Ruined Art Projects and correcting the mistakes

Creating art taught me something about myself recently, and even though I made so many mistakes in the past with my work that I try to forget about. Shadow Hill is the one project I haven't done anything major with yet and failed like I did with Raizen Fury and maybe two or three attempts with Yurei Yokai (formally Ghost Runner). All those stories I tried to do graphic novels for in the past I messed up bad and worry that too many people have already seen the mistakes even if they don't notice them or mind the mistakes when I told them about it. 

But I didn't keep the books around long enough to regret that they were created in the first place other than The Little Red Fox. The only books I preserved in my archives for further study and research purposes. There is no telling if there are pirated copies of my old content on the internet but I never go searching for it because I don't want to get pissed and driven to just quit entirely if I see any of it listed somewhere. So far I haven't seen anything other than my poser work listed on rule34 and I had such great disdain for some of those too. I really do have art that I just deeply HATE so I pulled some of it from Pixiv because of that. It wasn't always just them warning me about genitalia not being fully censored.

I never had the time to go back and make corrections or try to redo failed projects over again from the beginning to see if I could excel a second time. The only time I did make that attempt was when I redid Little Red Fox over and renamed the story "Raizen Fury: OuterHeaven" I managed to get through 25 panels before I chose to pause the project and focus on Escape From Exodus. The one thing to keep in mind is that artist have always hated their own work, not all of their work but specific things..Like a certain song, album, music video, etc....No one is entirely proud of everything they have done on an artistic level.

I didn't want Evelyn being a futanari anymore...But the only reason she was one in the first place is because Lauren did something to her in a medical trial. At least that's what her original backstory was as to how she ended up with a dick. It's just that the more I thought about it the less dick girls I wanted in Raizen Fury... (Evelyn is the one in the white tanktop stroking her dick)

I feel that it's not suitable for this series at all because its about girls in gangs... Shadow Hill and Yurei Yokai work best for futanari material than Raizen Fury. I don't think I can get rid of the futas from this series at this point. So I needed to work a plot device in there where some of the women were used by Lauren in a trial and she caused all of this to happen to them.

I felt that Escape From Exodus was a much easier project to work on than Raizen Fury Outerheaven that would have required close to 150-300 or so characters for the prison setting to truly feel like an actual populated prison including parts of the story that didn't involve the prison...

Yes I said 300 characters I was pushing myself to do the unthinkable, and overwhelming myself with large amounts of workloads. One of the reasons I felt this way is because I read some Arkham comics (Batman) a few months back just to get an idea of how a prison setting should look if it's truly populated with a lot of criminals. I even seen images of real prisons which was scary as hell.... I looked at a few prison films and TV shows as well and I noticed that these environments are stacked with people so I kept saying "Okay how the hell am I going to create THAT many people for this?" I managed to create at least 100+ characters but it still didn't look like I had enough.

People sometimes come to me and ask for old comics and graphic novels I did long ago but I removed them because I was embarrassed by the work and just really hated them to the point where I never wanted a soul to see them again until I went back and started over again from ground zero. I really felt talent-less because of 2014-2020 then I see how far I've come along artistically compared to back then and I'm telling myself "If I remade these right today, I would be able to celebrate for the very first time. But I don't want to remake every single damn book over either."

 There was something really wrong and off with this prison series once I got to the part related to pregnancies....Not this image in particular but, the series itself.. It wasn't just the bad lighting that irritated the hell out of me with some scenes being way too damn dark, muddy, and ugly including poor use of skin shine effects to simulate sweat but instead it just makes everyone look oily. 

Some women were way too damn dark, others had like this really orange skin tone, then there was the poor use of DOF in the camera that made everything heavily blurry as hell including the characters that were suppose to be in focus and not out of focus. 

  Everything was wrong with the whole series. And the story itself was the worse trash I ever thought up...Not only did it keep giving me this uncomfortable feeling, I just overall hated the whole damn thing it's pure GARBAGE! So yeah I needed to go back and start over. 

