So this morning, I spent a good amount of time happily replying to any person who gave any sort of response to the Trope-tan poster, and I felt great coming up with many different ways to thank people for favs and stuff like that. It was nice.
Then I started talking to a friend who immediately started criticizing it, calling the body awkward and all. I laughed because it was kind of a crass whiplash after all the positive reception, but after a while of talking more, it got really depressing. Then, after something he said, I realized something.
He was in a critical mood because he was disappointed with himself for failing at something. That's why he was criticizing me; we both have much to learn and need to overcome our faults.
What I realized is that... I don't want that. I don't want to think of art as that thing that I have to do in order to become a person who is worth anything. That's what it had become to me, and that's why I hated doing it so much, because whenever I failed, it would mean that I'm worthless, and it was always easier to distract myself than to try and keep failing at being worth anything. That is not what I want art to be. Drawing is supposed to be a thing that I enjoy. Something that I do for myself, not to fulfill some vague obligation for a goal that I don't even know.
It's a bit of a complicated thing to think about, of course. I want to draw for myself, but also for others. I guess it would be a good explanation to compare it to studying kanji. I started studying Japanese, and I love studying kanji. It's a mental exercise, it's interesting, and the best thing is, I know exactly how to get better, and I can see my progress in numbers. The mental exercise makes me happy, and the progress makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile. The progress of drawing should be similar. I want to explore it, I want to be able to see what I can do and that I can keep doing it better and better. Of course, I also draw for other people. A single person is useless, and so is a single person's isolated art. But the progress is for me.
I guess a part of me wants to say that I don't want to receive criticism, but that's not quite right. I'm well capable of realizing when I have trouble with something even as I draw it. As long as there's anything that I can't draw without fumbling about, constantly erasing and trying anew, I cannot claim to be able to draw it well. And as it stands, that is a lot of things. But of course, there's many things I will still miss. God knows I can take forever to notice when an eye doesn't quite match up with the other, for instance.
It's not like I want mindless praise. In fact, that kind of thing touches me quite little. If someone says a picture is "cool" or even just "nice" or perhaps even "good", that's nice, but it doesn't tell me anything. I guess what I really want out of feedback is to know just what the person's reaction to it was. Did it make you smile, do you find it cute, does it strike you as very melancholic, whatever impression you may get.
I guess the kind of criticism I don't want to get is the kind that just says, in some way, "this could be better", because that says nothing I don't know already and only serves to remind me of the harsh side of reality. If there's something that stands out to you as wrong, I'd like to at least know in detail exactly what it is, and perhaps if it completely ruined the rest of it for you. Just like I want from positive feedback to learn exactly what I did right to get such a positive response, and what kind of a response it is.
This post ended up rather disorganized. I guess the bottom line is: I'm unable to become happy if art is, to me, a thing that I must live for, rather than a thing that makes life worth living. I share art because I want to move people in some way, make them smile or make them see things I see, and the progress of getting better and improving flaws is something that I want to do for myself, at my own pace.
ShopDreamUp AI ArtDreamUp
Hmm.
The issue I had with that giant comic seems to have been caused by wildly divergent color adjustments on various screens. I still don't fully understand it. I hope that I managed to at least put a band-aid on the issue. Unfortunately, I can't imagine that anyone who doesn't see it the way I intended will get the emotional reaction out of the comic that I intended. Well, those that would've gotten it from viewing it as intended, I mean.It's very much a downer for this project to end like this... But I will try not to let it get me down. I learned a lot, got a lot of experience, and there's still many ideas I want to do stuff with.Before I d...
Well.
I just spent about a month working on a comic. Pretty huge, clocks in at 20,000 pixels in height. Finally finished, tried to upload, had to resize it, resized it, uploaded, and there we go.Then I looked at it on another computer and it was purple.
And I asked someone else and it looked purple to him.Changed to PNG, didn't change anything.Made even smaller, decreased the JPG quality to make the filesize go way down.
Still purple.This is just not fun. Why are you ruining this for me, Deviant Art? I'm not even going to joke about this. This is just a serious dick move.
Summary.
So I spent my vacations working towards the goal of attending the Leipzig Book Convention so I can sell things at the doujinshi corner, with the goal of reigniting my artistic spark, giving me an incentive to get my skills back up to snuff, and to feel like a real artist drawing stuff for people.The whole thing was a mixed success. I actually made a decent amount of money, all things considered. Or I would have, if I hadn't completely missed my mark in terms of the demographic I'm working for at the con. Girls, girls everywhere! And no, TV Tropes is not, in fact, well-known in Germany! And as it turns out, no one seems to want to have a po...
Snorkel!
It's an inherently funny word and thus a valid title.I just figured I'd bump the previous journal entry off the main page since it's no longer current.
And it's embarrassing.Wooooo!PS: It won't let me set a mood anymore. Booooo!
© 2011 - 2025 fawriel
Comments6
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
I always get the impression that criticism is a widely misunderstood concept. As a culture, we have a bad habit of reducing things to "black and white terms" - when we receive commendation and praise we feel like we've done a good job and are a success, and when we receive justified negative comments we start to feel like we have failed. Everything gets reduced into binary as we get overwhelmed with the question of "did I win?".
But what if it's not that simple? If you write a story that moves someone to tears, does that reaction become less meaningful, less "real" if the next person to read the story hates it? If you make someone smile slightly, does that count as a complete failure if you intended to make them laugh?
