Indecision

Sometimes you just can't decide. I have been having a bad bout of indecision the past couple of weeks, on two different projects. Thankfully, they're both things I'm doing for myself, and not for paying clients! (Those have all been straight-forward and are going well, phew.)

First up - you may remember a while back I drew this little guy, and put him in a couple of disguises. I want to develop this character more, and got to wondering if I needed to 'push' the character some.

So I came up with another version.

And now I can't decide which one I like better. I know, right? They're both cute and funny. The second one just needs a pair of devil horns and he'd be all set. They're both carrying a "book of disguises" ~ in the first one he has on shades and is hiding behind a fence or bag, and the second one is inside a bag with eye holes cut out (they're both subtle and take a bit of work to figure out).

So please tell me which one you like. Maybe I'll  need to come up with a third one, blending the two together. Any thoughts you have will help a lot. Because I just don't know. Which one would you like to see in a book, or dressed up in outfits, doing stuff? Thanks. (This is not a test, there are no right or wrong answers.)

Then. I was talking in the last post about this knitting idea I have. Well. I have just about driven myself MAD trying to figure out the best way to do it.

First I thought I was going to do a few nice pieces of knitted designs, and of course thought I'd do them in colored pencil. But what's the best technique? Below you can see some test pieces I did, trying to decide.

1. I thought all watercolor pencils would speed things up from what I usually do. Verdict - YUK.

2. A first pass with one color (Lyras), then another layer with a different red, with all my little swatches to the left. Verdict - Taking waaaaay too long, and not even looking good.

3. A different combination of watercolor pencil with dry pencil over it. Also, NO.

4. Just plain Prismacolor, fastidiously applied. NICE. But again, waaaaay too slow. Because while I was doing all these, I kept rethinking what I want to do with this idea exactly, and keep thinking "Oh, I should have done this, oh I should have done that, oh, if I did it this way, then I could do that with it ...", on and on. I need to be able to sort of mass produce the art, but still make each piece different (if that makes any sense) and need to be able to do repeats, borders, etc. and have them all match up.

So I decided to try my digital pencil technique that I worked out several posts back.

Without boring you to death, I'll just share a small snippet of how ONE experiment looks at different stages. These tries were all about finding just the right combination of texture/no texture, trying to get a rich colored pencil 'look', without having to redraw each bloody stitch on each bloody piece of art.

Somewhere along the way my brain had a meltdown. And I was relieved to have to switch over to a  'real' job for a while. I don't even want to think about doing watercolors or gouache (which I'm sure someone would suggest). Any way I do it in the end will involve a lot of time, so I just have to pick the one that makes the most sense and dig in. 

People don't realize that art is HARD sometimes. Even drawing little kitties or pretty knitting.