Consistency in long term projects – redo or not redo?
This is probably true not only for artists, but for other people doing creative and semi-creative work as well.
We artists under development usually change our style every now and then, and improve our skills over not-so-long periods of time. You can see how our skills have developed by looking at our creations from oldest to newest. Sometimes, we evolve really slow, so our works from one year to the next may not seem too different, and sometimes it’s so fast that you can pretty much tell that something was (or wasn’t) done in January, May or August of a given year.
As we evolve and improve, we look back and start disliking what we did before. Even hating it.
Our critic eye gets keener and we grow detached of what we made in the past, so we can safely say “Eww! That looks so bad D:!! What was I thinking Dx ?!”, and we think “I could do it way better now, and faster too…”
So what does this have to do with long-term projects (or projects that go on hiatus for a while and then you pick them up again)?
Well, if you have been working on something for a long time, you’ll know you get the itch to redo everything.
You can no longer look at the work you did before and be proud of it; you have improved and you *must* go back and fix it, so it matches your current skills because now you can do better and it hurts your eyes to look at the stuff you did last year, or worst, 2 or 3 years before!
Sure, you can just suck it up and keep working. It’s hard, but hey! the project needs to be done and it’s been long enough already and you just want to get it done, so you can show other people, be happy and move on.
But there is another problem with that: consistency.
As I said before, we artists in development change our styles every now and then, and what it was natural for us before, starts being more complicated to do; you have to look at your old work so you make sure it matches what you’re doing now, so the coloring matches, the proportions match, the light, the way you drew this or that… and it’s no longer natural nor fun, because you struggle to not do things the way you do (and/or like) them now (for example, draw big eyes even if you now like small eyes, or paint in soft-cel shading with many layers when you now like to do one-layer painter-y coloring – or vice-versa), and sometimes you have to just downgrade your skills so things don’t look out of place when next to earlier pieces. Sometimes you just can’t downgrade, your brain won’t let you; it’ll tell you it just looks wrong!
For people releasing things on page-per page or chapter-per chapter basis, this is not much of an issue, but in projects like VNs, where many graphic pieces that may have been done in different periods of time coexist in one space that has to be seen as a whole, consistency is an issue that needs to be adressed.
I’ve been there myself a few times.
The first time, it was when I was working on Astre@; I had worked non-stop for a couple of months to get it done, then dropped it because I wouldn’t get my presentation date and the script was never done. Then I picked it up again for a while about a year later and again 6 months after that. Some things I left them as they were, either because they were good, acceptable or because I didn’t want to bother with them. Some things I fixed because they looked plain wrong, or because I thought it wouldn’t be so hard to make them look better. I made a couple of new things and one of them looked completely out of place because I was tired and didn’t want to bother with consistency anymore; maybe I would have got a better grade if I had been more careful, but in all it was ok.
Second time, it was with The Flower Shop, I think. It took me about a year of working very on and off to get it done. I had some things fixed in the middle when I noticed their flaws, but majorly left them as they were. I think you can pretty much tell which sprites I worked on first and which I did the last.
When I had to start work for Winter in Fairbrook, I had already improved some things, so when I went over Jacob and Trent (that would have only neeeded a change of clothes over the old sprites, plus the extra poses), I *had* to redraw and recolor most of them, or they wouldn’t match what i was able to do now. Susana and Uncle Sam also got a renovation (Uncle Sam’s hands were hideous before!), and the cat got completely redone. Again, the “What was I thinking Dx?!” thing. The sprites have been done for a while and I can start seeing flaws that I may or may not fix, depending on how much effort thaty would take; I need to focus on the Event CGs now, and even if I’m in the middle of a style shift, I have to go and look at the sprites when I draw them so I keep things looking the same.
Now, the longest project I’ve worked on is Flight of Twilight. It’s been what… 4 years? 5? I don’t even remember “Orz .
Without even showing you anything, you should probably guess that we’ve improved a lot throught the years.
We’ve been through major improvement in proportions, anatomy and composition(and Sai’s instant horizontal flip button – oh, dear) that by default makes us want to go back and fix things, but we’ve also been cycling through several styles, and sometimes we’ve made stylistic choices that look completely out of place with stuff we did earlier and/or the ones we would do later. Not to mention it’s three artists with hands on the production, so the style of each of us (at that point of time!) would find a way through, sometimes more noticeably than others.
As the colorist, I can account for many different ways of coloring and some coloring experiments I’d rather not have done. I used dodge tool for hair highlights in the beginning (shiny desu owo!!), tried some cel-paintery shading, then some adjustment-layer coloring, then soft-celshading with masks, then switched to Sai, tried one-layer coloring… I seriously want to go back and re-color some of that stuff. Badly.
