems with my hand.