A challenge

As I’ve mentioned yesterday, I am taking part in a challenge on Daisy Yellow blog. I know, I know, I said I won’t be doing these things anymore, but this one sounded sort of interesting. It’s called The creativity queue challenge, but I like to think of it as the Stop Procrastination Dare. The whole idea is that you have to do something that you’ve wanted to do and put off for a long time. And I kind of related, so I thought, why not?

A long, long time ago I heard a song on Youtube that I really liked. It inspired me. It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then, I come in contact with something that speaks to me – in images, mostly. I had it in my mind and I wanted to put on paper, but there’s a huge step between thinking it and creating it.

 

My first attempt was a major failure. It was pathetic and I hated it, so I dropped the whole thing. Except the idea – I still kept onto that.And then I read about this thing and once I signed up for it, social pressure played its part. I mean, ahem, I…felt very motivated. Yes.

So I tried again. I sat down with the sketchbook in lap (my new, beautiful sketchbook) and tried to sketch. It was looking acceptable so I kept going, adapting things while I went. The image in my head doesn’t always stay the same, neither does the one on the paper.

The cat was pretty supportive too. I mean, that’s what I like to think, since cats aren’t exactly the cheerleader type, but maybe this time she really wanted me to feel encouraged.

The pencil drawing took longer than I would have wanted but since I usually rush and ink the sketches before I make sure they look good enough, I consider this a progress. Obviously, I still fucked a bit up, but since I was going to edit it later, I didn’t panic as much as usual.

Then came the fun part – actually it was only fun for the first 2 hours or so. After that I kept coming back to it, obsessing over every aspect and constantly modifying the whole thing and the fact that I still didn’t like it was driving me nuts.

I edited it in Photoshop, adding textures and what not. I tried  so many different things, I saved four versions to show it to you, but there were a lot more than that. It just wouldn’t come out the way I wanted which was probably expected since I didn’t know exactly what the fuck I wanted.

As you can see, I took out the outline rather early in the process and focused on the shapes. I like it so much better this way because it looks simpler. The only thing left from the original sketch is the face and the contour.

And the final version. Final, final. I mean I am not going to alter anything. I’m done. It could have been better, but I’m happy with it. Happy-ish…However, I accepted the challenge and completed it – I got it out of my system and cleared it from the queue. So you may call a success.