Invisible in the City

Before you scoff at the title, imagining a long-winded post of the oh-so-original feeling of being alone in a big city, bear with me.  I’ll try to make this as brief as possible and related to my actual painting, which I’m WAY more excited to talk about (because I have process shots!).  So here’s the “feelings” part (feel free to skip to “process”).

Soon after moving to the city I struggled to be happy, which bothersome to say the least.  I was working full-time and felt overwhelmed with trying to settle in a new apartment while finding time to write and draw.  My new schedule also doubled my working hours, squeezing my time even more.

At the same time, I started to feel very alone.  I was one of thousands of people walking to work, one of millions pressing an elevator button, and one of the countless masses that left work by 6pm, evidenced by the one-time I took the subway (missing out on the first train which was actually too full, an experience that had never happened to me before). 

In retrospective, it was one of the few negative reactions I’ve had towards change.  I’ve written about how I love change, look for it, and readily embrace it but this change, for whatever reason, scared me and it was like I was looking for a reason to be unhappy.  Over the course of a particularly unfortunate weekend, ‘invisible’ felt like the most accurate representation of how I was feeling.

Soon after, those feelings went away and I realized that everyone feels alone and invisible at some point.  Solitude is a common feeling no matter who you are.  When I originally felt that way, as usual, I thought "I could write and/or draw this", but it was even more exciting to think of a way to portray the temporary feelings of invisibility everyone has or will have felt, especially when moving or living in a large city.  So, I got to sketching.

Process

Technical aside:  If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ve noticed I often draw in my notebook, scan the sketch, and continue the color process in Photoshop.  Thanks to a jiggering of some of my Photoshop brush settings, along with a more comfortable work flow/style, I now start a lot of paintings directly from Photoshop because I’m able to replicate the look and feel of using a pen. End aside.

Despite the above aside, I technically started the concept in my notebook, but quickly moved to Photoshop.  Here’s the notebook thumbnails.  

It was more due to impatience that I eventually moved to Photoshop, picking a few elements of each sketch I liked.  Here’s my first iteration.

As mentioned in my last post, I decided to be a little more deliberate in my style and really employ a loose sketchiness in my work.  Here you can see thin outlines of buildings and the positions of would-be people.  After some thought, I started outlining in heavier black lines and I also blocked in some color.

Okay okay…starting to look good.  In my third iteration I worked on what would be the final outline, making sure each person had a body, a face, and that the buildings would stand out.  I made the decision to not include any clouds in order to simplify the entire image.  Here was the final black.

I was feeling really good here but I knew there was a big piece of the image I hadn’t tackled yet at this point and it was making me nervous.  But by this point, I needed to start the final color. 

This was the part that took the longest but I was really pleased with my decision to make each character monochromatic.  I’m sure in an earlier time, I would’ve wanted to color everyone “realistically” but I’m trying to become more aware of overcomplication and it would help with the later aspect of the piece I knew would come soon.

Here was the colored part and at this point I started working a little on every little thing to not get tired of it.  

I worked on the buildings a lot, as I couldn’t figure out what colors I wanted them, what colors I wanted the windows, did I even want windows?  Eventually, there was a breakthrough where I thought, what if it was nighttime instead of daytime?  This changed everything. 

While the colors of the people didn’t change due to their non-natural nature, I could now change the colors of the buildings (which were a dark blue) to a nicer violet and the windows could be yellow.  I was much happier with this change.

I then took some time to figure out whether or not I wanted to implement what was basically the reason for this painting – the invisibility part. 

See, at this point this picture is just "people in New York."  Which is fine. But it's not what I wanted to showcase. My reason for making this was to represent invisibility and, while it may be too literal, that is what I wanted to do.

So I started to make parts of each person invisible.  Unfortunately this started to look a bit on the awkward side so I added smoke.  This gave the city a nice element and weighed down the bottom half of the composition.  By then, all I did was finalize the colors, clean up lines edges, and then add a little last element in car lights, which I think adds to the city image.  And, after a long, long process, I finished 'Invisible in the City.'

Self Critic, A Powerful Enemy

This blog post is a long time coming – I’m about a month and a half late on it.  It’s a catch-up post and it’ll also go through the process between ‘Self Critic’ which, I think, marks a fairly big step in my illustration process. 

