Friday, November 9, 2012

You Can Do Better

I'm going to share an epiphany I had a while back while doing a project for a client. After the initial sketch was approved I started refining my drawing. I had spent a few hours on it and was liking it. But then I noticed that the placement of the hands were wrong. The way they were facing did not make sense. (If the style I was going for was more stylized and graphic or flat it would not have been a big deal, but that was not my aim for this drawing.)
I hated the thoughts of redrawing those shoes laces! My first reaction was to keep going. I figured most people wouldn't notice. I'd only change it if the art director said anything.

However, that thought nagged me. I knew I could do better. But by going back I'd be spending more time than I wanted on this picture. But after my personal debate, I decided to bite the bullet and make the change. I ended up spending an extra couple hours making the changes and the funny thing is that as I made those changes I noticed other flaws with my drawing that I needed to change.

I'm not going to lie. It was a painful and dreaded thing when I realized how much I had to change, but in the end I was so much more satisfied with my drawing.
 

It made me reflect on my life. How often do I just get by? I can say, "You know what? No one else will notice so what's the big deal?" The deal is that I live with myself. And why shouldn't I try to do better? Anyway, since then I've tried doing things just a bit better. 

But I also want to say that I'm not doing it to compare myself to others. I know a dozen artists that could do a much cooler drawing of this little girl. But the point of changing the drawing wasn't because I was trying to be better than another artist. It was because I knew I could do better.

4 comments:

balloongal said...

Great thoughts on how life is. We can make changes because we know it will improve us, even if others won't even notice.

shawnajctenney.blogspot.com said...

This is a great post, Jen!

Unknown said...

This is a great post. I also saw the illustration in the Friend. Nice job.

PJ said...

Awesome post and so true! It seems that like you said, the client probably wouldn't notice or even care, but you knew, and you had to live with yourself. Why not do the very best we can not for others, but for ourselves right? :)