The Frustrated Introvert's Dilemma

 Before I get into talking about the art and my process, a little reminder/announcement that the drawing tablet I use for all my digital art and touch-ups/additions to my traditional art (so 60% or more of my work altogether) has succumbed to a hardware issue and I'm trying to drum up funds for a replacement. You can read the full story in this journal entry, and if you'd like to help me out My (traditional) Commissions, dA Printshop, Redbubble, and Ko-Fi pages are all great ways to do that, and I thank you so much in advance for doing so. Even just spreading the word helps a lot! 

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Well now, what do we have here?

I'll go on record and say that yes, there is a specific event/topic that inspired this. But I'm not going to go into any more detail than that, because it's almost definitely going to come back to bite me nice and hard on the rear if I do. That's the unfortunate nature of our online-enabled world these days. 

That said, this actually happens to me a lot. Something will happen or I'll see a post (sometimes several posts all talking about the same thing) and I'll either have strong opinions on it or just otherwise be frustrated and want to share my two cents, and sometimes I really will go so far as to type out a Big Long Thing about it. Only, I think about it for a few seconds too long, and I end up deleting it. Because:

What if the wrong person sees it?
What if what I said gets taken out of context?
What if I get labeled as [insert thing I don't want to be labeled as here]?
What if I get in trouble some other way I haven't thought of?

I don't have a very far reach, but I'd like to keep what I do have on good terms. 

But of course, deleting the post without posting it sort of misses the mark, and so normally I don't feel any better than I did before. But I rarely go back to it, since most of the time I either know or I think that I know posting my super-long (sometimes unpopular) opinion is only going to cause trouble I do NOT want to deal with. And thus, I'm better off keeping my mouth shut. Or, if I must, posting the vaguest-possible 1-2 sentences broadly touching on the subject. 

And that's where the caption, "Reasons Why I Don't Post Much" comes from. Aside from my art and the very rare things that make it past my "this is not a good idea to post" radar, especially on other social media that don't support long-form text like dA does, I'm usually fairly quiet. I am a "lurker" by nature, for the reasons above and because small talk kills me slowly. 

I'm sure I can't possibly be alone in this...whatever this is. This want to vent/rant/share your opinion but not being able to because you just don't want to deal with all the things that could possibly go wrong from doing so. 

So I made this little comic to expend my frustrations in the safest way I could think of. It gets the point across without nailing down a specific event/person/whatever. 

I haven't tried to make a comic in...in years. And the like 2 times I did, they were very simple and kinda dumb. (And I'm sure can still be found lurking in the depths of my gallery somewhere.) So hopefully this isn't too terrible. I tried to format it nicely so it's fairly clear and easy to read/follow, while still trying to keep it unique to me. (Or at least attuned to my own tastes.) 

I started with a rough traditional sketch of the four panels, done in a style similar to my Chibi Cards, which I use over on Twitter a lot these days. The character is, of course, supposed to be me, hence the purple hair, blue eyes, and black tank top. Fortunately, once the idea of doing a little "vent" comic came to mind, I was able to pretty quickly come up with a clear mental image/plan of what I wanted and what I would need to get the point across as simply as possible. 

And simplicity was a must because I knew I wouldn't be able to give this nice clean lines digitally unless I wanted to actually rip my hair out in the process. 

You can read the full details in my Ongoing Saga journal, but suffice to say I've been trying some things with my current not-Cintiq set up and Jesus Christ is it not becoming more and more aggravating. 

The biggest issue I dealt with here was the lack of precision, hence the messy, messy, messy lines, and the closer I got to completion with more layers involved, the worse staggering/lagging I also had to deal with. 

Obviously, I eventually got through it, but I am telling you guys I am so ready for a better tablet solution it's not even funny anymore.

Anyway. I roughly traced my sketches to get the lines, then made the centering lines and rearranged things slightly, since my sketch wasn't perfectly centered or squared or anything. Then I expanded the canvas so I could add the frame. 

Then I moved on to coloring, and once again, for the sake of my sanity, I stuck with simple, flat, imprecise coloring. And I had to do it by hand since my messy lines mean the magic wand tool wanted to select about five times more area than it needed to when I tried to use it to just "grab" the sections I needed. 

My color choices were fairly simple. I know what colors I naturally am, and it made sense to me to make the background my "Mystic hue," since my walls are that color in real life, and it's just kind of my on-brand, go-to color now. The main colors I had to decided on were the desk and the computer screen. I went with a darker brown for the desk, hoping for a little extra contrasting, and the computer screen I kinda just went with what felt right. 

Picking fonts was a bit of an adventure. I wanted something relatively easy to read, but with a little be of extra flair than just Comic Sans or Generic Plain Computer text number 3,497. And I think this one hits a pretty nice place between something more computery and a handwriting look. I did have to use different fonts for the *type* 's on the second panel and for the caption/my name at the top to get the look/effect I was going for, though. 

It's not much and far from my best work. But at least it's a way to sort-of get my feelings out into the world. To know that I could at least do this one thing, even if I can't do anything else to vent my frustrations because other options will not end well. 

At the very, very least, I hope maybe somebody out there can relate or gets a small laugh out of it. 

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Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings 

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