Self-doubt is a struggle I (we) constantly have to deal with.  Thoughts like “There are so many illustrators better than you”, “Face it, your writing isn’t good”, “If you were great, something would’ve happened already,” pop up constantly before I start something, in the middle of working on something and right before I finish something.  Sometimes it stops me.  Sometimes I give up. 

But other days, I tell myself to shut up and keep at it anyway.  That’s when the critic comes in.  He’s the one that really makes me question what I do.  The one that tells me my anatomy is off.  My color choice is wrong.  My lines are ugly.  My dialogue is not believable.  My story isn’t interesting. My plot point goes nowhere.  You have no style.  You’ve lost your voice. 

It’s really hard to stop listening to myself.    

It was this past Summer when I was hardest on myself and this self-critic was seeping through all aspects of my life and affecting me negatively.  I was (undeservedly) hating my job, scared whether I was moving forward, and I was worried about literally moving.  I had set a personal goal to move out of my parents place and into New York City by age 25, which was (is) coming up in January. 

But, as always, I kept going, with much less confidence as I was before.  I’ve talked about how little steps on a consistent basis is a great way to keep moving forward but at that point, even that way of continuing was in question.  I wondered if I was taking the wrong steps, moving sideways rather than forward or, even worse, taking steps back without knowing.  I questioned my decisions, my efficiency, my career choices. 

Again, I didn’t stop. 

I focused on the one big thing that was nagging me – my move to New York.  As usual, I compartmentalized whatever I wanted into actions I could take.  I started looking for apartments. 

I looked at many apartments and the process felt strangely like a job search - I felt like I needed to impress people and was generally unprepared for the competition.  It should be no surprise but at all points in time, people are looking to move to New York.  At one of my lower points, my self critic instilled fear in me and having found a great apartment with willing roommates, I stopped myself.  I questioned if I could really move, if I really wanted to.  I lost the apartment due to fear.

That’s the problem with your self critic.  It can be helpful, nudge you in the right directions.  But sometimes it can be paralyzing, stopping you completely and throwing you in a deep, slippery crevasse where your own critiques pull you deeper.

After some time, I did find an apartment.  A great one in fact.  Concurrently, my job promoted me to full-time, a change I wasn’t sure how to take.  Again, my self critic told me that I’d have less time for the things I truly wanted.  I questioned my happiness and wondered if I was just becoming comfortably pointless in my own life.

The move eventually did me well.  I started to regain perspective and focus on the positive aspects of myself and the big change in my life.  I mean, I moved to New York.  It had been a dream of mine ever since I went to NYU now 4 years back.  So was getting a full time job (something I’ve now learned to appreciate). 

But I was still worried about my art.  That lingering self critic latched on to the criticisms that dug into my skin but I wasn’t going to let it win. 

Throughout this time I had been working on Janaris, my personal concept-world project but my big issue was – how can I get art directors to look at my work?

  

There are many answers, one of which was, create editorial work as if you were working for an art director.  But where to start and most importantly how?  That’s when I decided to use my self-critic as a weapon against itself.  Self-criticism is something we all deal with and I wanted to represent that.  So I had started with this sketch.

It wasn’t great.  The colors were a bit off and I was trying to mix realism with cartoony elements in a sloppy way.  I held off on it for a long time.  Fast forward in time and I was in my new apartment, with a brand new work set up.  What did I want to do?  Draw.  I opened up the ‘Self-Critic’ piece and made a pained face.  I stared at it for a long time.  I asked myself honest questions about the piece and what I really wanted from myself.

For some time I was starting to be really unhappy with my art.  It seemed to want to be something it wasn’t and rather unimpressive.  There were things I made I liked but not recently.  I tried to think about what I liked about my own work and basically I said “fuck it”, put a gray sheet on top of my work and started it all over.

I worked with black lines, worried less about realistic anatomy (which was an issue in the original sketch), kept a loose, sketchy style, and really just stopped thinking so much.  I can compare it to playing sports – whenever you overthink something that has become learned through practice (hitting a tennis ball, shooting a free throw, etc) you’re going to mess it up.  So that weird-colored sketch turned into this (A few of the characters changed as I colored the piece, so you're seeing an edited sketch here):

When I was working on this, I kinda just did what I liked.  I stopped worrying how “good” things looked, how accurate and just went for feeling, not in an artsy way, but what I was trying to convey (self-criticism) was the sole motivation for my drawing.  After a rush of drawing, I stopped and exhaled.  This was much better.  I worked on colors and eventually ended up here.

