djamilaknopf
patreon
Follow-up to yesterday's post
🕑 Added 2021-08-18 11:03:08 +0000 UTCFirst of all, thank you all so much for your thoughtful responses, suggestions and words of encouragements! You're all so sweet and kind for taking the time to write a reply. I've read them all and I appreciate every single one. It will take a me a while to respond to all of them, but for now, I wanted to let you know that I'm just leaving the painting as it is and it will stay here on Patreon.
I won't put it in my next art book or make prints of it. I'm just not happy with how it turned out, and it's nothing that a small fix could change. I'd have to invest A LOT more time to make it work and even then I think I won't be excited about it anymore. I think there are two problems:
1.) It looks too digital for my taste and it lacks the feel of being hand-painted. I left a lot of things unsolved (colours, values, depth) until the very end and figured that some Photoshop effects (like light rays, colour adjustments etc.) were going to take care of the issues. But... That didn't work. Lesson learnt!
2.) The whole thing was too ambitious, took too long and that sucked the fun out of it. I took a bit of time off, went to a convention and dealt with lots of other things while I was working on this painting. So I kinda lost steam throughout the process. I started it in early July, so I've been dragging this thing along for over a month and it's been a constant stressor in the back of my mind. I couldn't envision the end result and I as getting more and more afraid that I wouldn't be able to make it work. And now here we are! I've had a really good run with the last three paintings I did, so I guess I felt over-confident to go even grander and more detailed. But it seems like even I have a limit when it comes to how much detail I can take, haha.
Long story short, I'm just letting it go. It makes me feel free and so much lighter! It stings a bit that I invested so much time in it and it won't be released out into the world, BUT it's here for you to look at! And I'll be sharing the process as part of next month's reward.
