Archive | February, 2011

Don’t wait for the Perfect Moment. Just don’t.

Posted on February 23, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

I’ve said it before1 and I’ll prolly say it again and again and again, because it’s so friggin damn important that it’s worth being repeated ad infinitum:

Whatever you do with your art, do it now.

Do not wait for that perfect moment/the perfect idea/the perfect kiss of the muse/the perfect whatever! And if you’re sure you’re not waiting for the perfect moment, make sure you’re not waiting for a good one, either.

Art doesn’t need that perfect mood, a grand idea or a special gift. That’s just a myth, a fairy tale people want to believe, simply because seeing art and story-telling as a skill to be learned, a craft to be mastered, makes art seem almost… mundane 2.

But people still buy into the need of divine inspiration, the story of a special-snowflake gifted spark or that proper art needs that perfect moment of unbridled creation in order to be worthwhile. It’s such a beautiful, powerful myth. A story so useful3, that some people aren’t even aware they fell for it.

Bullshit.

The Danger of Waiting

Yes, They do exists, those precious moments when all stars align. Those sudden bursts of inspirations, those special, grand ideas full of promise.

But if you’re waiting for them, well, ouch. Because you won’t be able to actually use them. Or worse, you might actually overlook them.

Waiting doesn’t improve you. Waiting doesn’t teach you how to recognize a good idea or brush up a decent one into a great one. Nor does it teach you how to string two ideas into a story, or how to edit a first draft or to tighten your writing, or to expand your vocabulary. How to invoke a mood. Waiting doesn’t teach you anatomy, proportions or structure. It doesn’t teach you how to draw or to design a panel for maximum impact.

Waiting doesn’t teach you how to harvest a moment of inspiration to its fullest, it doesn’t teach you how to concentrate on your art or how to deal with the inevitable frustrations and snags.

If you haven’t payed your dues to your chosen art, not even the absolute perfect moment can gift you with a decent outcome.

Remember: All Arts are Crafts

You need to put in the time required to hone them. You need to go and learn the basics, as boring as they may be, and you need to learn the rules, because you do need the proper tools to express yourself – and you need to know what’s what, in order to make bold decisions about what you want to do.

So, go, do it now.

Pick up that pencil, open the wordprocesser and practice your art.

Chances are you’ll produce crap – Don’t worry about that, that’s normal. Most of my work’s crap, too. That’s why we’ve got sketchbooks and draftpads, and nobody forces you to publish what you don’t want the public to see.

Work with what you have right now.

Just enjoy yourself, don’t settle, strive to improve and you’re bound to see progress. Keep working and everything will be alright, even if it, right in this moment, doesn’t feel like it. Don’t give up. Track your achievements, look for where you improved. Even if you just have five minutes in your busy week, use them.

The muse will show up sooner or later (as flakey as they are, they always do), but you have to show up first.

Keep Practicing now and you and your craft will ready for that rare perfect moment.

Footnotes:

  1. Latest public iteration can be found in this comment – and that’s just the latest, it won’t be the last. ↩
  2. Well, it is.
    There are few things more mundane and technical than an artist working. Professional painters for example tend to discuss brush-strokes, canvas-qualities, colourschemes and shapes instead of grand emotions. I tend to rant about crappy tablets or the bastard that is Painter X. ↩
  3. It has everything!
    Drama and romance in the image of the iconic “suffering artist”.
    It can make you feel special and a member of selected few for having that “divine spark” or, alternativly, present you with the perfect excuse not to work on your art, by claiming you aren’t among the gifted few. Not your fault, hm?
    And you can even use it justify not to pay artists for their hard work – the “spark” is beyound an artists control afterall and they enjoy it, so a ~good~ and ~proper~ artists ~must~ give his work away for free, no matter who wants to profit off him. ↩
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[WoW] Yes, yes it will.

Posted on February 21, 2011 in Adventures in Video Games

Samus vs Atramedes

The true reason tanks are insane


Yyep. Not even her helmet helped her here. (It was a wipe, btw.)

In other news: I learned to love that lightwell. Such a useful little spell.

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Flashes of Memories, Inspiration and Staying Power

Posted on February 15, 2011 in On Traces of Chaos, Yay, art!
Chalcara, Portrait (2006)

Chalcara (2006), art by me

Do you ever got those small, sudden memories?

For example when you smell something and suddenly remember your Grandma baking cookies on the Fourth Advent (the last Sunday before Christmas), with the churchbells ringing out there in the frozen darkness on the other side of the glittering window pane, while here in the brightly lit kitchen the fresh dough smells after cinnamon and butter and candied orange peel?

Inspirations

For me, inspiration is just like that. A sudden flash of what feels like a memory; a certain character yelling a certain phrase, a smell, an action, something special the characters do, a mood they’re in, a dead body they carry.

It sometimes happens when I’m playing a game, hearing a song – or if I read an interesting sentence or fascinating word somewhere. Or an interesting statistic. A physics formula. It could be everything.