I can go through the specific changes and mention why each element was better than my first attempt but honestly, this change was less about that, it was about letting myself be myself and not worry so much about where I want to be.  Sometimes the urge that started a journey (drawing) gets lost by the search for perfection or approval.  Getting back on the original path is important, because that’s the only way you’ll be satisfied with what you do. 

Lesson: I Have A LOT LEFT TO LEARN

The title of this post sounds fairly obvious, but when it happened, it kinda hit me like a punch in the face.  It was the kind of lesson where I had to really step back, take a long pause, and think about it before I realized what it was I was learning.  What am I talking about?  Let’s take it from the start.

If memory doesn’t fail me, I originally came across Blizzard’s art contest on Twitter.  Blizzard is a video game company most famous for World of WarCraft and its Diablo franchise of games.  They were holding a contest for fan art for one of their conventions.  It was pretty simple – they were just asking for fan art. I play Diablo so I thought “this sounds fun, let me try this.”

So I did some of the most fun research for a project available – I played the game.  I also looked at some of their public art and started working on a painting.  I started with detailed sketches of the character's 'pets' I wanted in my painting, knowing I would have leave the main character to my own imagination.  Here are a few of the sketches.  

Sketch 1 - pet dogs (which have a really interesting shape to them).

 

Sketch 2 -  The 'Gargantuan' - a large, brutish zombie. (This was a lot of fun to draw)

 

Sketch 3 - The general layout of the piece along with a few sketches of the main character. Here I had practically zero reference where in the other two sketches I had solid references. 

Looks pretty okay (this is as nice as I’ll be to myself), doesn’t it? I had a complete image in mind and planned to put all these sketches together in one painting.  I started placing them and had a decent composition.  The painting process was going pretty well despite a few difficulties putting the sketches together without having them blend in an ugly way.  There was just one thing that looked off – the main character.

Unlike the other elements I planned to include, there was no clear point of reference for the main character.  I didn’t think it would be an issue.  I could just pull from different materials and make my own character.  So, on Photoshop, I sketched out a very loose main character, placed the different characters in what I thought was a pleasing composition and began the coloring process.

I was very happy with everything except the main character.  It lacked the detail, depth, and refined quality of everything else.  I also spent almost no time on it in my sketchbook, choosing instead to work straight off of Photoshop. There's always a large difference in the end product depending how far along in a sketch I get on paper and when I start it on Photoshop.  It's an issue I've been working on.

For a while, I kept working on it, telling myself that it’ll get better, that, given the time and effort, I’d eventually be happy with it.

That didn’t happen. 

Eventually, as the deadline came closer and as I grew disillusioned with the piece, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t going to finish this.  The discrepancy in style and look between the main character (where I lacked clear reference and prep work) and the rest of the piece was clear and I had to be honest with myself and know that I didn’t have the skill to produce this kind of work.  Why? 

I’m sure there are a ton of reasons, some I won’t even know.  But I think it’s because 1) I lack the practice most people have and 2) there are a few foundational skills that still need developing (anatomy, perspective) etc and these things will develop naturally (albeit slowly) with practice and more work.  This might sound like an excuse but professionals have been drawing since they were so much younger, they might’ve gone to school, trained at work – for whatever reason, I doubt they have been developing their skills for only two years, which is nowhere near enough.

So, what does that mean?

Well, I have to have realistic expectations of myself and not grow frustrated when I can’t produce something outside of my skillset.  Does that mean I’m done growing?  Definitely not.  I’ll continue to push myself, to aim for images and compositions that need problem solving.  Sometimes I’ll figure it out, sometimes I won’t.  Either way, it’s part of the learning process and I need to accept that.

It’s hard to tell myself “you’re not good enough for this yet.”  But it’s true and I don’t have to feel bad about it.  I just have to look forward to the moment I’ll think “I AM good enough for this.”  

So what ended up happening to the painting?

Well, I was honest with myself and I realized that I should just work on what looked the best - the gargantuan.  

 

And I was pretty damn happy with it.