Post Christmas Worrying

Gather round children, here comes a lot of talk on the subject of 'Worrying'

First a summary of my Christmas; I had a really cool break and it was nice to have a bit of a chill out and catch up with family and old friends. One of my uni friends made the effort just after Christmas to visit Bristol and I taken him on a little tour of the landmarks and got some beautiful photos of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and more reference photos from the Museum.

Clifton Suspension Bridge

Dom :P

And here is a creepy stuffed tiger from the museum.

 The dog also remembered me aswell which was good, in fact he missed me so much he left plenty of presents in the back garden for me to pick up...

Wind up merchant.

On a less horrible note however I did get some progress with things work related during the holiday, there are some things that I have missed that I may go back to at some point but I got the space centre and pumping station work completely finished plus some initial sketches and concepting on the xmas villain character.

Space Centre Final Piece

This brings me to the main point of this blog post. I am a worrier, I worry about things, I worry about worrying in the first place. This has been something which I have struggled with for a while as I am known as a massive perfectionist, which may be good at times but in most cases it leads to my downfall. I have rambled to many people about certain things in my work which I'm unhappy about, my old summer art tutor must have been sick to death of my cries of 'I'm never going to figure out how to draw faces' or 'Wow, I'm never going to be able to do that' but I have never listened to the advice everybody seemed to give which was mostly along the lines of 'Take it one step at a time and don't stress about it'

An example of my worrying can be found with this blog: I have suggested at the bottom of most posts that I will upload something else soon and write a little something about what any readers can expect next which is a good idea when I type it but as soon as next weeks project comes in the plans go out the window, sometimes the scanners don't work in the Library so it gets left and I worry about posting something else instead as any readers of this blog might be expecting the content I mentioned earlier on... This among many other possible reasons makes these little things too hard to plan.

This led to a point where I was overplanning and over-organising my work and life but with this came more stress about the small things I have left out, creating a list of things that are still unmarked with a highlighter.

Now after all of these talks I have had with people over the years the advice is finally starting to sink in. Some things I worried about last term I'm being more relaxed with now; for example as part of our course we are meant to upload our sketchbook scans and work onto a facebook album for our tutor Chris Wright so he can see our progress and hopefully down the line get noticed by people in the industry.

In fact Chris mentioned in my last feedback that was one thing I needed to focus on doing more of but last term my worry got in the way and the reason I didn't do it that much is because if for any reason the scans were bad one week or something else then I wouldn't upload them or any work set after because I would worry about them being in the wrong order which was insane. Now my focus is just to get work on there for show and get it sorted and done even if I'm not that happy with the scans or the order as I can always revisit it another time and reupload. Time to stop letting trivial things stress me for no real reason.

Our last project before the current intensive workshops we are doing was the storyboard project, in which we had to create 144 sketches and 12 finals in two weeks. The workload seemed so astronomically large that most people thought It wasn't possible until Chris stepped in and clarified a few things. I was actually one of those that thought it isn't possible and I fallen at the first hurdle, my perfectionism got in the way of doing quick loose drawings and I was spending too much time on preparatory sketches not realising the true goal of the task.

My main inspiration came the second week of the project however, after collecting loads of sketches and one final piece I had a moment where I actually decided to try something faster and looser and played around with the image rather than draw directly from life. I didn't think it through that much, I just drew. After the first week I was flustered so I just spewed something out without worrying if the people's faces look deformed or if the perspective is off on that one little picture frame, the result was one of my better pieces for the task and have tried to continue focusing on the idea rather than execution as the execution will naturally get better. I realised the more I worry, the more the work suffers.

And that children, is a ramble. :D

See ya next time.