people please...
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- Orbit0
"My flesh bloats and weakens, like white bread in a pond, and my cold fingerless hands reach out for the Twix"
- Orbit0
I might think about eating a scotch egg in a minute.
- Orbit0
^ I ate a scotch egg yesterday as planned, and I ate another one today.
- Orbit0
^ I ate a scotch egg yesterday as planned, and I ate another one today.
- Orbit0
I am fucking motoring through this shit like a bullet through butter.
- locustsloth0
what the fuck is a scotch egg? An egg pickled in scotch? With a tartan tied around it's middle? Stuffed with haggis? Curling?
This is very much after the fact, but the fact remains that eggs see no nationality. THAT is the New World Egg Order... over easy... with corned beef hash.... and a hash pipe... strike everything but the last bit
- Oh, hi Locust...I am posting and immediately dog-earing so didn;t see you there until I just un-eared.Horp
- Scoth egg = boiled egg encased in sausage meat and rolled in breadcrumbs.Horp
- Not a fan of boiled eggs, but that sounds goodlocustsloth
- Horp0
I've taken down my Orbit Lesser work in great shame. It troubles me that I am so far away from having any kind of clue that I couldn't see for myself how appallingly bad the work is. My friend who's opinion I totally trust was unable to return one word in comment, he actually wrote to tell me he'd prefer not to have to pass comment.
I knew it was flakey once I'd got all the piece together, but in my mind I felt there might be something in some of the pieces. Some basic skill in some of them, some interest in other... some virtue in my approach.
It turns out the work was so bad that one of my best friends couldn't face giving me the truth... to me, even with its faults it was shaping up to be a better / more interesting / more 'stylish' sort of work than my spooky stuff... so if Orbit Lesser's was that bad... where the fuck does
Oh I fucking give up. I've become aesthetically crippled. I can't see good and crap, and I give up.
- Horp0
I sometimes think Rand and I are the only ones who see and feel the thick blanket of abject futility pressing down. Maybe its only us two who are under it.
For the record, I like Rand's work the most out of all the graphic designer's work I see on here. That excludes web stuff and AV stuff which I cannot judge under the same criteria.
- locustsloth0
First off, let me know if i'm ruining your sanctuary here by posting. If so, i'll vacate post-haste.
What i don't get about you, Tim, is that you have all these people here swinging from your bojangles, but your one friend won't comment (reason unknown) and you pack up your toys and go home. You're like the opposite of me, who ignores or discounts all negative criiticism and inflates and rationalizes the value of the positive.
Is it the artist in you that yearns for that geniune angst and sadness that is super-fuel for creativity? Do you not enjoy creating?
It just seems odd that such a talent, who usually is steadfast in his opinions, can be so easily swayed in his opinion of himself.
- Orbit0
Its just that my work is shit and I have lived on self-delusion. I had come to understand that my work is shit via the work I do under the name studiospooky, but I had a little pang of hope that by pulling together all the pencil-based stuff I might actually have a decent portfolio in a new direction. I had high hopes. It felt it might be my way out, my future.
First off, I posted it to about 20 agents. You need to understand that if you have anything of any value at all an illustration agent will absolutely take your arm off in their haste to sign you up Their income relies on good portfolios, they don't waste their time on shit ones.
So I contacted 20 agents and I got nothing back. "Oh that's just those twenty agents, it doesn't mean your work is no good".
I sent announcement emails to about 200 UK newspaper, publishing and magazine contacts. A large number visited the site. Not one person responded. "Oh, thats just those 200, there'll be others".
My friend is far from being an unreliable point of reference. He and I have often worked together in the past and I know and respect him greatly for his blunt honesty and his eye for quality design, illustration, photography, typography etc. His opinion counts for a lot. His opinion was worse than bad, he felt unable to say anything. "Oh, that's just him, ignore him"
Finally, in aesthetic terms I seem to be suffering from a fluttering Myopia. I cannot see the wheat for the chaff. In compiling the Orbit Lesser web portfolio work I started to get a creeping suspicion that my idea about collating into a tight portfolio might not be as great as it seemed to be in my imagination but I couldn't see it through independent eyes. I had a good few days away from looking at it and gave my eyes a rest, and then when I returned to look at it with fresh eyes, I really saw for myself that it was weak.