So I look to the renaissance and Victorian painters of the past for inspiration since a vast majority of artist of the current era are hardly inspirational. Years from now people aren't going to look at AI art and say "that inspired me to become an artist." Because anyone can just use that shit and create something out of it effortlessly.

I still have my regrets about decisions I've made in the past starting out, if you don't know a damn thing about lighting in 3D you can forget about creating art worthy of being proud of, and I was a massive failure in 2012 starting out.  People would tell me my art looked "great" even when it wasn't great, it was their way of trying to not hurt my feelings...A lot of people did that on Renderosity. 

But honest feedback is better than false feedback, you can't help someone by telling them their art is great.. When you know damn well it isn't. Sure I had one overly sensitive person block me a few years ago because I told her that using Daz's Denoiser made her art look muddy and
killed the details, which it did. Not everyone can handle criticism of their work that well.
Too stupid to realize I was trying to help them, everyone with common sense knows that using the denoiser is a terrible idea in Daz studio. It's only good to use for test renders not to finalize the image itself. Amateur mistake.

But as I have gotten better over time I'm training myself to avoid all the trash I see that doesn't give me much positive thought about the future when it comes down to what we will be coming face to face with as far as artistic ideas go. Sometimes we have no choice but to rely entirely on ourselves and not on what we see and I was never a fan of following the herd or copying trendy ideas either. When I'm bold and brave enough to take risk and come up with my own creative foresight. I want an idea that comes to me naturally I'll watch old movies from the 70s, 80s, or 90s. There is a lot to be inspired by artistically even in this crippled, suffocated world of the 21st century.

This was part of Escape From Exodus two years ago. The steam behind them looks like crap though, I've gotten better at doing this kind of thing since then. But that was a steam plane in the program itself with fog attached to it, which is why it looked like ass.

 It's the non-dialog version. Most of the scenes from this book is definitely too extreme, when I started over the extreme was cranked up even higher....Just wait until you see the finished product. You'll think I'm insane and lost my goddamn mind.

When I asked DesireSFM to teach me how to animate like him in SFM today after he read my Corruption Of The Lodge IV review seeing how he has seen most of my work before including stuff I never showed anyone yet other than Steve Carson and a few others. First thing he said to me when I asked about training me to be like him in SFM was, "you would be a threat! You're  too dangerous!" LOL he's not lying, giving me that animation power he possess...Would be dangerous but in a good way. We had a damn good laugh.

If I don't feel like watching movies I will listen to music, I'll read crime, thriller, dark erotic and mystery books to find myself a new inspiration if I don't come up with one without the source material. Sometimes I will observe gothic architecture over the internet, abandoned places, or read mythology, dwell on the past and immerse myself in the tales of the dark arts...Hell even religion have helped me formulate ideas at times. It's not the ideas I struggle with, it's putting everything together and having it make any sense that's the problem with why some of my work didn't do as well as I wanted it to.

Nevertheless I didn't forget entirely since I went back and refocused my energy on remaking the whole thing to Raizen Fury's Outerheaven. Some scenes from Little Red Fox were impressive and when I look at all three books I'm surprised how much work I actually did to complete them back then. And I have a few scenes from the fourth book I never sold at all because it was unfinished and needed to be revised again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  I tried this before a long time ago but it wasn't done correctly. Then a few months ago I tried it again and didn't realize how masterful I was at achieving what I didn't before in the first place.When I try to remake something the goal is to improve upon how it was originally created and make it much more better so I don't have to feel embarrassed about the original work anymore. 

Creating remakes allow people to forget all about the mess I made if the original one failed and I wanted to start over from a clean canvas. When I say fail, I don't mean as in people had no interest. I'm talking about failed to please me, the one that created it.

