Weekly Update - 54 (Patreon)

I've decided that, since it's supposed to be a dark scene, characters eyes should probably glow a little brighter.  I dunno, maybe I need to look up some videos about photography and cinematography at night so I can get a better idea of what to do to make it clear to the reader that this is taking place in the darkness.  Most of them are crepuscular animals, so the darkness of night doesn't bother THEM all that much.

Also, yeah, it's kind of weird for Kiva's big pullover hoodie to not have a front pocket, so I think from now on I'm going to start drawing it as if it does.  I often gloss over a lot of little character details like this simply because I'm still growing my skills as an artist... I'm scared to look at how many times Donno's scars have changed places.  >.>

Comic this week:  I'm actually not sure.  I've made really good progress but there's still a lot of work to do.  I will try to get it done.

Poster Progress:

Kiera - Flats and Shading

Max - Ready for linework

Riley - More shading and highlights

I didn't make much progress on the posters this week, unfortunately.  Page 97 is taking me more time than usual because I'm trying something I've never drawn before.

Drawing:  Page 97

Playing:  AI Dungeon >.>

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Rambling:

Depression for me comes in waves.  Usually it'll start off as something small, easily ignored, but over weeks that little thing won't go away, and I'll feel it start to build up and it'll eventually reach a point where I'm sent into a deep depression spiral by even stupid, trivial things.  The last week or so I've been feeling it creeping up on me pretty hard.  Then last night my husband and I were bantering back and forth like we always do, and I kinda blew up at him over nothing.  And yeah, that was a mistake.  It made for a really awkward and uncomfortable evening until I ultimately apologized and blamed myself for everything.  And I do mean everything.  Every mistake I've ever made throughout my entire life.

My mistakes are something my brain loves to use to tear myself down and drag myself into the deepest depths of it.  My brain maintains a long, long list of mistakes and regrets, from the trivial to the moderate, (I dare say I've never made what I would consider to be a "severe" mistake, like robbing a bank or getting someone hurt.)  Everything, including things that stopped mattering long over a decade ago.  Like the time I embarrassed myself in front of a couple of strangers at my first part time job.  As you might imagine, since I hang onto all of these things, my list of mistakes is long, much longer than my list of accomplishments or successes.  And yet, I have a great life, I'm married to a great guy, doing something I love as my career, so what gives?

I think the reality of it is that everything I've ever done is a mistake, and that's okay.  It's like when an infant is trying to put a square peg into a round hole.  We look at the infant and laugh at them and watch with fascination as they make that same mistake several times, before they finally figure out that the square peg goes into the square hole.  Mistakes are how we learn.  Life is a lot of trial and error, and the only reason it feels bad to error is because we remember our mistakes better so we *hopefully* do not repeat them.

It could be argued that there's also societal pressure to not error, to not make mistakes, and to punish mistakes when they occur, which contributes to teaching us feel bad when mistakes are made, but that's a topic I don't want to cover.  It's messy when you consider how that's different culturally and globally and it's far too complicated for my silly weekly musings.

I think the point I'm getting to, in a sort of roundabout way, is that my giant list of mistakes is ultimately what's made me who I am.  It is a list of experiences where I did the wrong thing, but that's a list of experiences I can keep in mind should that situation ever come up again.  Knowing what not to do, I have a much better chance of doing the right thing next time.  So when my brain starts listing off all the times I fucked up something in some stupid way, maybe I can listen to it and go, yeah, it's true that I did that -- next time I'll do better.