As per usual, the new page is out, and without further ado; my rambling of the week!

When a person embarks on a creative endeavor, the first thing that happens is the envisioning of the project. You get an idea weather it seems concrete or a little abstract of how the project turns out and you just think to yourself "Oh man! It's going to be so great when this thing materializes into the thing I see in my head." Yet something that doesn't often come to mind when we get these visions for a project are logistical questions like "How much work will this take?", "Do I have the time to do this?", "Am I even at the skill level to achieve this vision that I see in my head?" Sometimes the fantasy of the result that we see in our heads binds us from from what we actually have to do in order to make it a reality.

So Why am I picking this for a topic for a blog? BECAUSE I'M SUPER GUILTY OF IT! This happens all to me all the time. I get a vision for doing something cool (mainly drawings or illustrations) and I either underestimate how much effort needs to go into it, or I just outright don't  take it into account. This will then lead into much frustration to be had. Either in the tumbnail process, or the the bulk of the main project, or BOTH that I try to work out the kinks of the project and I'll think to myself "What's going on here?! Why is this thing not turning out like this super high quality version of it in my head?!" Then I'll either begrudgingly quit the project or finish it with a less than satisfied feeling for it. It's hard for me to name a time when I'm drawing or painting where it doesn't play out closely to this.

So what's happening? Is there something wrong with me? Should I get help for this? No, not really. I used to the term 'fantasy' in the earlier paragraph for a reason. The definition of the word is: "The faculty or activity of imagining things, esp. things that are impossible or improbable." That's what a lot of these flashes of inspiration are. They're an unrealistic expectation of what the result of our project should be. I said that these ideas can can be concrete or abstract, but when you boil them down, all ideas are abstract. We are chasing after a feeling we have and scramble to find a physical way to translate that into the real world, and no matter how much effort we put into it, our desired result can't overcome the limitations of reality. A picture is worth a thousand words but the feelings that they can make us feel can sometimes be wordless.

Now is the moral of this blog that all of our trails to achieve dreams are futile and not worth trying? No, not at all. There would be no progress if people weren't trying to push themselves to a higher ideal. We need to work to get closer to our ideal, but the issue with that is that you need to finish something at some point. You can't just keep polishing something for an undetermined amount of time or else who knows when you'll have something to show for your work. So while it's good for you to do better, it's also good to set limits or deadlines to it as well. If something turned out a little less than desirable, then just brush off your shoulder and try better on the next venture.

Am I right? Or am I some anomaly living in north west Ohio who thinks this?

Keep working towards that "perfect piece"!
-TiMBo

The new page is up and now I have all the original art of the pages I have published up on my deviantart page.

As you can see this blog entry is called finding your voice, and by that I don't mean your singing voice, I mean what it is that makes your drawing/paniting/illustrations uniquely yours.

When one embarks on learning how to draw, we start off by copying a lot of stuff. Some would say this is "tracing' or some would call this "using reference" but either way, we are copying another work whether it's an illustration or a photograph, and this is completely fine. Hell, there's even a "grown up" version of this called "Masters Studies" I think that asking someone to learn a skill completely in a vacuum is a very unreasonable request. Usually a reason that we peruse learning a skill like drawing is that we're inspired by the work of someone else.

Now does this make it okay to master someone else's drawing style and market it as you?... Well, I would be inclined to say no but it might bring you a little success, but I'm also willing to bet that you wouldn't want to go down as "The Poor Man's <Blank>"

So you have to branch out and experiment with other looks and styles. Surely your a fan of more than one artist or illustrator, otherwise you're a really boring person.

I guess the way to illustrate this is to go through a journey I had. Up until I was 22, i figured that I would be a pencil and ink guy and nothing more. I figured that painting was just for those people who "get it" and I wasn't one of them. Then I came across this video of Alex Ross painting a cover:

I felt like I peeked behind a magicians curtain when I saw this. "OHH! This is how he does it!" I thought to myself. Every other art lesson I had prior to this video didn't show me an organized structure to making a painting like this did. So now that I had some idea of how to approach painting, I wanted to get my hands dirty.

I decided just to try it with pictures of my friends. My first attempts didn't have the same finesse as Mr. Ross, but I was learning about how the medium worked.

I decided to do these fun paintings of the Chrono Trigger characters. I wanted the structure of Toriyama's character design to be undeniable but I wanted to push the realism.

I also did these pieces for The Legend of Korra. Here again i was pushing that realism with mixed results.

So I put some time aside to do another one for this year's season "Book 2 Spirit" and I found myself as a cross roads for how I was going to approach the painting of this piece. If i was going to go for that realistic look or if I was going to take a bit more of a stylized. So I asked my other art buddies and they all thought i should make it a little more stylized with subtle outlines.

I was really psyched about the way this turned out. I felt like I found a look that was something unique to me, and I cant wait to do more! But I have to keep up this comic as well.

So If you feel like you're being too derivative, just throw something different into it to see if it's something you would like to stick with your art.

Now to get back to work on this comic.

Peace!
-TiMBo

I'm going to be frank with you folks, I was going to do a much bigger blog entry here, but there's an aspect of it that's not finished yet. It will definitely be finished for next weeks page entry. Just letting you all know that it's keeping up the hard work for you all.

Thanks,
-TiMBo

I have decided to move the page updates to Wednesday, because well frankly, I would like my weekends to be totally Galsha free. The artwork has been running behind, and I should have known with my crappy sense of discipline that I would be doing things the night before an update needs to go up. Now I have my weekend totally free to either draw or paint other stuff, or for other activities entirely. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to work.

Hope you're enjoying the experience!

-TiMBo