citizenmaple
patreon
A little take away from my recent images
🕑 Added 2018-05-04 11:11:07 +0000 UTCSo the last four images from me were an experiment of sorts that comes from a certain frustration in the way I work. I spend hours on an average image and while that is perfectly fine for a commissioned image, after all that’s what you give me your hard earned money for, when it comes to my personal images… Honestly sometimes I just want to get an image out to a decent standard as fast as possible. I have the opposite of artist’s block 90% of time; I have too many ideas almost to the point where it hurts my brain. As such I’ve been doing some soul searching artistically, do I need to bring my A game to every image I want to put out there? Is it OK to experiment and change the pace occasionally? Will people still enjoy these faster images or will they think it’s a waste of their support? Have I artistically backed myself into a corner?
I know, I create porn, but regardless I want to make porn that I can be proud of and that I enjoy making.
So what did I get from this little experiment? Well…
- I vastly underestimated how long even these scaled back images took; I think four was too many, I’ll be aiming for three next time.
- I feel like I’m finding my voice a little more with this style.
- It was refreshing to work like this, it’s brought a new joy to the commissioned images I am (and will be) working on, a change did me the world of good and ease a little of the burn out I’ve been working through.
- I got to break my oftentimes formulaic way of working.
- I just enjoyed it.
Will people like these images, in presentation if not content (that’s subjective after all)? Well only time will tell so let’s find out!
Comments
Citizen Moon
'Kill your darlings' you know, that is my major issue, I never know when to stop with a image or just give up and say 'nah, this isn't working' I have to try and finish everything. I think this exercise was an attempt to break that mindset a little and I'm definitely going to try and work on it more going further, just to maybe get an idea out, polish it a little and -then- see if I want to finish it.
Faxmachinen
Sometimes less is more, and that is perhaps even more true for titillating imagery. As an example, another artist recently drew a shower scene, where half the image was blurred from fog on the glass. While he did draw everything in full detail for an alt version, I think the blurry version worked better, and was more steamy in both senses of the word. My point is you can use things like rain and chiaroscuro to make details and shades less important, and actually get a better result than if you hadn't. Of course you'll probably have to do more experiments to figure out what works and what doesn't, and I for one would love to see the results of that. And now a piece of advice from my digital media teacher: Kill your darlings. In your case that means you have to sacrifice some of the ideas you really like, because they would take too much effort to do. His advice rings true to me, because some of my best ideas are those that I didn't prefer to begin with.
Citizen Moon
Glad I'm not alone! :P I'm badly dyslexic so my time perception and processing is a little... interesting. but it can be very very frustrating personally, especially when I'm coming towards the end of an image and seem to be spenting 5 hours just painting hair.
Funny, just yesterday another artist that I follow through Twitch expressed the same frustration with how images take longer than he expects of himself. He has been drawing for 15-20 years.
