musing
Origin of Cappy
Lately I will admit to being a bit lost in my own little gaming world. In that time I played a game I hadn’t even heard about called Hollow Knight. This game is absolutely bloody amazing! It is both simple in its execution and layered with difficulty that is brilliantly balanced. It got me to thinking of a comic to sort of commemorate coming to the Switch and this idea came to my head. Enjoy, and do let me know what you think.
As the title states, bodies are weird. I came to this conclusion after I started physical therapy and felt like a puppet or discarded toy. The therapist would go around and feel in my joints trying to find where my problem was at one point she noted how little stabilizing muscle I had. Turns out it would be easy to dislocated my shoulder which led me to think how segmented my body felt.
Like a child with a toy my arm could be popped out of it's socket with only a slight bit of effort, disquieting to say the least. It had never occurred to me that my body could be injured with such ease. I had always felt super glued in, and nothing would unhinge anything about me but when she had my shoulder in that position feeling around my joints explaining how easy it would be to just pop my shoulder out it somehow made me feel less than I once thought I was.
Now I spend everyday doing these workouts which feel ridiculously easy and yet I know that they are helping me tighten my joints back together almost like a teddy bear getting an arm sowed back on. I wonder why I now can look at my body as a child' toy?
It might relate to the ease in which the physical therapist said she could disarm me, hehe, or maybe it is the realization of how fragile we all are. I will leave this one at that, started playing around with the new adobe illustrator tool set, still need to figure some things out but for now this is what I got.
So I'm going to get up to speed, that is the plan and I'm sticking to it, yet I'm going to admit that it feels daunting. For one I've got a set of goals that I feel should be easy to achieve.
Easy, a good start and one I think I should be able to do, the illustration and article can go together which helps knock out two birds with one stone. The art side of things hasn't been too difficult but the article writing has been an interesting challenge. I feel opinionated today and do I really want to be going off about my opinions on things?
An artist opinion is certainly a important part of their personality but it can also alienate them from some audiences. There was this one writer on Twitter the other day that had a very strong political opinion and it caused me to tilt my head, he was just so open about a hotly debated topic that my gut reaction was to respond. I didn't mainly because I felt in the end that wasn't what the writer was asking. He was stating his opinion, there wasn't any point to arguing it with him. Now his audience may respect and flock to him because they share the same values but that got me thinking, who do I want to target my articles to?
No... that isn't the right question, more it should be who will be attracted to my opinion? We're not talking about the trolls in the world, but the people who are left afterward. If I find myself ranting about people who annoy me, would I then find myself surrounded by people who are annoyed with the world? I'm not annoyed with the world, but earlier today one of the drafts I was working on was about someone who I felt was unprofessional, just a very bad people person. I didn't publish the peace because I felt it portrayed me as a bad people person.
I don't want to be be that, I like people and so I pushed away from the article and actually up and deleted it. Instead I tried to write an opinion peace on what I thought about something with a cultural perspective, and it felt judgmental... ok I am judgmental but I tend to keep it to myself. I'm not aiming to be a personality that throws out slurs down-casting others who I disagree with, everyone is entitled to their opinion.
Really in the end this just ends up being a rant about the thoughts that can cloud me from doing what I plan on doing. Thinking through things to a ridiculous degree and getting nowhere fast. Thankfully I have a process to overcome all this, and that is to just say, "Who cares?" Then I can move on and hit publish and realize, that is how you get things done. You do it and learn from what happens. You can sulk and hide yourself in a corner but that isn't going to get you anywhere. So with that, I will once again, hit publish.
Often times artist, those creative types, can get hung up trying to get ideas flowing. That has to stop, for me at least. One thing I'm going to stop doing is letting things sit on my theoretical easel when it comes to some creative ideas. I'm a busy guy and I shouldn't feel that ideas that are unfinished need to be locked up.
I'm doing this process mainly when it comes to visual media, but I intend to carry this over to written material when I finally have put some energy into writing some short stories. Basically this is for short works, breather projects. What gets to me is how my ideas of perfection tend to keep me from showing my work, flawed as it is.
It is frustrating to dabble in ideas but never produce anything worth showing. I do a ton of work that makes it to fruition yet for some reasons all these little side projects start to grate at me and the side effect causes me to do less. So to get myself moving I'm going to show unfinished ideas, flawed ones and hopefully I will also show the good, the nice updated stuff that is finished.
Maybe this can help me look at the ideas I throw out and see what could be useful, maybe even get feedback at some point. I just am tired of having this box of ideas locked away and never doing anything with them. Good, bad, and mediocre should all get some time to see the light.
With that in mind, the above piece was going to be my first blog post but when I realized I had a free domain with my account on Squarespace I decided to move my blog over. All of a sudden this idea that started out as an illustrated idea of dusting off an unused space became moot point. I was going to just put it on the side and let it collect dust since I could now use this site as I planned to use my blogspot, then it hit me. I was going to let a illustration about dusting off and getting back to work sit there.
I didn't have the time for it, and the will to continue on it was taking a lot of effort, fighting for the time I really didn't have to spend on it. Yet instead of letting a illustration about beginning collect and gather dust, I figured I would at least give it a half-life and in that process maybe let it fulfill its function. Let it show me an example of what I'm worried about and finally give an unfinished job a positive purpose.