Point your fingers at me and laugh (but pls be gentle)

I want to tell you about one of the times I was unsuccessful:

So this week I had a portfolio review with a publishing house that wanted an illustrator for 8+ yo narrative illustrations. Since I am mostly an online artist, anything probably below 14 wasn‘t an age I had to cater to so far,so I wanted to add something to my portfolio.

I also knew from illustrator friends that publishers love seeing that you can draw animals, children, diverse characters in ethnicity, religion and body type, so I dug up an old concept and planned to do a redraw while adding a few more touches (aka the room, add more shadow creatures, make the girl with the back to us black and add little gnome creatures you can’t see here). See picture no. 2 for reference.

Tne inks went well and for the colouring (a stage I dread a lot of the time) I wanted to go with warm, autumnal colours and try out the new patreon brush sets. Make it look a little aquarelly, use some felt pens etc etc

This is not my usual colouring style AT ALL and you might think „it‘s stupid of you to try a new style when you only have a day left before the portfolio review“, but trying out a new style often feels a lot more motivating to me because of the novelty. That‘s how I trick my brain to stay focused.

UNFORTUNATELY the colours somehow just didn‘t match and I tried changing the faces tons of times because they just didn‘t feel charming and unique enough. I like expression a lot, but these faces felt bland and boring and at that point I was doubting the validity of my portfolio. And this piece kept on looking more and more generic and I started comparing myself to all the artists I knew. The later the hour grew, the more my self doubt grew too.

And then suddenly looking at the boy‘s face and colours I got flashbacks of these AI Ghibli filters and at that point I couldn‘t unsee it anymore, I hated this piece, I didn‘t want to finish it and I went to bed really angry.

Looking at it the next day I don‘t know what my issue was anymore, this looks so cute! But I need to redo the colouring and probably the lines of the characters too and just take more time to really make it charming!

Oh AND the portfolio viewing went well!! So much stress for nothing!

EDIT I realised I never explained the shadow creatures!

Basically the story is about children learning to befriend their emotions (especially the dark and strong ones) to not let them stay strangers. They tag along, but now they are familiar(s). It‘s based on me; as a little kid I was scared of soooo many things, so at some point I had up to 7 imaginary friends, all of them things like skelettons, ghosts, bats, owls etc.

It made me feel powerful in the dark to have allies that were equally as spooky and could protect me.