I’ve had stories which grew out of a single news headline1 and characters who grew out of  single picture.

I’m never wanting for ideas, I’m even glad I forget one or two – see, I’ve got at least one idea for a story everyday and if you’d put me on a spot I’d come up with at least a dozen more, just gimme ten minutes or so. There even might be some good ideas among them.

Ideas are a dime a dozen; I’ll always have far more than I can write in a lifetime. The problem is to pick out the worthwhile ones, because, well, most ideas are crap eitherway.

My criteria to differ between mleh and worthwhile ideas?

Staying Power.

 

Honestly, it’s the single most important deciding factor if I will create something based on an idea or not. If the idea sticks around, if it doesn’t get replaced by other, new and shinier one, then it idea actually might be worth committing to.

It’s kinda vexing afterall to find out mid-story that the idea you fell in love with is a flaky, shallow, uninteresting thing and ultimatly unable to pull its own weight in a story.

Example time: The Birth of Chalcara

Duty, 2003

Duty (2003), art by me

Chalcara herself came to me in a picture on the right. A nameless cat-anthro person-thingy, she stood in the rain just when the sun broke through, overlooking the sea, which barely covered the destructions of an just-fought battle2. I really liked her and what little I knew about her fascinated me. So I named her after a similiar character who’d played a major role from a story I’ve been toying with for quite a few years at this point.

I called it a day and concentrated on improving my art, because I wanted to get that picture into a certain online gallery with tighter than usual quality standards and the bastards kept rejecting me, and damn them all to Molten Core, I would get that fucker in! And well, I’m nothing if not stubborn.

But the-Chally-from-the-picture never let me go. She had far more staying power than her prior incarnation.

Eventually, the Chalcara from the picture merged and finally displaced the original Chalcara3 – And the story changed to suit its new center.

It fell apart and came together again, better than before. Same themes, same basic idea, the same kitty people, but a far more interesting setting and mood. The story grew. It matured. It now had an idea with staying power at its center.

It became Traces of Chaos.

Stories need time to mature.

But Chalcara still had to change and grow a lot till she was a workable character. I trimmed some things out, built others up, did (and am still doing!) all the crap necessary to make a character pull its weight in a narration. It’s a long progress, and if I had grown bored by her, Traces of Chaos would’ve died years ago.

Part of it was to restrict Chalcara’s powers, to move her out of her position as protagonist without dimishing her impact4 and pass off some of her more… odd traits to other characters, but all in all she’s still how she fist came to be.

She’s still the strange anthro in that picture, just all grown up. Unlike the hundreds of other characters I invented Chally stuck around in my head and still manages to fascinate me.

And that’s why I am telling Traces of Chaos.

Footnotes:

  1. Like the second chapter of ToC – the original headline actually stayed in the story so far. That’s unusual – normally the inspiration seed either doesn’t show up or gets replaced by something more fitting for the setting. ↩
  2. I never managed to get the ruins right in that picture, so I left them out. Since they’re not even in the picture itself, I’ve never mentioned them before – if art needs an explenation, it ain’t doing it’s job.
    But that’s the hardest part for me, struggling with my limitations in my writing and art. It’s disheartening that I’ll never do my inspiration justice. I’ll never be able or good enough to show you what exactly I can see.
    But this is a topic for another day. ↩
  3. This is a lesson that stuck with me too. Different characters must be named differently, even if they do not share the same universe – otherwise I end up with a merger between those and that has far-reaching and often unintended effects. ↩
  4. Chally, due her sheer awesomeness, is best viewed from afar for her, yours and the story’s protection. She’s got the Vetinari problem: Spent too much time in her head and she’ll lose her badassery.
    This is why I invented Siendes as viewpoint character, who, so far, is the ONLY major character who was concieved out of necessarity – I needed a new protagonist. ↩
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Hm.

Posted on February 12, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

I wasn’t born this way
My condition was learned
Once bitten twice shy I don’t wanna be burned
When you travel a passage
That leaves your heart ravaged
Your mind waxes placid to limit the damage
Your reaction is passive
Whether you like it or not
You cannot win whether you fight it or not
Your brain swallows the pain and buries it instead

Source

Edit: Have some context.

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[WoW] Rolling pin no more!

Posted on February 10, 2011 in Adventures in Video Games

So patch day came and went1, and with it an undocumented suprise happened. That damn rolling pin isn’t a rolling pin anymore, instead it morphed into a northrend-style spikey… club-thingy. 1000% improvement, in my eyes, and after she got over the initial shock2, Samus tends to agree.

But of course NOW she’s whining about the spelleffect, which wasn’t visible on the old rolling pin. It makes her – and here I quote – “look like an incompetent resto-druid with literal power incontinence“.

Bloodelves.
I swear they’re only happy when they’re high on fel-energy.

Footnotes:

  1. EEEE! Rebuke! BOOO! Nerf to the holy power generation ↩
  2. Bwuh? SPIKES?! ↩
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