Gratification

You may have noticed that I didn't put a blog up last Friday. This is for two reasons:
1: I wrote a new story and I wanted to write it after posting that, and there were problems involving the cover art...
2: I'm dying again with another terrible cold after getting over one just a week ago. Life is pain.

Anyways, the week I wasn't sick, my friend and I went to go see Gundam Seed: Freedom. Initially, I'd planned to write my reivew and post it here as a blog, but since Ghosting was scheduled for review, I figured I might as well lean into the fact that Gundam Roboknights Seed is actually a good chunk of that story and have Soarin's family go see the movie instead. If you want a basic outline of a movie entirely in Japanese and unavailable to the rest of the world for the next three months, read chapter three, Observation.

While I thought the movie was dumb and made sure to include that in the character's reviews of the film, I also thought the movie as fun and did enjoy about half my time with it. Nobody ever accused Seed of having intelligent, well thought out plot lines, especially after all the work that Destiny went to making sure there was no intelligence to be found. Freedom is effectively more of that, with the bonus of Alex Dino being fun and not an idiot anymore. The story is effectively a more comprehensive review of the movie though, so if you want that, go read it.

I'd never thought about making a bottle episode with characters just talking about a movie or something, but after doing this, I think that could be kind of fun. Still, if I do more short stories like this in the future, I'm gonna have to work on regaining some of my art skills because, holy crap, making that cover was painful.

By being lazy about my process, I made a bunch of extra work for myself, which was failure 1. Failure 2 was in that, after my initial sketch, I wasn't happy with anything I'd done and decided to start over with something simpler, in spite of having drawn the background and partially lined a character. The second drawing wasn't coming together either so I thought about doing a third drawing which would've been just the title, but I didn't like that either. Frustrated with nothing working, I dropped it and left it to the next day. Nothing happened then either. Wasn't working, didn't like it, couldn't get into the process. It's terrible, because I'd been working on other stuff and drawing just fine earlier in the week, and it was really pissing me off. Finally, I decided to change modes and try something else completely.

One thing I've realized is that I don't like guitar songs that don't feel like they use the guitar well or efficiently. You can find tabs, which are simplified charts that tell you what fret to press and string to play in order to play a song. I wanted to learn a bunch of these and play game music and stuff like that, but it never feels good to do so. The one song I did commit to learning used a variety of chords and picking together to make up the song I wrote a majority of Super to while listening on loop, Aurian Dance. Even sitting in my chair playing it, I get stuck in the loop just playing it over and over again. It's just fun, but hurts my wrist after a while because, this figure

is very painful for my poor beginner hands. So, after having that down pretty effectively, I went on looking for another song to learn, but nothing was getting my drive going. then, I figured if normal things weren't working, I'd try something on the opposite end, a classical guitar piece.

I have not had so much fun learning a piece since I found the version of Aurian Dance I learned. I spent probably a couple hours just playing the main loop over and over again because it just felt good to gradually increase speed and make it sound the way it was supposed to. Obviously, since I'm using an electric guitar, it doesn't sound exactly right, but my ability to check pitch and tune the thing has gone up dramatically and it was as close as my instrument would physically allow.

I watched a video recently, and if you've seen it, Pewdie Pie took a journey into art as of late, and it's got a bunch of online people talking about it. One of the things a youtuber I follow said about this was that: "Art is supposed to be fun." I don't know about you, but I forget this shit all the time. I wasn't having fun or even trying to have fun with it, I just wanted it done for the sake of it. I hate releasing stories without covers, and these are my ideas, my visions of the story to be brought to life with my hands, and I do actually enjoy it. But I get too bogged down in my own bullshit to realize that and wanted to grind it out.

With a refreshed mind, I went back into drawing the cover, and I was enjoying myself with it. And then, I never saved it, opened another piece to reference it, closed it the wrong way, and lost all my progress.

It was fine. It was fine. Everything was fine.

I picked up the original piece, made some modifications to the things I had problems with, and ground it out. The cover you see for Gratification is probably the worst thing I've produced in a very long time, as sparse as my art has been for a few years now. I used bad techniques, I spent as little time as possible on every character, and I sat down and did the whole thing about 6 or so hours, and it was only that long because I wasted a lot of time fixing things that wouldn't have been a problem if I'd done it properly in the first place. I'm probably not going to remake it or fix it, but it was an excellent reminder that I have a process and a way to do this stuff for a reason, and if I actually want to make a piece in the future, I really need to put the time in.

To that end, I want to start drawing again. I do enjoy doing it, and sometimes I've avoided doing things because I'm lazy and don't want to put the effort in. I drew like half a comic a whole back, but stopped because Just couldn't work up the effort required to keep going on it. Sure, there's a place to stop and to know when you should drop a project, but I tend to actually finish my work. If I can be delirious with illness fighting to get a stupid cover I didn't even like done, what's stopping me from really getting something I want to make done? Laziness, pure and simple.

We'll see if I actually keep that up going forward, but If I do make something, I'm sure I'll link it here.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy Gratification, and that's all from me for now.
Until Next Time~
-KCZ