So I tried the agents, in case I was wrong, I tried working art buyers, and I tried my friend Andre, and with the feedback (or lack of feedback which in itself spoke adequately) I was able to see that beyond the encouragement of friends on QBN who would want to be saying positive things more than absolutely honest things, and I saw that the work I had gathered together was just a bunch of scribbles. No real skill, no finesse, no purpose, no tension, no narrative, no style, no interest, no application, no use... just pictures drawn by someone who really wants to be good at drawing but isn't.
- Horp0
I just want to do something that makes almost everyone, or as many people as possible feel like they're looking at something really good.
- locustsloth0
Well this is a level of de diligence i was heretofore unaware of. i personally am amazed that you haven't heard back from anyone and really like your stuff. My brain can't even start to conceive of how to even think up the stuff you do, much less execute it. That said, i am a nobody in terms of art/design/whathaveyou. But regardless i still like it, so that's one down in the mission of having almost everyone like it (and if i didn't, i wouldn't say i did, i'd just say nothing).
So maybe a break IS in order. If for nothing more than to clear out all those robots of rote that seems to set up shop in one's brain when a relatively similar task is asked of them over and over.
And who knows, maybe your next endeavor will add a new dimension to your art, open a door to another room where you can frolic.
But even given the disappointment you've experienced and documented up there ^, remember, it's not that you aren't any good (cause you really are), it's just that you're not marketable to them right now. Which, depending on how you view life, is not that important at all.
Make your art your religion. Make it what you believe in and pour your soul into (or at least the bits of your it that don't go to Racheal and the wee one).
You've got talent, you've got integrity, and you have a voice. And though that won't pay for a roof over your head or food to eat, it is still not something to sneeze at.Now could you kindly help me down from this soapbox? Honestly, who buys this much soap?
- Horp0
Yeah, to my mind there is only one way to judge the commercial success of the work I am producing, and that is by the response from the commercial artwork buying population. They weren't buying into it at all, so by that measure and that measure alone I must conclude it is a fail.
Its a difficult point to try and clarify for people, but for me the well meaning encouragements from friends and family is subjective and largely irrelevant. I'm not trying to get pats on backs for merely putting pencil to paper and doing things that people who know me can look at and tell me how marvellous they are. There are people out there who create succesful careers and have portfolios of work that bring in more and more work and more and more plaudits leading to more work and more plaudits, the calibre of each getting higher and higher all the time.
If what I do leaves me standing at the bottom because it attracts no commercial interest then its dead work and any time invested in trying to kick it to life is counter-productive. My main studio has become closely associated with a very poorly produced sort of digital work of a style I do not value at all. I can't change the perception of that studio now. When I try, clients resist because they only come to me for the tat, they take their good briefs elsewhere to the darlings of the moment. Both jobs I have had on this week are for a style of work I got sick of in 2005, and yet both clients have an abundance of briefs they farm out all the time to other illustrators they deem to be of a higher calibre. When I suggest they let me do 'a better job' they tell me they want the crap style, done quickly, because that's why they've come to me.
So Orbit Lesser was my attempt to get around that perception and show a different style of work. But if that different style of work doesn't grab them from the outset and make them say "oooh, nice work, we'd really like to use that" then the work has failed if you put away emotion and consider it coldly and efficiently.
So there is no point in trying to excite people with a style of work that clearly doesn't excite them.
Outside of the people on QBN who I consider to be friends there has not been one single iota of positive feedback about the work. Its as plain as day, the work is shit. The plan didn't work out. I go back to the drawing board.
If I don't do something that excites people who look at it then its a waste of time.
- Horp0
I'm just posting for me now by the way, just as a place to mither, away from the main crowd.
There are four illustrators who are globally revered at the moment.
1: his work I do not like but I appreciate it has a style and a flair. Predominantly vector based.
