This took me an hour.
My boss is getting this tattooed on her foot.
A collective hour, that is. You wouldn’t believe how many pieces of paper I killed, how many times I put it in a drawer for a month and then accidentally found it when I was trying to look for character sketches for a comic. I don’t even believe it.
I hate those flowers, you guys. I HATE THEM. I’m not saying that so you’ll tell me they’re great (please don’t). I’m saying it so you understand why I’m contemplating a bit of therapeutic madness that coalesced in my mind after a comment on my tantrum from the wise and venerable Bear:
Whether she left out her capitalization as a subtle but powerful statement or whether she just didn’t feel like hitting the shift key for the largely uncaring audience on Twitter, it got me thinking.
I don’t know why I’m so scared of my art sucking. I don’t actually care. If I’m not specifically creating an original for sale, I use inferior art supplies on purpose because they’re cheaper. Archival quality? I don’t care if my art lasts years, or minutes. Nearly all my joy comes from the process of making a drawing, not gazing at the finished product. I have just as much fun drawing with my finger on a fogged-up car mirror or a filthy pickup as I do on a piece of Bristol board with Copic liners.
And yet because I don’t particularly enjoy the finished product, I always assume others won’t either. And I also assume they will judge how much I care for them or how much effort I put into their work by the end result. So if I don’t make it perfect, my own logic insists that they will think I am rude or careless instead of just an unskilled artist. It’s taken years to dig this deeply into my neuroses, and I’m sure there are many more layers to my insanity. But I do know it’s hard for me to let go of art if I can’t ctrl+z, because those flaws might come across as a statement instead of mere accidents.
(I also undervalue my own skills and can never be good enough, but this neat article on pricing your own skills made me feel a little better about just giving people what they need from me instead of what I would need from me.)
Anyway, flaws ARE beautiful. I love this picture, which is a partial nude, so careful when clicking:
Used totally without permission.
There are all kinds of flaws in that drawing. In fact, the artist is probably going to tie me up with electric eels before feeding my twitching body to a sharkweiler that has been specially bred to chew very slowly, just for showing you such an old piece of her art. (Go look at her other, more recent work. She’s amazing.) But I don’t care about the flaws, and if they were gone, if Cox went back and redrew this to make it “better,” I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t ever love it as much as I love this one.
Clearly, I have a double standard going on here. |:<
I’m thinking of attemping to finish the art I owe people in a way that won’t allow me to convince myself it could be better, that I could do it again, and that it might be more worth the money they gave me or more exemplary of the love I have for them. (After all, some of them have given up by now and would be surprised if I gave them anything at all!) I could draw it live, like 3liza’s Sweatshop. Would you cheer and/or crack a whip at me if I marathoned some drawings? Or would you hunt me down for putting the same H.I.M. song on repeat the entire time I was drawing?
…Because I’ve been listening to their “Wicked Game” cover since before I started this post.
I fucking hate you.
That said, I am also incredibly touched. I love you, you fag.
I would certainly be down for whip-cracking, but H.I.M. has much the same effect as chloroform on me, so no promises on being able to stay awake for more than three minutes.
It only makes sense for there to be a double standard (though that likely doesn’t make it any less frustrating). Flaws in a piece are direct challenges to the artist, who probably invested a lot of time beating their head against them, and just leaving them alone can feel like a cop-out. None of that affects another observer, who can just enjoy the flaws as quirks or bits of added character, if they even notice them at all.