A lot of it stems back to the dubious philosophical belief that there is a singular "truth" behind all concepts. But what if there isn't? What if something can be both a true failure and true success at once, depending how you look at it? If one person thinks an artist has improved and another person thinks he has gotten worse, does one of these people have to be wrong? What if their judging criteria is different? Similarly, would it be wrong to say Citizen Kane is a great movie but a terrible video game? I would think that is a valid opinion, although a bit obvious.
Alternatively, imagine a doctor creates a drug that cures lung cancer. This is great, he saved lives! But a patient with BREAST cancer might give the perfectly legitimate criticism that the drug "doesn't cure enough kinds of cancer". Is the patient wrong to say this? Is her opinion worth less if she can't explain exactly HOW to improve the drug? Should she just keep quiet and accept that she was not the doctor's "target" group?
The thing people don't understand is that true criticism isn't about overcoming all your faults. It's just about finding them. What you do after that is your own choice.
Sometimes it's just not important to fix a certain flaw. Like, comic artist Rob Liefeld can't draw a realistic body to save his life, but he still makes oodles of money. And he knows about these criticisms. Heck, when Penny Arcade held their "Pose like a Rob Liefield Character" contest, Rob Liefeld himself submited an entry. He just has no reason to waste time fixing a flaw that doesn't affect what he wants.
Sometimes you can even just cheat around flaws. For instance, I hate drawing complex backgrounds and tend to rush them. I recognize this is a fl6aw I have. I COULD try to overcome it, but instead I usually just pay someone else to draw backgrounds for me. The end result is the same and I don't have to do something I dislike. Is my solution somehow worth less than if I had painstakingly worked through the problem on my own?
Criticism isn't supposed to be discouraging or depressing or even necessarily let you know how much work you have ahead of you. It can't tell you whether you're worth something or not. It's all about helping you get whatever it is you want. Maybe you want to be regarded as a great classical artist, maybe you want to collect a thousand "squeeee!" comments from a dedicated fanbase, maybe you simply want to be able to support yourself financially off your hobby. You just have to keep in mind that everything you do will be both a success and failure, listen to whatever criticism you can acquire (no matter if it is detailed and thought out or just "this is bad"), and use that info to come up with ways to get the SPECIFIC successes you want.
But if you don't know exactly what you want, criticism can't help you find it. Statements like "something I must live for rather than something that makes life worth living" are the typical vague ideas we fall back on when we can't objectively analyze our own motives for doing things. As Lewis Carroll wrote, "if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there". Just sometimes you won't end up where you really wanted to be.
But what if it's not that simple? If you write a story that moves someone to tears, does that reaction become less meaningful, less "real" if the next person to read the story hates it? If you make someone smile slightly, does that count as a complete failure if you intended to make them laugh?
A lot of it stems back to the dubious philosophical belief that there is a singular "truth" behind all concepts. But what if there isn't? What if something can be both a true failure and true success at once, depending how you look at it? If one person thinks an artist has improved and another person thinks he has gotten worse, does one of these people have to be wrong? What if their judging criteria is different? Similarly, would it be wrong to say Citizen Kane is a great movie but a terrible video game? I would think that is a valid opinion, although a bit obvious.
Alternatively, imagine a doctor creates a drug that cures lung cancer. This is great, he saved lives! But a patient with BREAST cancer might give the perfectly legitimate criticism that the drug "doesn't cure enough kinds of cancer". Is the patient wrong to say this? Is her opinion worth less if she can't explain exactly HOW to improve the drug? Should she just keep quiet and accept that she was not the doctor's "target" group?
The thing people don't understand is that true criticism isn't about overcoming all your faults. It's just about finding them. What you do after that is your own choice.
Sometimes it's just not important to fix a certain flaw. Like, comic artist Rob Liefeld can't draw a realistic body to save his life, but he still makes oodles of money. And he knows about these criticisms. Heck, when Penny Arcade held their "Pose like a Rob Liefield Character" contest, Rob Liefeld himself submited an entry. He just has no reason to waste time fixing a flaw that doesn't affect what he wants.
Sometimes you can even just cheat around flaws. For instance, I hate drawing complex backgrounds and tend to rush them. I recognize this is a fl6aw I have. I COULD try to overcome it, but instead I usually just pay someone else to draw backgrounds for me. The end result is the same and I don't have to do something I dislike. Is my solution somehow worth less than if I had painstakingly worked through the problem on my own?
Criticism isn't supposed to be discouraging or depressing or even necessarily let you know how much work you have ahead of you. It can't tell you whether you're worth something or not. It's all about helping you get whatever it is you want. Maybe you want to be regarded as a great classical artist, maybe you want to collect a thousand "squeeee!" comments from a dedicated fanbase, maybe you simply want to be able to support yourself financially off your hobby. You just have to keep in mind that everything you do will be both a success and failure, listen to whatever criticism you can acquire (no matter if it is detailed and thought out or just "this is bad"), and use that info to come up with ways to get the SPECIFIC successes you want.
But if you don't know exactly what you want, criticism can't help you find it. Statements like "something I must live for rather than something that makes life worth living" are the typical vague ideas we fall back on when we can't objectively analyze our own motives for doing things. As Lewis Carroll wrote, "if you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there". Just sometimes you won't end up where you really wanted to be.