2. His work I absolutely hate but I can appreciate there is a certain core style to it that was bound to have appeal. Predominantly hand based.
3. His work looks very nice and also looks very hand drawn, but I have long known it is merely pictures scanned in from books and treated to some very basic filtering in PSD(CS3) which is done in a particular order to give it a distinct look A piece of his work can be achieved within three minutes yet it appears he's a master draughtsman. Some of the 'features' of his work are actually telltale signs to the method used, including spikes/trails produced by accident on large format bubblejet printers when printing on a certain type of substrate. So I like the aesthetic, but do not value him at all because he is a fake and could not actually draw a fucking thing to save his life.
4. His work is very fine-art based. He is prolific, very sophisticated in his execution, and he works predominantly by hand with digital finishing. I think his work is tremendous. I absolutely applaud him as a master of the craft. The best.
If was going to be anywhere, I would want to be on the top table with these four people. Two of them I personally consider myself to be eminently more capable than because frankly I could do both of their portfolios ten times over given the justification to do so. The other two I rate and would not consider myself to be more skilled than.
Regardless of my opinions however, the world at large has deemed these four to be 'the best illustrators' right now.
If you were to pick any single piece of work from each of their portfolios and place them on a table, and then pick any single piece of my work from my portfolio and place it amongst them on the table, 100 people would not even once pick a piece of my work as being the best piece on the table. Not once.
This is my problem. I am just not in that league even though I do not even value two of the four I use as a benchmark. My work simply does not have any appeal at all. I have to accept that I do not make the grade. Wanting to be good enough is not good enough. I can't grow wings nor can I grow the natural talent to make pictures that engage people. My very best is average. Average is my very best.
I hate average.
- Horp0
By the way anyone, I have bookmarked this thread in my QBN folder under the name "My Thread". So if you pop in and wonder why I appear to be posting long self-morosing posts to nobody but myself its because I've designated this as the place where I will transcribe the effects of my deepening mid-life existential crisis. That's not to say nobody else can use this thread, of course, everyone can use this thread, but I'm posting and dog-earing, posting and dog-earing, posting and dog-earing so there is no sense of narrative continuity or even any sense of dialogue from my perspective. I'm only here for me. Anything else that gets posted will not even be seen by me unless I undogear for some reason.
- Horp0
That is to say: I am shit. As shits go, I am on really the slide over here. I wonder how long I would cope with this if I didn't have a daughter and a pregnant wife.
* The pregnance of my wife is not common knowledge yet nor will it be for a long time. I pray to god nobody emails me about this as my gwife gets all my emails.
- Horp0
^ Why didn't I just fucking delete that before posting? No fucking idea. I am so massively thick at times.
* Facepalm.
- Horp0
I feel I need to do something to re-establish my existence in the minds of people. I am increasingly feeling the need to shout, to forestall the rapid onset on anonymity. I just don't fucking count for anything. My bulb has gone, I am in darkness, the sound of feedback rolls around the inside of my skull like a stunt motorcyclist in a cage of death.
Ad break. Twice as loud as everything else.
And we're back. Battery acid for sweat, empty head, feeling dead, this is not good. Despair. Despair and weakness. In a forest, killing time. Tossing coins to decide my fate and all I get is a black eye.
Must try harder.
- Horp0
Its totally unoriginal I know, but I'm desperate. I'm going to tape my arm to an Ikea tressle that I will place on top of my work table. My work table will be pushed in front of my easel. I will cut the tip off my index finger, which will be pointing at the easel. I will cut a lot off so that I sever something squirty... then I will strike my finger just behind the wound with a masonry hammer, forcing an explosion of blood to project outwards onto the paper of my easel.
I will photograph the mark made in high detail, once when wet, once when dry. I will present it as my only piece of work on my website and it will not seem at all remarkable to anyone who sees it. I will never explain to anyone just what it is they are looking at.
I will do this ten times, one for each finger until I have no finger tips left. The set of pictures will be entitled "Ten Minor Suicides, wet and dry" and nobody will ever look at them twice.
Then I can be safe in the knowledge I have gone as far as I can and it isn't worth a fucking thing.