Quest for Perfection: An Artist’s Worst Enemy

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Oftentimes, an artist can be their own worst enemy. We criticize our own works far harder than other people will. We scrap and restart and struggle to make the image on the page match the perfection of the art in our head.

This isn’t always a bad thing… unless you’re a webcomic artist who is running on a tight deadline. In this case, scrapping a page may mean missing an update or worse, losing the forward momentum that keeps the comic running.

A Sygnus.org forum member, Dark Knight Elliot aks:

My problem was (and is, I suppose) that I was never really satisfied with my work. I’d work for ages getting one page to look just right, and then I just keep frustrated trying to duplicate the results. Is there any advice you can spare for poor ol’ me?

Answer…

As I see it, this is all about balance. What you’re balancing here is quality of your work vs. meeting the self-imposed deadlines of a regular update schedule. It really depends on which one you place the most value on.

In my experience, if you’re not consistent with updates, you may lose readers (though there will always be those who are loyal no matter how many updates you miss). To me, being consistent with updates is one of THE most important things you can do to build and keep a readerbase… but that’s my personal value.

On the other hand, you question whether that means that you should release pages that aren’t up to snuff just to meet an update schedule. My answer to that is… yes and no. It really, really depends on the situation.

No one wants to go out of their way to produce something less than their best. But there will always be off days… weeks… months… For example, in order to keep updates consistent at Wayrift, I make it a personal goal to draw roughs every Friday night. I ink on Fridays and Saturdays… sometimes that holds over into Sundays, but I try to finish everything by Saturday night so I can have a day off on the weekend. I meet these personal deadlines whether or not I feel like I’m in my best art form.

Yeah… sometimes I really have off weeks where I feel like nothing was right on my pages. That things were just really bland and uninspired (had a few of those last week). But I do the best I can… and if I feel like I didn’t do so well this week, I set a goal to make up for it next week. If one page isn’t all that it can be, I’ve learned to let it go and just do better next time.

I’ve found that expecting too much out of every single page makes what should be a fun hobby more of a frustrating, tedious job. In a way, it may actually stifle your creative development because you’re stagnating over one piece and never moving on to experiment with something new.

A long time ago, when I worked mostly with traditional media, I made a rule for myself. I saw that when I finished a pencil sketch, I was apt to come back later and start changing it, trying to fix what I saw was wrong with it. This meant that I would spend all my time on one single piece… and I could rarely, rarely fix it the way I wanted it to be in the end. Nothing else would ever get started because I could never finish what I was working on to start something else (I’m anal in that I have to finish one thing before I start another).

So my personal rule became this: Once I signed and dated the piece, I was never allowed to change it again.

As you may notice, most everything I do, including comic pages, are signed and dated. That is part of the the reason. It’s a note to myself that this project was sealed and complete. If I’m not happy with what’s there then it’s time for me to pick up the pencil and work on something else that I can be happy about.

So it goes for me with web manga pages.

I’ve also noticed that I will always be my own worst critic on things. About 99% of the time, when I post up a page I feel is flat and uninspired, no one else notices if I don’t say anything. In fact, I get compliments about things on those pages! Of course, I value the compliments and the positive outlooks from readers and thank them, even if I don’t feel the page is up to snuff. If you don’t say anything about the flaws you feel are there — the key point — then sometimes you’ll find what you thought was so bad, really might not have been in the eyes of your readers!

The most important thing is that you keep moving and not let one lacking page stop you from creating the rest of the storyline. A lot of us, me included, find that development of techniques come over the long haul of being consistent to your work and your readers over a stretch of time. You can take a look a the old, old pages of my comics compared with what I do today, and see that for yourself. And I plan on continuing to get better and find ways to work smarter and faster.

Hitting on that thought… there’s always those webcomic artists that have the itch to constantly go back and remake the beginning of their comic a million times. I know that I did for Wayrift once — once was enough and it was for a very solid reason. But that’s a sort of tendency that warrants its own post in and of itself… so I won’t go into all that here.

I guess my final thoughts on this are — do the best you can. Don’t let your self criticism stand in the way of natural art development by standing in one place too long. Have the courage to put something out there even if you’re not sure you’re completely happy with it (because sometimes that takes courage to do). Even if that means you sign and date the piece to seal a promise to yourself to let the piece go. Take heart in those that love your art even with all the flaws you feel are there — because the little flaws are what make art beautiful and human.

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Posted by User Image Aywren