Whenever Easter rolls around I thank the good gracious creator that she showed me the light and steered me into work that doesn't require baking tens of thousands of hot cross buns on Good Friday. Instead, I've had a pretty chilled out weekend of holidays, and seeing as I have little to do with the big JC, it's an excuse to turn down the noise and relax for four days.
So not a lot has been happening this week, and I've still been a bit preoccupied to even post up some gaming posts I have cooking. Thankfully though, I managed to scrawl out a few doodles, even though they're much of the same. I suppose that's a train of thought we could spend a few paragraphs on.
Lately I've been acutely noticing just how much work a lot of artists create, that's barely an iteration on itself. I suppose that's a roundabout way of saying that I've come to the realisation that a lot of artists produce extremely similar works over and over again. It might not be news to most people, and is pretty obvious when you think about it too much, but there's an important lesson to be learned from this bit of knowledge.
Sometimes I beat myself up about lacking skills in certain areas or struggling to develop different mediums and methods of creative expression. Almost to the point where I start feeling like there's no point in doing anything if I can't at least be competent in most things. Thankfully, noticing that other artists spend most of their time creating the same work in the same style with the same medium, releases a lot of that pressure.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what anyone else is doing, but I never actually thought about how repetitive most people's work is. Naturally I follow a bunch of artists on social media, as I love seeing all the diverse work they create. However, despite the aggregate range of styles and mediums on display, each individual's work is pretty much the same, time after time. Rarely do I see an artist trying out different methods, as they all seem to have found something they're good at (or just like doing) and stick to it.
Kudos to them for sticking to a direction and carving out a look that immediately recognisable as their work. I'm a bit undecided about how much I want to pigeon-hole myself, but it must be nice to know that you can continue creating the same thing because you've done it so many times before.
Everything has pros and cons, so maybe I should try it for a while and see if I'll get bored of doing the same thing over and over. Something tells me I might, but perhaps the con to never settling on one thing, is that you can never really excel or be defined clearly.
Either way… it's something to consider!
It's Easter so of course I had to draw something religious like a mental rabbit. It's always amazing to me how eagerly religious folk try to defend holidays as something more than a niche thing. I'm not against anyone celebrating what they believe in, but I'm not going to give up the rabbit for the martyr anytime soon.
Similarly, this is some kind of gnarly wolf. I think I was watching something where a wolf showed up.
It's a turtle… go figure.
I'm still fascinated with different ways of drawing bodies. Perhaps there's something in that to latch onto in context with the rest of this post, but for now let's just say bodies are interesting and weird aspects of existence aren't they?