I suppose where I am right now is expressing what it feels like to create things. This one was very much a trust the process thing, but not in the way it usually is. The artwork started out strong, and there was never a point where I felt it wouldn’t turn out good. The process was more of an internal thing for me. Understanding this thing I was creating. Understanding that it wasn’t about death, pain, or sadness, but about art and creation taking root and springing forth as a sublime thing. Sometimes I work to create what is in my head, but this time, I was creating a thing, and the work was to understand it.
For a while now I’ve been on this journey to bring authenticity into my art, but admittedly, even I wasn’t 100% sure what that meant. I just knew that I was on on a journey to find parts of myself that were missing. I’ve been looking for passion, and joy, and truth that I’d been missing it.
I’d been trying to draw out something within myself and failing at it. But I know not that even failing is good and part of the journey. Because in failing, I’ve still been trying, and working, and building.
In the absence of joy, I’ve been practicing skill. In my want for passion, I’ve been acquiring technique. In my search to truth, I found grace.
This journey is of course a lifelong one, and every road is different. Falling back on the familiar road can help to keep moving, but trotting a different road brings with it new knowledge.
The key to this journey has been to keep moving. Even when lost. Even when confused. Even when tired. Sometimes the cycle was rest, cry, and throw things, but at some point come back to it.
I think in this new artwork, I’ve truly found a lot of what I’ve been looking, and the funny thing is, it’s made up of a work I did while on the journey to get to this piece.
So… I drew this a little time ago. The last couple years I’ve been content. I’ve been in a okay place mentally and generally happy. But what I hadn’t been is hopeful. Being hopeful was something that was defining for me for most of my life. But life be lifeing, and hope became painful. It’s only recently that I’ve began to feel hope in a way that feels encouraging again. In that, I drew this to process what losing hope felt like for me. I’m regaining parts of myself I felt were pulled away, and hope is starting to feel normal again.
I used to really struggle with sketching on digital. So what I used to do was I would do my drawings on paper, scan them, and then add digital color. This little guy here was the first sketch and color I did years ago that is completely digital, and he opened a door for me that allowed me expand on my skill set. The past few months I haven’t been working so much in digital, but with the stories that I have upcoming, I think it would be wise of me to step back into that mode…
I put a lot of work into creating the Pavilion LinX stories. The art, the stories, the planning… I felt it was good. But somehow it wasn’t right. So I decided to start over. This isn’t the first time either. I’ve gone back and forth with my story telling because i was rushing myself. I wanted to jump in head first without really knowing what I was doing. I’m still trying to reconcile things within the new stories that will be coming in March. Reconcile what was, learning what it is, and dreaming what it could be. But like I’ve said before, the key to it all will be authenticity in my storytelling. Even though I let go of those stories, there were some very important things that were within them that I hope to carry over, and lessons I learned that I hope will help make them something special. While those stories may be in my archive, I still love some of the artwork that came out of that time…
I made this one a while back, and I love it even more now than I did then. At the time I was playing around with different poses and perspectives. I think I need to do more of this moving forward.
So there was this online group I was in (am in, not sure) and there was a art challenge that was going to happen with the prompt being creating a our very own Naruto Original Character. Somehow, somewhere, someone dropped the ball and the thing never came about, but this was going to be my submission for the challenge.
