RIP Story: Oct 22, 2024

I didn’t finish this story. Read at your own risk. More details in the epilogue.

Garrett had spent hours on the collection. He’d been inspired by his favorite game to start making simple drawings of characters. He had no supplies, no skills that he was aware of and no idea how to start. Moreover, he didn’t even know what method he would use to make the characters he wanted to see.

When his friends were not online to play, he started looking for videos on how to get into different kinds of art. There was a time when he tried hand drawing in college, but he felt like he was making a mess of the process. He never felt any kind of progress. How do you even measure skill progression in art? He would ask himself that all the time. Eventually growing too frustrated, it was easy to stop one day and not go back.

This time, he had an inspiration and an idea. He just needed a nudge toward the right kind of drawing. He decided he would go with digital art. There were free online tools he could use to learn. He could save his work, and he could work on one screen while he had a let’s play series playing on his second screen.

He started with winged humanoids, but not the full body. He loved the look of wings. The color options that came with the feathers was fun when set against the darkness of the game world. There was a basic shape he needed to follow, but he found his mind had lots of ideas for different looks within the structure of wings on the backs of his characters.

He found that the tools made it easy to set a line and take in the overall look.

Time ran out….

Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow.

EPILOGUE: I felt good going into this one. I had a concept and an inspiration. I was thinking about the times I played Diablo III. I had a budding artist in mind, and the struggle with the desire to be good at something. The problem here is that I had no character arc. I think I got lost in the desire to tell a story about self-discovery or what happens in the mind of a novice artist. I felt like I was skating on a thin story and felt no real connection to the character. That feels strange because I feel like this kind of story is autobiographical. However, it comes back to the arc. The arc wasn’t there and I wasn’t excited. If I’m not interested while writing, why would the reader be interested?