3 weeks of death fail + other stuff

It’s been 3 weeks since I said I was going to start working on a personal project to reinforce my design skills, get ready for FZD and feel it like a real job in some way.

But I failed, I’d like to say now everything was right but it wasn’t, I have to learn from this failure and repeat it again in the future because is something I recommend to anybody.

I painted this illustration just as “teaser” of something that I hope gets bigger with time.

Now I can explain what was the idea, in the 3 weeks, I was goinn to work on a project with a script part written by me and part written by a friend who was going to act as a client. There were deadlines, revisions, etc. And the part of the script I wrote was to set up a story with elements I would not be comfortable with because of the lack of experience but I was interested in.

The point is I wanted it to be like a bloodsports challenge, something where I not only practice, but also study new stuff. So the first week was going to be full of study and the other 2 designing and doing a few more studies if required.

The first week was right, live streaming only 1 hour a day I had a lot of time to keep focused studying.

I finally spend some proper time for anatomy: gesture drawings taking reference from many websites, Michael Hampton’s book of Figure drawing…I didn’t finish reading it yet but went over half of it and I can only recommend it.

Then with the Gnomon DVDs of Scott Robertson I studied a bit of design and perspective.

Some architecture and environment thumbnails playing with my copic markers (never used them before). The Gnomon DVD of Cecil Kim was very useful and inspiring for that.

Also this quick study of fashion, mostly japanese.

Study of skulls from different animals, taking as inspiration some stuff from FZD’s students.

And a lot a lot of pages just drawing straight lines and ellipses by hand. I didn’t take pictures of those because I thought weren’t interesting enough. I thought it was going to be quick and in a few pages I could do it but no way, I still can’t get them totally right so it’s going to take some time. But it was so frustrating, see how other mates were painting awesome illustrations while I was just drawing lines and ellipses.

So first week was good, intense, productive but….tired. On 2nd’s week Monday I started feeling less productive and on Tuesday I fell sick, lack of sleep and whatever. Then on Wednesday something totally unexpected happened, I got a real commission and I thought a real work could go over a “fake work”. And the next day to compensate the 2 days without livestream I streamed for longer and over the weekend I worked on the bloodsports piece of “Living statues that you already saw”

At this point the plans were totally messed up, so I did my best for the commission, worked on the bloodsports (Living statues), long streams came back as well as days without livestream and painted this other illustration just randomly.

In the meanwhile I kept thinking on the project and sketching some designs and ideas, but I realized it was a big thing, and I was excited about it, so I though, why not, to keep working on it but with no deadlines, as a personal  IP.

But I posted on Facebook I had other plans for after these 3 weeks. The first one was to replace all the pieces on my portfolio from last year for more recent works but I still have one, Goldilocks 2085, for the basic reason  it’s going to be included on a book and I thought it’d be good to keep it there for a bit more.

The other plan was to finally open my sketchbook on sites like concept art.org. And so I did, CA’s sketchbook is pending for approval, I made one on cghub and started posting my stuff also on the CGGallery and Pixiv.

As last words, in these 3 weeks, I had peaks, peaks of extreme productivity but also unproductivity, I felt stressed, frustrated but also excited I missed talking to people but at the same time noticed I need time for me too. I learned, I learned a lot from failures, mistakes and success.

Keep the hard work up!