I've just finished painting a pinup for Hamthology volume 2. It ties up Onward in vol. 1 to the story I'm working on with Kyr for vol. 2, titled "Sometimes the Red Queen Laughs" (STRQL). I wanted to write this post while working on STRQL.
I was overly eager to finish the comic becauseI've been working on it for so long and I started to feel that it was taking too much of my time. I wanted to move on to other things so badly. Without knowing it, I succumbed into "mechanical mode"; that is, I worked in order to finish quickly.
This affected the way I drew without me realizing it. It was when Ken, my drawing instructor, explicitly said that I needed to "play around more" that I started to reflect on my unconscious thoughts.
I had to force myself to slow down and feel whatever experience the process made me to go through. I tried strokes that I wouldn't want to consider previously and they gave me surprisingly fun result. I guess I started to understand the saying "enjoy what you are doing and you will produce good things".
Some things remained difficult, of course. I still couldn't produce satisfying hair highlights. But the process was very rewarding. I experience a few "Sharingan moments".
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Let me sidetrack to explain what I mean by a Sharingan moment.
I met with Sharingan while reading Naruto. If you are willing to read overly long description for Sharingan, you can read its Wikipedia entry. For this post, you only need to know that in one scene in the manga, Sasuke (while using Sharingan) could see the next move his opponent was going to make. I think that doesn't mean he can predict the future, it's more likely that he can see the most likely steps his opponent going to make based on his current position/posture/move because of physical constraints (gravity and momentum).
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Similarly, while working on STRQL, there were moments that I could see where I should put my next stroke. It sounds incredible perhaps, but I did experience it. I could see an image of the small part I was working on and so it was easy to decide the next stroke. A few moments after I first experienced this, I was overwhelmed by the triumphant feeling. Too bad it didn't always happen and I don't know what triggered it. (Is this why athletes are advised to visualize themselves winning?)
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While reflecting on these moments, I wondered what made me feel triumphant. Put in another way, why is it so rewarding to experience new things?
My train of thoughts brought forward what I read sometime ago, something like: "I feel that I spent my life searching for something I don't know."
Alright, I found the source after searching Reddit. Go here and go to image number 14. It's a photo gallery titled "It's Complicated: the American Teenager" by Robin Bowman. The exact line is different from what I remember (even in meaning, now that I re-read it); illustrating that mind does distort memory.
Could it be this search that makes us/me feel rewarded on discovering new things? Even if we know that countless other people probably have discovered the same thing over and over?
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If you are interested in such lines of thoughts, you might be interested to read David Brin's Uplift novels, particularly "Startide Rising". Most characters there reflect on their own thoughts in a similar manner (or, more likely what actually happened, the way I think was influenced by the characters in "Startide Rising").
