fawriel's avatar

fawriel

88 Watchers91 Deviations
27.3K
Pageviews

Hmm.

1 min read
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 dare to work with colors again, I'll definitely have to make sure first to fix whatever caused this issue... But I mustn't let it discourage me!

Grarr!
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Well.

1 min read
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.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Realization.

4 min read
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.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Summary.

3 min read
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 portrait drawn of themselves as a strange and cool creature, either.

So yeah, I spent almost 40€ printing 25 postcards of a sexy-cute catoblepas girl and 25 posters of the new Trope-tan, and ended up selling... 1 poster.

On the other hand, what did I get? I got about half that money back for the single poster and other services. Most of them involved "conhons", a thing that I hadn't heard about before that day. Most of them also involved very happy customers, except for one, whom I feel bad about. Very bad. I will make sure that the mistakes I made shall never be repeated.

I also learned that, indeed, I should stop being an American nerd. Or at least, only an American nerd. I am, after all, a German. It's funny, kind of, how I'm studying translation, and it appears that I'd be more capable of translating a text into the foreign language than vice-versa. My German has been deteriorating, and I've long lost the connection to anything my peers might be doing. I suppose it might be time to change that, painful though the rehabilitation process might be. I don't much like online Germans, but maybe that's just my imagination.

I also own a website now. And university starts again, soon. Unless something goes wrong, I will be able to keep studying Japanese. It'll be fun.

Did I reignite that spark? I'd like to say yes, but of course, it remains to be seen if the momentum will keep up. But if I can find enjoyment in honing my drawing skills much like I find enjoyment in studying kanji, there shouldn't be a problem.

So what now?

Let's see, I guess.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

Snorkel!

1 min read
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!
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Featured

Hmm. by fawriel, journal

Well. by fawriel, journal

Realization. by fawriel, journal

Summary. by fawriel, journal

Snorkel! by fawriel, journal