Artist Musings: Artist Block

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LaGelian's avatar
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What goes through your mind when you see other artists' WIPs and walk throughs? To me they look so straight forward. They have their perfect line art, their base colors, shading and highlighting, and then final details. It seems like a linear progression from a starting sketch to the final piece. Whenever I start a new piece, there are times when I feel like working on the piece helps it move forward to become more like the vision I have in my head; but somewhere along the line, I make a bad decision to color this or add that, and then before I know it, I'm furiously backpedaling trying to save the piece from being an utter and complete failure. Is it because I don't plan out my work as well as others, or does everyone go through this?

I say this because after drawing Luna and Ginny, I also wanted to draw Hermione. However, I just can't seem to get her face or pose right. So I decided to give my Harry Potter fan art some rest and pick up on my ATLA fan art.

I'm really excited about my ATLA concept, but again, I feel like I can't express what I want on paper exactly the way I want! Is this what artist block is? Because I know exactly what I want to draw but every stroke I put down on paper seems wrong. It's frustrating because I have my subject sketched, but figuring out the composition of the piece is literally just me drawing a few lines on paper (and my paper happens to be quite thin) and then immediately erasing afterwards because it looks so off.

Maybe I'm rushing it? 

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firelightprincess's avatar
I'm not fabulous at composition so I can't offer any amazing advice, but one thing I find is that you have to be flexible with the image in your head. When I have a picture mapped out in my head in detail and I try to copy it exactly onto paper it never works. I have to sometimes let the piece take on a will of its own and then change the pose or the layout or whatever it may be to fit the flow of the image rather than following exactly the image in my head. Hope that offers some sort of insight...