Art, commissions, and expectations
A couple times recently I was looking back at the commissions I'd completed over the past 12 months and I thought to myself "Wow... I drew that. I really did that, -this is the kind of quality that I remember being inspired by back when I was in college and first started getting influenced by other artists." I'm proud of that, and I pinch myself sometimes because I can easily remember the kind of work I was doing even going back to the beginning of this very Livejournal and I sometimes wish I could send a message back in time to let myself know that I'll get there eventually. Of course I still find all kinds of errors and problems in the current work I do, and there's no end to the amount of artwork I see that I yearn to be able to do of similar quality and skill, but I finally feel like the baseline I can create on a regular basis is of the sort that I always wanted to aspire to, so that feels really good.
The flipside to this feel-good scenario is that I look at the work I've done over the past 12 months and I think back to many years ago when I might finish a picture in less than an hour, and times when I would attend conventions and hang out with folks trading sketchbooks and visiting instead of what I do now which is have a quick dinner and then hole up in my hotel room and spend the next 7 hours trying to finish up as much as I can but somehow not getting nearly as many pictures completed as I'd hoped or once been able to. I wonder sometimes, -am I slow? Can I get faster? Are the methods I use unnecessarily laborious? If I were faster and less fastidious would anyone notice or care?
Often I'll comment to people that I don't consider myself an artist, but rather an entertainer. The visual ambition of the works I create are usually a far distant secondary importance than the *idea* that I'm communicating. I specialize in character artwork and my highest goal is to make the character feel like there's a spark of internal life to them and that's something I can achieve with just a quick scribble. A scribble can sometimes be satisfying if that spark is fully realized, but when people are paying me to do color illustrations I feel obligated both to myself and the client to create something to the best of my abilities, and as I've gotten more confident and stronger in my skills that has translated into pictures that take longer and longer to execute. If I had unlimited time that wouldn't be a problem, but the issue I face is that I have other things to do besides commissions plus I currently need to take as many commissions as I can in order to build a positive income. There's the crux: do I raise prices? Do I spend less time on each project? I'm constantly feeling like both would be the proper answer, but I get bogged down in the stress of wondering whether people would pay more for less, or conversely how can I train myself to make better work worthy of higher prices but spend less time doing it.
Of course the bar for quality and speed is measured in the professional animators that I grew up reading about who could draw like lightning and make character art that was so vibrant and alive. They didn't scribble out a mess of lines and then massage it until the character revealed themselves within the spaghetti like I do, they practically just breathed it out onto paper and behold, inside of five minutes the finished picture appeared with the quality that I aspire to. How do I get there? What is the magic process?
I'm sure the answer is "practice" and the only way to get practice is work constantly and do so with the goal of mastering the visual appearance that you're aiming for so that you can whittle down the unnecessary scribble and just arrive at the finished drawing with a minimum of exploration. I feel absolutely certain I can do this, but at the same time I remember how long I've been drawing, and it's not like I take weeks or months where I'm not drawing, -I draw frequently enough that I've actually gotten pretty good at the visual quality I've wanted. How about getting to the speed? If I could maintain the quality while increasing the speed then I'd feel really good about increasing the price...
This a little window to an ever present conversation in my head.
The flipside to this feel-good scenario is that I look at the work I've done over the past 12 months and I think back to many years ago when I might finish a picture in less than an hour, and times when I would attend conventions and hang out with folks trading sketchbooks and visiting instead of what I do now which is have a quick dinner and then hole up in my hotel room and spend the next 7 hours trying to finish up as much as I can but somehow not getting nearly as many pictures completed as I'd hoped or once been able to. I wonder sometimes, -am I slow? Can I get faster? Are the methods I use unnecessarily laborious? If I were faster and less fastidious would anyone notice or care?
Often I'll comment to people that I don't consider myself an artist, but rather an entertainer. The visual ambition of the works I create are usually a far distant secondary importance than the *idea* that I'm communicating. I specialize in character artwork and my highest goal is to make the character feel like there's a spark of internal life to them and that's something I can achieve with just a quick scribble. A scribble can sometimes be satisfying if that spark is fully realized, but when people are paying me to do color illustrations I feel obligated both to myself and the client to create something to the best of my abilities, and as I've gotten more confident and stronger in my skills that has translated into pictures that take longer and longer to execute. If I had unlimited time that wouldn't be a problem, but the issue I face is that I have other things to do besides commissions plus I currently need to take as many commissions as I can in order to build a positive income. There's the crux: do I raise prices? Do I spend less time on each project? I'm constantly feeling like both would be the proper answer, but I get bogged down in the stress of wondering whether people would pay more for less, or conversely how can I train myself to make better work worthy of higher prices but spend less time doing it.
Of course the bar for quality and speed is measured in the professional animators that I grew up reading about who could draw like lightning and make character art that was so vibrant and alive. They didn't scribble out a mess of lines and then massage it until the character revealed themselves within the spaghetti like I do, they practically just breathed it out onto paper and behold, inside of five minutes the finished picture appeared with the quality that I aspire to. How do I get there? What is the magic process?
I'm sure the answer is "practice" and the only way to get practice is work constantly and do so with the goal of mastering the visual appearance that you're aiming for so that you can whittle down the unnecessary scribble and just arrive at the finished drawing with a minimum of exploration. I feel absolutely certain I can do this, but at the same time I remember how long I've been drawing, and it's not like I take weeks or months where I'm not drawing, -I draw frequently enough that I've actually gotten pretty good at the visual quality I've wanted. How about getting to the speed? If I could maintain the quality while increasing the speed then I'd feel really good about increasing the price...
This a little window to an ever present conversation in my head.