Like a lot of artist I too suffer from laziness at times, but not enough to purposely do piss poor work, my legacy is still important and I don't have a lot of work that I completely finished. Yesterday Kama and I talked a little more about challenges and overcoming them in our line of work. Then I read some reviews he wrote on his discord about video games and movies. I don't too much review anything that's none explicit related. At least not here on my blog because reviewing pornographic content is very rare, no one else does this so I just made a habit of doing it ever since Tumblr. 

In Raizen Fury's case it's a story that takes place in the early 1990s and it was the first story project that I worked very hard on and made the most graphic novel attempts for as well.

 The prison novels I did in 2020 was my first to complete four books in a short period of time only to botch and ruin them because I was very distracted by all the real world chaos going on, reading news, and focusing on all the Western politics which I've grown to hate over the past few years.

Then there was the story Vanity about 3 or 4 years ago and it didn't strike me as the best that Raizen Fury had to offer since so many scenes were poorly put together and randomized. 

One minute you would have girls fighting the next it was sex. It was messy and poorly organized, I admit I really didn't know what the hell I was doing starting out. I use to try to do comics back in my poser days and they were awful back then, a lot worse than the mistakes I made when I moved to Daz studio.

My real problem is that I have done several other projects where I just misused a lot of characters and placed them in situations they never should have been in like having Claire sexually assaulted by the Queens in that story Vanity and passed around like she was nothing...Thankfully I didn't even bother to keep copies of that because I hated that shit more than anything. Claire and Irene never should experience that kind of abuse. If it were Sadako or Kayako, then that's a different story. I usually don't have a problem with those two doing harm to a character I'm protective of otherwise.

Then came the worse offense in Little Red Fox I and II that I'm not even going to get into....That's not how I wanted the story to go at all, and I've even had bad nightmares about something I created in my work and woke up in the middle of the night just to try to fix it.

I started being more careful and over-protective of certain characters as time wore on, and then there were characters where severe things just had to happen to them if they were a tragedy character. Gretchen for instance is a tragedy character because she is always inflicting self harm on herself, she's also a very unpredictable individual, you never know what she's going to do next. She's what some would refer to as a masochist if they met her in real life.

Therefore it's not unusual to see the character covered all the time in bandages, arm wraps, wounds, bruises, and welts all over her body....I'm so overprotective of these characters now that I make careful decisions on how they will be used and presented. There was another time I screwed up bad but this wasn't story related since I have those canon/fourth wall moments in Raizen Fury all the time.

 But the things I do in Shadow Hill and Yurei Yokai is much more complex because the characters are a lot more difficult and provide the extra layer of creative ideas. There were some projects I had planned in mind from long ago when I tried doing a book that involved ghost infiltrating an office building. So I had time to think about how I could and would approach these scenarios because it was just so easy to come up with an idea that could work for that. 

The first time I introduced Sadako I knew I needed to give her a presentation that was different and original from what I had already seen in The ring film and a half dozen artist were doing with her. In my case I didn't want to have Sadako taking someone else's introduction. So I needed to invent something new that was never done before. And then I remember there was a ghost story about a young Japanese girl ghost that hangs around toilets. Hanako-san..Another character I had plans to create for Yurei Yokai in the future.  But the toilet ghost girl gave me the idea to have Sadako emerge from it.

I kept remembering how everyone was taken by surprised when I did this because I thought up a dozen unique ways for her to do that, and I even had a scene in mind where she reaches out of the toilet while a woman is sitting on it, grabs her and drags her into the toilet bowl and then all this black blood just sprays out of it. Moments later the woman is seen again drenched all over in black colored water, her hair and suit is wet, and she's leaving trails of black water behind. The office ladies start laughing and making fun of her because this story explores office work bullies. You can guess what happens to the co-workers but I won't go into the dark and terrorizing details of sexual violence.

So this office woman is possessed by Sadako and that's when she goes on this serial assault rampage throughout the office building attacking office workers, and security personnel. Then this strange standoff between her and a street full of police unfold. The title for this story is "Ghost In The Cells" (not to be confused with Ghost in the Shell). It was also the first time I was planning to try something new that I never did before. You know like the skinsuit theme I familiarized myself with after seeing several artist do creepy art involving people wearing the skin of others. So I wanted to try something like this but differently.

My first attempt at working on a psychological horror graphic novel didn't turn out the way I wanted it to in the beginning just like my attempt at working a comic focused on the 1990s needed time to improve. It was just another project that had all this potential to be something great and then I ruined it by making bad decisions or just not really paying much attention to what I was doing at the time. 

But since I know better now and I have all this experience a lot of the mistakes I made in the past are much easier to avoid. Making mistakes isn't entirely a bad or negative thing because it just means that you will learn overtime from them unless you are just completely ignorant and never learn from mistakes at all.

Whenever I've done ideas that I knew were stupid, dumb, and idiotic of me I admitted that it was crap. I didn't hide or pretend like there was nothing wrong with it when I clearly knew there was something wrong with it.  So I made some poor decisions with Yurei Yokai in the past but never really got to invest deeply into it. The worse offenders were with Raizen Fury since I have made the most graphic novel and comic book attempts with it than all the others.

 Have you ever been showered in the
cum of four legendary dark forces before?

When I did the book covers to Shadow Hill a few weeks ago I said to myself this is my last and final attempt at graphic novels because if these don't sell well I'm going to be disappointed, but if they do sell and I still end up hating something about the work....I'm going to be disappointed.

That's why it's important that I take my time and slowly work on every detail, and then correct mistakes before publishing anything so I'll be ready to present the material. With the prison books I didn't do that, I just wrote the dialog, made the images, put them together and paid little attention to how bad a lot of it really was. Then I seen someone leaked Issue 1 with only half the pages posted and over 6000 damn downloads I was infuriated that it was posted at all even if it wasn't the whole book because I really ruined Emma's reputation, and I hated myself for it...I was so tempted to not even bother remaking it or doing anything after someone posted it...They made me feel even worse than I already did. There was just too much damage done.

 

 I go back sometimes, re-read my old work just to see where I went wrong and respect the segments I did do right at least. But the project can't be half good and half bad, I'm strict about this. It doesn't matter if everyone else that read or purchased them in the past thought they were "great" to me they weren't great. I hate shit lighting, I hate harsh shadows, I don't like crappy plots, and using certain characters a specific way. And then Kamasdeva was asking me why I don't learn to animate and that if I mastered it, we could work together.

 

 I told him that I prefer to produce books instead of videos. Videos would give me a lot more leverage if I could animate as good as Radroach, DesireSFM, Selfdrilling, Animapron, Rigid3D, Rapetacular, Perfectdeadbeat, or even 26Region then sure why not. But since I don't have the will to learn animating I'll stick to creating books where I can actually produce story lines for my content. 

 

To do that with animations I would have to be able to do 50+ length animations and there is no way I have that amount of time each year to do that. Animating is a team effort assignment, that's the only reason why these guys get so stressed...You have to make the animations, the music, the sound, recruit the voice talent because AI voice acting is shit and stupid I pray nobody starts relying on that garbage for voice work. 

 

No if you are really serious you got to work with a team or do all of that BY YOURSELF. As a result it's a lot harder, after the stress gets finished kicking your ass you become burnt out. It takes a special kind of person to work on lengthy projects and then keep going afterwards. But there's nothing wrong with taking a break from it once in awhile vs quitting entirely because it became too much.

That Cowboy Beebop Folk Blues song inspired this image. I just pictured how it would sound if Kuchisake was the one singing it and Kayako and Sadako were on backup with their instruments. Suddenly I visualized a burning city that caught on fire the moment they set foot on the premises. 

There were suppose to be police behind them and on the sides attempting to arrest them but this was done on my crappy 2070 GPU that was dying but was able to still render back in 2020. I remember the card reached 100 degrees it was so hot that when I touched it I actually did get burnt. It felt like the flames from this scene went into the graphic card.