Final Thoughts: Due South Stacked Rewatch/Timestamp Roulette Art Challenge
Personal favorites (in no particular order):
Well this was fun. And it wasn't. Like most things, it was a very mixed bag.
I started out in September wanting to see if I could develop a personal, recognizable lineart style, something easy-looking and confident. Turns out I wasn't very motivated to do that after all. Or maybe I'm so stuck in my ways that I don't want to put myself through the process of de-learning some things and learning new ways of working. I've always been self-taught in almost everything (just doing stuff intuitively my way) and get easily irritated if I'm pushed out of my comfort and skill zones. Not a great learner!
The one thing where I definitely did step out of my comfort zone and gained confidence in was posting stuff that's less than perfect to my own eye. Ha, got quite good at that, actually! I think I got over the fear that someone tells me "this is not up to your usual standards". I'm hoping - while definitely aiming to create stuff that gives people feels - that this will make me work quicker and post more happy-making art instead of sweating over whether a piece is good enough to be posted. And I truly hope that my shit-posting (as I've called my super quick doodle weeks) has given someone else out there a feeling that they, too, can post stuff that might not be perfect by some artificial standard. I keep saying that great fanart can be drawn with stick figures, too.
One of the biggest joys in this project has been discovering oil pastels. They simply suit my way of working, the colors are easy to mix and I can work pretty fast (I'm impatient). One thing I've gotten a lot of feedback on is how much people love seeing traditional media used for fanart. I still don't know what to think of the difference between digital and traditional. Is there any? Don't I use my human hands to create digital art, too? What difference does it make if a piece of art exists in pixels instead of pigment (except that photographing the latter for online viewing is a pain in the ass)? I kept going back to digital art from time to time in this project, and certainly can't choose which I enjoy more, oil pastels or Photoshop. Probably will continue more with digital art for the simple reasons of less mess, no storage problems, available shortcuts to reach a better likeness, and endless editing options. The best medium for me is the one I actually bother to pick up to make art.
This 38-week project was probably the largest-scale art experiment I've ever done - or will ever do, at least on a strict weekly schedule. I kept expecting RL stuff to throw me off schedule, but it didn't. I kept expecting I'd just give up at some point, but I didn't. I guess the joy of having even a small purpose in life (even if it was self-inflicted pain in the ass sometimes) was worth it.
Thank you for following this project - and super thanks to those who tried the actual timestamp art roulette challenge even once! It's still open - the instructions are in the first post here: https://mortmere.tumblr.com/tagged/*/chrono
(The link goes to a chronological view of all my art/crafts post from these past 9 months - it's been my "progress evaluation link" to see what I've managed to create so far.)
