Art style stuff and mid-year update
Recently, after recovering from my previous funk from the beginning of the year, I've fallen into another one. I feel really bad that I haven't done nearly enough writing for COTV Act 2 when all I've got is time, but I also haven't even wanted to start. I'm acutely aware of my own limitations and I don't believe I can express things through media in a way that connects to anyone or resonates at all. The Touhou VN I finished is probably the best thing I've ever made, but even that has so many cut corners and scenes that just aren't Done.
I'm happy with how it turned out overall, but it does highlight a lot of my lack of ability in writing, lack of patience, difficulty expressing events in a compelling way, and so on. Probably the thing that sticks out to me the most, though, is how little my current art style has any intent behind it.
Art style troubles are something a lot of artists worry about, and they largely aren't real. If you become professional you have to draw in whatever way the job demands using your transferable skills, like I'm sure the Splatoon concept artists could work on Resident Evil or vice versa. If you're anyone besides an Industry Person you can pretty much just draw however you want and let your own personality and judgment affect your decision making.
That's...the problem I think I'm facing. I'm not really sure there's much of anything affecting my conscious decision making in art, it's all very direct and instructional rather than evocative of any emotion. Putting a character on screen because that's how they look rather than thinking about what mood the colors and textures are meant to convey. With the Touhou thing I was specifically referencing the older Windows Touhou games and making conscious decisions regarding the color choices, shading, lighting, texture of the trees in the background, and so on. Comparatively, Call of the Void feels a lot more like I'm just winging it.
All this to say, I'm extremely jealous of people who have one or two core art inspirations that they just emulate and absorb and end up with a look that can just come out unconsciously that gels with what their projects are meant to convey. In an effort to get there myself I've been looking at older media and trying to catch up, in a way, trying to sift through stuff in my own past that might be one of those core inspirations.
The issue with this is...I kind of don't want to get stuck in the past too much. I ended up really disliking 80's throwback stuff when it was super prevalent in the late 00's to mid 10's since it felt like it came at the cost of the decade's own identity, and keeping new things from growing and developing. That sliding scale of nostalgia has pretty much caught up with the older Windows Touhou games and other stuff from that era that I'd potentially love to emulate, so it makes me worry that I'd be contributing to that extremely nebulous feeling of society being 'stuck' or whatever. I've got this weird daisy chain situation where a lot of my characters are named after music/bands that were in Jojo or Guilty Gear, and in turn those are all references from before 2000, so it really adds to that feeling.
That's the paragraph that made me want to write this post in the first place, but I guess that wasn't the real issue I was having and trying to mimic old stuff is fine actually if I'm using that to consciously develop my own work. I guess that's the same conclusion I came to at the end of the Touhou thing.
(were my cohost blogs always as long and meandering?)