At some point we did reach a point where we looked at things and there were different versions (some slight, some not) of each character! So we went, compiled all the versions and made character sheets with front, side and back views of the characters and front/back views of all the outfits and said “From now on, THIS is what each character looks like. Period!”. Yeah, we should have done that from the very beginning, but we didn’t think it was necessary at that time and would just use the 3/4 body sprites as reference for everything, like most people doing personal projects; now we know better! Things have been better since then, though we still need to go back and fix some old things to match them.
However, it’s been a long time and what we made that we thought looked fine before, or even just acceptable, is making us (artists) cringe. We’re now deciding if we should just update things style-wise, fixing the style choices and mistakes from past pieces that bother us the most so we can be happy with our work and stop hating what we did before, and spend time we’d rather be using to produce more art for the game; or just keep going and keep the consistency discrepancies (and the hating) without wasting any more development time.
It’s complicated.
Like one artist (who worked with watercolors) said in a panel when I was in college:
You have to arbitrarily decide when a piece is done and declare it finished and then never touch it again no matter what. Otherwise, you’ll spend the rest of your life working on it, because you’ll always find something that you could fix or improve, because you’re not perfect.“
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Tags: Astre@, FoT, improvement, project, rant, style, The Flower Shop, VN
este post si que me a llegado al alma
porque ultimamente e dibujado pero con tanto que quiero ‘mejorar’ e llegado a la conclusion de que ya no dibujo ‘bien’ si algun dia acaso tuve mi ‘propio estilo’ ahora quien sabe donde a quedado porque lo que termino haciendo tiene influencias de todo _ _
espero pronto retomar esos dias es que dibujaba por gusto, con cariño y animos, que se me pase la ‘obesion por mejorar’ que en mi caso solo no me esta ayudando en nada _ _
animo Deji, precioso post~
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Deji Reply:
November 9th, 2010 at 7:00 pm
@BlueValkyrie, no te preocupes por lo de “tu estilo”, eso lo vas a encontrar solo, no te vas a dar ni cuenta! (yo sigo pensando que no tengo estilo, pero todo el mundo me dice que puede reconocer mis cosas, así que supongo que algo hay ahí xD)
Dedicale un tiempo a dibujar por gusto, y otro a practicar; trata de no practicar con personajes que les tieenes cariño si es que practicar te frustra mucho, o si no les vas a agarrar mala y ya no los querrás dibujar D:
Mi mejor consejo si estas pegada, es copiar cosas. Copia dibujos que te gusten; eso sirve para entrenar la mano C:
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I really think you improved a lot, comparing the first FS sprites with the one you’re doing for FS2
However, I also think the FS1 sprites were already quite good as quality level for an indie visual novel/dating sim, so you shouldn’t worry too much!
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Deji Reply:
November 9th, 2010 at 7:03 pm
@Winter Wolves, I was happy with the FS1 sprites when I made them, and I think they were good for what I was able to do back then, so don’t worry, I don’t hate them or anything xD;
I think FS2 sprites do look better in some areas, though, and I’m happy about that
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This post…if only I could fave it! It’s been my experience, that when doing those deviantArt “timeline” memes, that’s when it really hits how how much you have(or possibly have not) changed as an artist. Going through my junk folder to crop pieces for the meme, I asked myself multiple times “What was I thinking when I drew this?” or “I know an arm doesn’t look that way…why did I follow through?” and on it goes. I think the best way to prevent the desire to take down everything and redraw it all, is to say each image taught you something about the whole drawing process and you could not be at this point, without doing some crazy stuff in the beginning.
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Deji Reply:
November 9th, 2010 at 7:05 pm
@R e a f u, yeah, that happens a lot xD;
It’s good to understand that your old stuff is there because it was a step on your improvement, gthat’s how I look at my old published stuff (images on deviantART, my Vica comics, the games I’ve worked on). The problem comes when you have to draw (or ink or color) something that will go side by side with something you drew (or inked or colored) 6 months, one year or 2 years ago… then it’s when stuff gets complicated >>;
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I love improvement, and as an artist, I do look back and old stuff and wonder why I thought that my piece was ever suitable for public consumption. But at the same time, sometimes you just have to power through. One project I’m working on seemed doomed to the land of never being finished. It should have been done ages ago, but the artist keeps insisting on starting over because he’s better NOW and it won’t match the old stuff. I’m currently on the THIRD set of sprites he’s done. This set is definitely an improvement over the original set, and there’s no real deadline, so I’m willing to be patient. But sometimes I think it’s best to just let things go and accept that you ARE better now. Unless the difference is so vast that it’ll ruin the game experience, it should be okay.
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Deji Reply:
November 9th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
@Ayu, I know people that does that a lot; they never finish things (or it takes them a long time) because they keep improving and they keep redoing everything because they’re better now, etc.
I think redoing things has two sides: mistakes and stylistic choices.
Mistakes are things that are inherently wrong. Those you notice they’re wrong and you can’t un-see them D: I’m all for fixing them if it’s possible.
