Revisions, Revisions (Advice for artists and writers)

[mylorolfereads]

Howdy, folks! I'm going to show you some fanart.

It's a faux propaganda poster-style image to celebrate the new update in a video game I'm currently obsessed with. I'd been sketching The Noise for practice and liked the expression on this one enough to turn it into a finished piece. Not bad, eh? That's what I thought, too, so I posted it.

But a day later, I felt disgruntled. I still liked the concept of the image, but the finished product felt bland. The pose wasn't dynamic. The fonts were off. The lineart didn't suit the character. It wasn't a bad picture, it just wasn't where I wanted it to be.

So today, I sat down and made another one.
 

 

I cannot begin to express how proud I am of this image. The pose is pushed to a ridiculous degree. The lineart is varied and interesting. The fonts... could probably still use improvement but they're much better than before.

I developed a bad habit growing up of thinking that I had to spend a bunch of time on a piece to get it right, and if I messed up in anything beyond the sketch stage, there was no going back.

I'll be honest: I knew this was a bad way to think! I had art teachers and how-to-draw books up the wazoo telling me to redo pieces I wasn't proud of. But with few exceptions I refused to do it. I was on a really high horse about art being a "sacred window" into the feelings you had at the time. Redoing it felt pointless, since you'd have different feelings doing the piece a second time.

I felt the same way about writing for just as long. If I started a story and it didn't "feel right," even if I still wanted to write the story, I'd just stop and write something totally different until I landed on something that was easier to write. 

Folks... this is the fastest way to make sure you don't improve.

I'm serious.

Turns out it's better to think of redoing a piece as a part of the editing process, not "starting from square one." A lot of times when you initially write or draw something, you're kind of just dumping your thoughts out onto the paper or screen. There's a real stream-of-consciousness effect where you might overlook a lot of elements that aren't working with your vision. 

Letting an image or story or song percolate for a few days and then looking at your piece with fresh eyes is vital to improvement. After a few-days break you start to forget the fine details of what you created. This is good! When you come back to it, you end up seeing a lot of errors and things you'll be unhappy with if you post it. In the case above, this meant starting the image over entirely because I wasn't happy with the base pose itself. In other cases, you can just chop up and edit those initial first thoughts until they reform into something cool.

When I write novels, I almost always have to rewrite my first chapter. I tend to info dump or write something that's irrelevant to the plot because I'm still getting a feel for what the characters are like and what mood the story should have, and this is a really common problem among authors. The best way to fix it is to step away from Chapter 1 for a week or so and then go back to it as if it was a piece you didn't write. This helps you pick out all the stuff that doesn't meet your standard of writing and get rid of it. Oftentimes this means erasing the first chapter entirely. (And, of course, you can do this for later chapters, too.)

But wait, there's more!

After a lot of this kind of revisions you start to pick out your more typical mistakes. Knowing them well means you can head them off in future projects, and you end up making better content quicker and with less revision time. Spiffy indeed!

I've learned to really love the revision stages because I like seeing my art and writing slowly form into the best that it can be. There's something fun about seeing something that looked "meh" become something that I want to show off to others.

(I'm apparently the odd one out here, but I even love editing my writing because I get all excited every time I think of a better sentence than what I had before...)

Anyhow, that's my piece for today. Hopefully it helps someone else out!