I'm a bad artist, but I'm still learning (Patreon)

TL;DR I critique myself.

Hey guys, those of you who have been around this year may have noted that I did a project a handful of months ago, where I conceptualized a new character: An old man who gets permanently gunked up in rubber raccoon goo and becomes the titular cross-gendered "Cranky Coon". Well what ever happened with that?

See I shelved it at the time, because even though I felt I was doing good at the time, that project coincided with me breaking out of a depressive art slump I was in. -So while it got me back on my feet, I wasn't running at 100%, and it really shows. Just contrast those pictures with what I've shown in the past 2 weeks. You'd think I was drawing with my left hand!

One big mistake that I made was trying to go the liminality route again and diminish the old man as a character in his own right. This was wrong, very wrong. Because the animate-inanimate transformation featured rather flagrantly an anti-liminal dynamic. When I have characters like Carlita, Faulkner, Monty, or Maple, they are the focus. You're not meant to care about the people who turn into them because they don't matter. But Cranky Coon is meant to be different. The Raccoon part may be liminal, we don't know exactly what it is or where it came from, but the character only works once there's an outraged old man forever bonded with the suit against his will. The old man and his indignation at the whole situation is the driving force for the whole kink on display.

I found myself thinking about this pretty hard while drawing Fru Fru this past week. Because while Fru Fru is meant to be a rage golem who hates everyone, their mission as an artist is to become the most oversexualized androgyne ever. He's all bark and no bite... he's all bark and all bussy. But now we have Cranky who wants to bark and they want to bite, but the suit won't let them. That kind of dynamic embodies a kind of hate that personal, which means it's fooling to think that I could ever brush the old guy aside when he's the star actor.

So tonight I wanted to do some doodles, but before diving in, I had to draw his had. And what began as a warmup then became a breakdown of what I'd done wrong and what I feel I'm doing right. -Just look at that before and after.

And that's the thing. I haven't used any 3D for a few weeks. Yes, I used it heavily for the Orville comic, but everything since then hasn't been structured with Design Doll, and instead I just dove into the canvas. This then resulting in pictures that look more 3D then had I actually been using 3D!

So ultimately, why am I sharing this? It's to show that I'm still learning and striving to improve as an artist, that being critical of my own work is important because it can lead to improvements like these, and to show a tiny portion of the thoughts running through my head at any given time when I'm working on this stuff.