Stylistic choices are, well, thing pertaining to the style of your work. Even the composition of an image, or the pose you chose for a character sprite are part of this. I’m against changing finished images due stylistic choices, unless you did something weird and it looks different than the rest of the ‘set’ or it is a simple image you can make way better without making much of an effort. You should aim to make newer things match the old ones style-wise as much as you can and not the other way around.
There is a point, though, when you start to balance how much it will cost to fix everything you’ve done until now (or the earlier work, at least) to match what you can do now, versus the effort it’ll take you to keep the original style until you’re done, because you’ve moved so much from the original, it’s really hard to reproduce it.
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I am somewhere in between looking back at my art and hating it while still developing my style– and then when I look at a piece I’ve only done a few months ago, I hate it again because I realized what I could have done better.
It IS complicated. For the current (hopefully) short project I’m working on, I’m just trying to truck on and do my best at my current level even if I keep evolving. I have to stick with what I got so for that very reason it can be there and exist as something I can look back on and see what I did wrong.
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Deji Reply:
November 10th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
@MaiMai, You have to make an “executive decision” (so to speak) at some point, like we did in Flight of Twilight, make some character sheets and say “This is what things will look like from now on. Period!”
As I told Ayu, when you have the itch to redo your work there are two things: Mistakes (skewed angles, bad anatomy, bad proportions, messy linear/coloring) and those should be fixed if you have the time! The others are stylistic choices(size of eyes/head, the way you draw hair, the technique you use to color things, the pose or composition you chose for a drawing). Those you should leave them alone. If you have spare time when you’re done with everything, you can go back and fix them if you want.
In short projects, I’ve found the best is to first sketch everything, do some quick color tests and, decide on a coloring technique and once you see everything works nicely, you go and finish each piece.
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Considering that I just spent 3 years on OASE, this post just summarized what I felt during those 3 years. And it wasn’t just art, the writing, the gameplay, the programming, the animation, everything! I went back and forth multiple times to make sure everything is consistent. It’s one the biggest reason why OASE took 3 years to complete.
So the biggest lesson learned is I’ll never want to make a game that I needed to spent over a year to make. The chance of you going back and fix things is just very high, and it ended up wasting a lot of time. I would rather make new games than dwelling with my past stupidity!
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Winter Wolves Reply:
November 10th, 2010 at 6:00 am
@Mirage, well said. Both for commercial/freeware, is better to release SOMETHING, even if you’re not 100% satisfied, that delay / put on hiatus the project for years.
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Deji Reply:
November 10th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
@Mirage, I only draw, so I’ve never had the experience on other areas, but I guess you had it really rough evening out thing on all those areas for OASE D:
I agree with you and with Winter Wolves; it’s always better to release *something* and then move on, learn from your past mistakes, and do it better next time; than doing just one thing that you spend forever on getting done just to make it perfect… that you may even end up giving up on due burn out and never get it released D:
To me, one year seems like a reasonable amount of time to make a game without many noticeable consistency issues, though it also depends on how developed you are as an artist and how long you’re able to maintain your original stylistic choices. Some people, normally artists in early stages of development or ones in search of a more personal style, evolve very fast during the course of a year and they’d benefit from shorter development cycles.
I normally don’t spend more than two months full-time working on things, though I think 6-8 months is around the time I can work without starting to worry about the earlier art looking bad/out of place.
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I know that feeling all too well, and I’m a huge sucker for redoing projects after a while xD
However, you always gotta keep in mind that, especially if it’s a large project, redoing will mean working on it even longer, logically resulting in you becoming even better, meaning that you might as well redo it again, depending on how fast you improve. Repeat. You’d never get it done.
So I’d say, just move on, finish it with what you already have from the past…and use your improved abilities in a new project instead!
I know I’m just echoing what everyone has said before, but it’s true x,D I gave up on drawing comics because I would redo every single page over and over, only to find that I couldn’t make it perfect either way…then I always got frustrated and quit 15 pages into the story, “orz It’s even worse with my writing.
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Deji Reply:
November 10th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
@Cielo, been there xD *points at Ishtera*
The problem with Flight of Twilight right now is that, while we have ben working for 4-5 years, we still have 2+ years of development ahead… So if it takes us half a month or a year to fix all our past stuff, it’s not that terrible xD;
Who knows, maybe we’ll hate what we fiixed now in 2 more years when we’re close to completion and we’ll have to do this all over again ^^;
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Moogs Reply:
November 11th, 2010 at 11:52 am
> Who knows, maybe we’ll hate what we fiixed now in 2 more years when we’re close to completion and we’ll have to do this all over again ^^;
Yeah no…
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Great post. I thought about it. Something to keep in mind as an artist helping out for a game. Since I do find myself going back SOO many times. I need to learn to control it and manage my time more wisely. Good quote too.
I replied to your comment in our blog btw, Project Memoria.
-Richelle
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