Some of my recent animation and illustration efforts have given me reason to pause. For better or worse, not all of my creative work is on the same level of quality. There are problems that can degrade quality, depending on what you perceive quality to be. However, I am the gate keeper when it comes to my art. Sometimes I let work go through that needed more. The question I’ve been thinking about is... More what?

Creative Process
When I see myself struggle with quality I have take a look at my creative process. If the house I’m living in is leaning one way or the other, I inspect the foundation. The creative process is as important to the quality of an artist’s work, as is a foundation to the frame of a house. So, what causes me to deviate from my process? Here are three problems that I’ve noticed that keep interfering with my work.

3 problems that can push creatives off their process

Problem 1 “Lack of Time”
Sometimes project deadlines can be very tight. This can cause us to abbreviate our creative process. We try to put the bulk of our time in the right places, but all too often some detail is either over-looked or not thought through. Many times we’re not able to see what could have been better until long after the job has been delivered.

The answer to this kind of “lack of time” problem is getting feedback from others by showing them work in progress. Feedback is always a great idea no matter what your time constraints are, but if you on a tight deadline getting feedback is even more crucial. Showing other creatives your work in progress and asking their opinion, will allow you to catch problems and will make your quick work vastly better.

Problem 2 “Over Confidence”
Why blaze a new trail when the one you’ve already made is working well for you? We creatives are certainly up for the challenge, but a wise artist will pick his battles carefully. There are times when you may think that you are beyond your process. That somehow you’ve outgrown the steps that have made you successful. Artistic thought will always challenge us to question what we do and how we do it, but if you wander off the trail you’ve made and wonder why you’re lost, get back to the basics of your creative process and you’ll find stability.

Problem 3 “Renegade Ideas”
Ideas by their very nature live to give birth to other ideas. There is no such thing as one idea and because of this, it can spawn a creative infinite loop. It’s a hell of a roller-coaster ride. It’s both exciting and empowering because ideas are the adrenaline of the creative world. At some point however, you will need to get off the roller-coaster and when you do you may realize that ideas are pretty easy to come by. What’s tough to do is to shape those ideas into some kind of physical manifestation. Unmanaged Ideas can be destructive. Falling prey to unmanaged ideas that come late in the process of a project, can effect quality. It can effect how clearly that original idea is communicated in your work. Be watchful of ideas that come late in your workflow. You should honestly consider all ideas, but be careful.

How To Put Quality First
Your creative process is not the same as mine. If you don’t have one... get one! Your career depends on it. Find someone you respect and copy theirs until it morphs into YOUR creative process. I don’t know of any successful artist that doesn’t have a creative process.

In conclusion, here is the key to quality: “There are no shortcuts.” (ha ha) I wish it were something magical. But I’ll say it again. “There are no shortcuts.” If you shortcut your process it will show with a lack of quality in your work. There is a tip I can offer, one that I have a goal to accomplish, because like I said earlier, I feel like my quality is suffering.

Here’s the tip: At every stage of your process... on up to your final work, treat each stage as if it’s the final work. How about a practical example?

3d Character Animation: Approach your thumbnails drawings as if they are the final work. Spend enough time with them, that you would be comfortable giving them to someone else to animate from. Approach the blocking of your characters as if it’s your final work. Meaning, do your blocking so well that you would feel comfortable giving it to someone else to finish. And so on... each step in your process is your final work. If you do that, your work will always have the best of quality.

Tags: Creative process, blocking, ideas, renegade ideas, blocking, animation, illustration, process

This morning I took an old sketch and made a new vector illustration for my iStockPhoto.com portfolio. I live in Provo Utah. It’s an understatement to say that the popularization of “Folk Art” into mainstream “craft” is big in these parts. The craft style of has gained its force because homes need decorating. House wives can band together. Craft business can create ready made projects that can be made in groups. Crafty style passed down from mother to daughter. The craft style is approaching kitsch. Scrap Booking has taken a similar path in recent years and it’s a very popular past time in the Utah County area. I shouldn’t be stereotypical and point to only females, because I made this illustration this morning. But I don’t have many guy friends that like the crafty style.



I drew this sketch in the late 1990’s. I found it while going through my very old stuff. I scanned it onto my computer and did the ink drawing below.



I inked it in Painter 11 at 300 dpi, then brought it over to Adobe Photoshop and made it a two color bitmapped image. Once a black and white bitmapped image, I used a photoshop brush to clean up my inking. I believe that viewing it as a 2 color image and touching up line thickness and adding details in the 2 color state, will give me better results when I vectorize my inks. I have the flag-heart crossed out because I want this illustration to be used by designers from other countries. The heart serves no purpose in a garden anyway. lol



Here is my final Illustration. It’s crafty enough for me, although some uber-crafty folk may scoff.

One interesting note is that this time I did some inking in Flash. I usually have some type of smoothing on the paintbrush to smooth out the vector strokes. This time i turned smoothing way down and when I was inking while zoomed in on my illustration, it behaved more like ink than I expected. I prefer an efficient vector stroke, but if it looks too clean it’s recognizably vector. (not always a good thing). Contrary, if a bitmapped black and white image is not at a high enough resolution for it’s physical size, then vectorizing it can cause optimizations of paths that will look blatantly like..optimized vector paths. (not always a good thing either).

If you’re reading this and are new to flash, then here’s an important tip:

Tip: The closer you are to an object, the more control you have on that object. This way of working is fundamentally different from Adobe Illustrator and if you are new to flash it may drive you nuts at first.

Here’s an example:
You want to rotate a graphic and you’re looking at the stage at 100%. The graphic you want to rotate is an inch square. You go to rotate and it snaps at odd times. You just want to rotate it a little. However if you ZOOM in on that object and THEN rotate, you will have much better control. The surprising thing about flash is how deep this modal kind of thinking goes. It’s pervasive and to be honest, I like it. So no matter if you are drawing with the pen, brush, rotating, scaling, auto tracing and a host of other features. The more zoomed in you are, the more control you have.

If you use the brush to make a stroke with your stage at 50% and then zoom into your stage at 300%, then make a similar stroke... you’ll see the point I’m trying make. Vector painting or Inking gets to be tricky if you like to zoom in and out, because ink thickness and smoothness can change depending on how close you are. I use CS3, so maybe this has been changed, but I doubt it because it’s so deeply used in flash and I’m not always against the way it works. It just took some time to get used to how drawing in flash behaves.

Joey

Tags: corel painter, adobe illustrator, adobe flash, craft, illustration, vector, iStockPhoto.com