Venting about the creative malfunctions (NSFW animations inside, reposts)

I’m going to vent about my own shortcomings now! YAY 

I came to the bitter realisation that I do not have creative control over myself. The urge to create a certain something, when it arrives, is overwhelming and honestly kinda of a nuisance. I don’t want to sleep or eat or do anything but work on that thing, well maybe want is the wrong word; it’s more I feel like I HAVE to do it. Considering how mentally ill I am and how little day to day capacity to do much of anything I possess, this is problematic as I will often be stuck unable to work on a thing but also unable to leave it and take care of myself like I know I need to. 

I realised that a while ago and while the self awareness certainly helps a little, I am still utterly terrible for this… and it doesn’t help that I’ve also now come to accept I have another related but also slightly different issue in that I really struggle to stick to a brief and constantly expand the scope of what I’m doing. This is real problem because I have plans to start making quick animatics for short video content and that needs to be something I can make efficiently.

Take this gif, for example,

you’ve seen it before but I’m posting it as a reminder. I did this in a couple of hours and called it done. Now, I set about making this with the express goal of making something simple quickly and I think I managed that but am I happy with it? Absolutely not. I see the satisfying movement of the butt and feel like it is wasted on the sloppy line-work, lazy colouring, tweened and unanimated torso, and rushed background. I just want to go back to it and keep working on it, it doesn’t feel finished to me. Even before I ‘finished’ it I couldn’t help but add extra frames to make the butt more jiggly when I really just wanted a basic up and down motion and those extra frames added probably 15 to 20 minutes of work. 

And that’s the crux of it I suppose, it’s so easy to “just add a little here” over and over until the thing never gets finished at all. Remember the “Caught Short” cartoon I was working on? Yeah, haven’t worked on that for a year, oops. I didn’t have a solid plan, a full brief, a complete idea of what that would be when it was finished and so as I kept working on it the scope for what I wanted it to be kept growing and growing until I got so overwhelmed by the idea of it that I had to just abandon it. What a waste. 

The last thing I posted is another example of this, the wolf and the pig. I started working on it with no plan, just once again the aim to make something quickly; “Animation of a girl getting boned from behind” was the only brief I gave myself. Easy, I thought, but then the IDEAS started to creep in…

What if the guy is fat? - Now I have to draw not only a lot more of a male body than just some hips but also the complicated  motion of a big belly rolling

Oh, he could be like a pig man! - Now I have to draw his head too

Oh and he could like, have her on a leash! - Now I need to draw her head jerking up 

So I ended up with something a bit like this…

She didn’t have ears at this point and the lines were all a lot more choppy and shit, I had to go and sort of reconstruct what I had at this phase. Anyway, I should have called this done, it had already taken about 3 hours of work which was longer than I wanted to spend on it and I had an idea for a weird little story to go with it; basically the girl pleaded with her big bellied partner to wear a pig mask and he was little uncomfortable with it but still generally up for it, light hearted and comedic. Brilliant!

But, I failed to stop. I had another idea for a story where the big bad wolf gets fucked by a pig, which was at that point also supposed to be quite funny with loads of stupid fairy-tale references, and like, she wanted to have three little pigs in her tummy from EATING them but, o-ho twist! Little pigs in the tummy from RAW SEX! Hilarious! So then I had to add a tail and ears and then I added loads more face frames and then I thought I should add the shading and neaten up some lines and then I may as well add a background and some text and drool and cum and motion lines and 

Well, I spent another 6 hours on it before I finally made myself stop….

Now, obviously this is a huge improvement but I still look at it and feel like I could “just add a little here”, the story ended up being markedly darker than than I meant it to be too, and longer, and also I made myself stop writing pretty early into the ideas I wanted to cover because I really shouldn’t be investing so much of my limited energy into writing one story that was supposed to be a very short, funny one and not a AA3 style slow-burn novela about sexual slavery or wherever the fuck it was going.

And that’s all on-top of the fact that I utterly failed to make something quickly. Including writing the story I must have spent close to 11 hours on something I set out to spend 2 on! I need a manager or something to keep me in check, seriously I don’t have the discipline for this stuff.

I’ve been working on a longer animation too (which I keep meaning to post WIPs for, oops) that’s got a girl being swallowed up by a barnacle tentacle thing, it’s got voice acting and stuff but it’s just taking forever because of the same problem, I keep wanting to add more! I’ve been getting the other artist I mentioned a while ago to help with colouring it and that’s speeding things up nicely and I am DETERMINED to finish it just to prove I can but I am also just feeling the frustration at myself at this point.

If I had the energy and mental fortitude, I could probably make the things I want to make without any trouble… but I don’t so I have to either force myself to make a compromised version of what I want or waste my life adding to the pile of unfinished projects :( Both make me sad but at least I do get something out of the former. I wish I was well; it's tiring to be reminded of what was taken from me whenever I try to do things