[Blog] Weaknesses in the battle plan (Patreon)

Mid-August week (Aug 14, 2023)

Eventually we'll figure out how often and on what day I should create these blog posts. For now I'll aim for weekly updates, and in the meantime I'll be practicing with daily sketches.

Self-Awareness

It is my dream to be able to create comics, games and visual novels of my characters and ideas, macro and non-macro alike. I want to say it's my passion to simply create, however, the realization and discipline for such supposed passion has been lacking for me. Work, life, and insidious vices have their ways of making me feel held back in wanting to do what I want to do, and create excuses as to why I can't do them. Achieving my goals has been all about failure and feeling stupid, so it's a matter of sad ego if I tell myself I don't want to fail or feel stupid.

In order to progress with myself, I need to be aware of how I fail and figure how to account for it in the future.

1. Fatigue from work

Working in a kitchen for half the day is hard and drains energy. Historically, the consistently best time for me to draw is before I go into my job. For years I've been getting up around 3-4am to draw before leaving for work, and getting to bed around 7-8pm, and it has worked out well. This has fallen out of routine for me, but it will be easy to reenstate.

2. Loss of focus, not following a plan/schedule.

The most insidious of my vices. An argument could be made that I am ADHD, but if so, it is also responsible for the endless stream of ideas I can generate, so it's worth refining with strong discipline. Now, how to balance the method of learn and building creative skills with the madness of idea generation? Perhaps it's best to start small and stupid. Small weights. Whatever I feel I want to achieve, I ought to aim a little lower, and practice consistently hitting my targets. This, plus fatigue from work, means I should aim to get up and doodle for two hours, and an hour before I leave for work I'll stop and share my progress. This gives me a nice deadline to help me not worry about details.

3. Excessive recreation/escapism

YouTube is the bane of my alledged ADHD. It's so easy to turn off my active brain and just coast on recommendations, so I need to be wearly of this, and trying to unplug myself if I'm having issues. I've been getting better at staying away and managing my time online. I'm biking more, as well as just sitting in the quiet and allowing my thoughts to organize.

Recent thoughts

I've been playing Subnauctica recently, and interacting with the leviathin creatures in game have inspired some animation ideas. I have a lot of animation scenes written out, both for video games and stand-alone, but whatever drawing is, animation is that x100. Which could be good for developing general drawing skills, but first I need to establish an ability to create and be satisfied with a simple scene. Every drawing I make I feel compulsed to draw and shade, though my relatively recent Champions of Hyrule proved to me that I can be content with just line work.

If you play Overwatch, you know there's a community game mode called "Death by snu-snu". Honestly, it's not a mode I feel you can play with others, but I've been curious if I could recreate this mode as a stand-alone game with the unneeded fluff removed. After I start working on animation, I feel this would be a good way of practicing for the slghtly larger scale projects I have in the queue.