Time for another yap sesh..
I've been getting a lot of commissions lately. Like, they quite literally just keep coming one after another. It wasn't long after doing the logo for the Agnes Tachyon Cutters that I was commissioned to do the team Portugal logo for WCoP 2025; it wasn't long before finishing that logo that I received a commission from an acquaintance for
their upcoming project (stay tuned btw); and then last week I received back to back commissions one of which I'll probably post tomorrow. I'm not complaining cause hey it's money, and it's not terribly hard work either since I've been rapidly improving as of late. I'm not trying to brag either, I'm just trying to point out that I've been doing a lot of work where the main focus is on producing something appropriate to my clients' needs rather than something that I have pure creative freedom over.
So just now I found a new manga to start reading cause I was bored. It's a manga about making manga whose name I'll take the liberty of translating into "Monochrome Match" (perhaps a more accurate translation would be "monochrome duo" or "monochrome pair", but I like the alliteration :3). It's been a pretty good read so far, but I digress. The main character works as a background artist assistant to the main author drawing the manga. And as he begins drawing his very first background, he takes a moment to contemplate on just how to make his art resonate on a deeper emotional level. And that made me think, have I ever really taken the time to really do anything like that recently?
As much as I hated the art classes I took during my sophomore and junior year of high school, I have to admit that my teacher really pushed us to think about the emotion and meaning we were trying to convey through our pieces. Something which I haven't really been doing at all with my art for the past year or so. I've been so caught up in recent times with trying to just create a veneer of visual appeal, an item for someone else to use, that I haven't really had the time to really explore myself as an artist. I've been making banners and thumbnails and logos and logos and so many logos, that at some point I feel like I've stopped treating art as a medium of connection beyond language, but rather as nothing more than a product to be consumed. And I feel a little disappointed in myself.
I think that something else I must admit is that I think I'm a lot more of a jealous person than I'd really like to be, and that this discontentment I feel is in part a result of that insecurity.
As a "worker", I feel like I've achieved a lot of success. I've received formal recognition of my efforts in both the smc badge and the artist badge, and I've also received commissions. I've even reached a point where I consider my technical skills to be at a pretty good level. But as an artist and as a person, I still feel unfulfilled. So for now, I'll stop taking on any new art work that isn't expressly for myself. My next two upcoming commissions will be my last ones for a while it seems.
That's all really, I just needed to get that off my chest. Oh, and before the feds can get me for excessive yapping, here's a thing I did a while back:
