Perfection Is The Enemy of the Meh.

 

See this image?  It's a sketch I did in 2012 on an iPad at the Upper West Side Apple Store using the app ProCreate.  I drew it on the fly.  It features Inanna, my favorite go to mythological character, considering an unseen subject out of frame with delight and interest.  You couldn't tell because the subject is off screen.  On the fly, folks.  I didn't think it out.

Even so, customers and employees in the store would stop by, look at the sketch and say, "That's really good!"  This stroked my frail ego, for I create drawings and paintings as infrequently as Axl Rose releases a new Guns n' Roses album.  I was drawing the image with my finger, so essentially it was a finger painting.  A finger painting masqerading as a charcoal sketch.

Now I hadn't purchased this particular iPad, so I knew if I touched the home button, the image would be erased for good and all.  Impulsively, I felt the need to preserve this work, so I asked Suze to take a photo with her smartphone.  Smart of me, huh?

Back home, she emailed the photo to my own iPad.  I considered cropping the image of my hand supporting the iPad frame, but I figured, "Why?  This is part of the creative process.  Why shouldn't one of my hands be in frame?  Lay claim to it!"

So this is how the above image has been preserved for your consideration.

Incidentally, I draw with my left hand, not my right.  My right hand just happens to be supporting the frame of the image.

It was when I critiqued the image that I began to see Inanna as a hideously deformed example of human anatomy rather than an inspired flourish of artistic skill.

Note how the tip of the nose is on the same level as her eye line.  The bridge of her nose practically begins in the middle of her forehead.

Her lips look like the end result of some Hollywood leading lady's botox enhancement.

The masculine lantern jaw that makes Jay Leno's chin look as delicate as Queen Nefertiti's.

And finally, the EAR.

That god damned EAR.

Rather than the tip of the ear aligning along her eye line, it's growing out of her fucking NECK.

She doesn't just look "off."  She looks like ten miles of bad road when you consider her carefully.

Let me show you an image with which fans of Babylon 5 are familiar:

This, dear reader, is a specimen of the humanoid alien species known as the Minbari.  Note how, rather than aligned with the eye, his ear is growing out of his jawline.

Now that's perfectly fine and dandy if you are rendering an alien species, but when you are trying to illustrate an anthropomorphic goddess?

Look at this more closely...

EEEEECCCCCHHH!!!

I had a PTSD moment of me back in La Guardia High School of Music, Art, and Performing Arts.  I'm presenting this malformed curiosity to my SP4 class.   I stand head hung low in shame as the teacher and my fellow students mercilessly eviscerate my slapdash attempt at rendering a woman's face in profile.  "And they'd be in the right, damn it," I told myself.  "They'd be RIGHT!"

"If only I had spent more time," I chastise myself.  "If only I had remembered how to sketch a human head more proportionately!  Where do I come off calling myself an artist?  The people complimenting me at the store aren't artists or even art aficionados!  I can barely look at it now!  This abomination is an insult to all the teachers who patiently and meticulously honed my artistic skills!  This is what happens when you fall out of practice for years, no, decades!  Put me in the stocks!  Have jeering children pelt me with rotten produce!  Have me put on a black hairshirt and shuffle through the streets in shame!  Unclean!  UNCLEAN!"

Then, I come to my senses.  These teachers I imagine took painstaking measures for me to perfect my art?  Do they even remember who I am?  Of course not!  I was one art student on a conveyor belt of art students that entered and exited their studio space every semester.  My peers?  They wouldn't know me from Adam!  They're too busy perfecting their work.  They're not looking at the easel or sketchpad or iPad next to them.  They're too busy staying on track.  And they compare their art to others by going to galleries and museums.

For heaven's sake, man!  It's just an on the fly iPad sketch!

And if I hadn't made the effort in the first place, would customers and employees in the Apple Store have stopped to regard the sketch?  They wouldn't have said a word if my art looked like this:

Or worse still, THIS?

Shame on you, Rob Liefeld!

Okay, so as for my iPad sketch... "C" for effort?  Maybe a "C plus?"

I've seen better, to be sure.  But as Mr. Liefeld shows, it can be worse.

So why does he work for Marvel and I don't?

Let it go, Baker.

Let it go.

- JJB