A parable about trusting your own talents

I know I haven’t done a real update for almost two weeks. I’ve been very involved with pushing my boundaries into a new area, and it’s taken a lot of time and energy. I hope this all doesn’t come off sounding hopelessly ego-ridden, but it’s not just about me. I know a lot of you are very talented and I think most of us know the feeling of being reluctant to try something because we don’t believe we’re good enough.

The bottleneck in my publishing production line is, and has always been, cover designs. I hated doing mash-ups, and I wanted to do real illustrations for the covers: completely composed from scratch, freeing me from the need to find (or set up and take) just the right photos, and being limited to those that were legal to use, and available in high enough resolution. Even when I was successful getting the images, and mashed them up as carefully as I could, I still was never very happy with the result. I wanted to do Real Art covers. I just didn’t have the confidence.

It wasn’t just that, of course. I’d get bogged down in all the self-sabotaging, neurotic internal dialogues, like: “You know you can do it.” No, I can’t, I can’t do real art! “Come on, you did three t-shirt designs for Rites of Spring, you’ve been paid for design work, you used to do the white boards at Community Education and people every day walked in and looked and said, ‘who’s the artist?'” Yes, but that was different! I can’t do this! “Yes, you can, just get your butt in gear and do it!” But it’s such hard work…

Bingo. See, that was the thing. I was a visual artist way before I was a writer. When I was a kid, I drew pictures all the time…constantly. I couldn’t leave a piece of paper blank. I filled the backs of all my school papers with elaborate drawings. I didn’t start writing until I was in junior high. I took (and aced, with exclamation points) art classes all through high school. But then…I just stopped drawing and painting, and started writing, instead. I never knew why…

…except for one fact that I really have to face. It was laziness. Writing was so effortless for me. Art, with the standards I set for myself, was hard work. And it was so different from writing. That’s gotten in my way with music, too. I was raised in a musical family. I have near-perfect pitch and I can compose original music. But I never really applied myself to it because it was too much work, and I had so many creative abilities, it was easy for me to coast into the least challenging paths. Laziness joined hands with perfectionism, and when I hit the first snag I just backed away and went to do something else.

The only exceptions to this pattern occurred when I’d made committments to other people and didn’t want to let them down. That gave me the incentive to follow through. Now, I have signed contracts with authors to produce books that need covers–by next month.

So, I needed to do the cover for Krymsin Nocturnes. I had some ideas I liked, and they all involved portraits of *gulp* people. In particular, I wanted Montgomery Quinn, the hero of the book, on the cover. I’d asked the author to suggest an actor that he thought resembled his character, to give me an anchor point. He suggested Michael Jai White. I’d looked up photos of Mr. White (he was in the last Batman movie) for reference, but obviously, they’re all copyrighted. But I didn’t want to do a mash-up, anyway. I’d tried mocking up one, a couple of months ago, and set it aside. I opened it up on this new computer, with its high-definition 22″ screen, last month.

“Ew, yuck,” was what I thought. It wasn’t holding together at all. I just couldn’t find legal images that were even close to what I wanted. I was going to have to start over from scratch, anyway.

So I posed myself a challenge. I have this new computer, and I have this Bamboo tablet tool that allows me to sketch in digital media, something that’s very hard to do with a mouse or a touchpad. I can draw and sketch and rough out, and then paint, holding the pen tool like a pen or paintbrush. It’s very liberating. I decided to see if I could paint Quinn, just as I imagined him, free-hand, and get a decent portrait. If I could do that, then I’d do the whole thing that way.

I didn’t work from photos. I did the initial portrait entirely from my imagination. Only when I was well along in the project did I consult a few photos, and several times posed in front of a mirror, to get certain details about anatomy or shadow/light effects or structural detail of inanimate objects correct. Every bit of the finished project is drawn and “painted,” using the art media tools in Paint Shop Pro, free-hand. And here’s what I learned.

  • Yes, I can do art.
  • Yes, I am an incredibly lazy person who kept trying to sneak around and use short cuts and then had to throw them out and start over because all those clever short cuts look like just that. If you want a detailed illustration that looks good, you have to do all the details…one by one. So a good part of this past week has involved dragging myself by the scruff of the neck to sit and do, say, a distant cityscape by carefully layering a zillion tiny little rectangles in different sizes, proportions and colors, one at a time. And how do you make water look like water? Quick hint: there is no fast and dirty way to do it.
  • It’s time-consuming, but ultimately no more so than mash-up covers with all the time they require in finding or making the images to mash, and it’s much, much more satisfying.
  • All 2-D art is impressionistic, and after a point you have to stop worrying about the fact that it looks like a painting and not like a 600 dpi technicolor photo. I’m using digital art media tools to make it look like art, not photography.

When I had just finished Quinn, and was starting the background (which is a full wrap-around cover), the author emailed me and asked about the cover design. So I sent him the figure of Quinn so far.

He was very gracious, but I know it didn’t look enough like Quinn for him–for one thing, my Quinn isn’t rugged enough. And I know one reason why…silly me. At the moment, I am totally crushing on Nelsan Ellis, the actor who plays Lafayette in the first season of True Blood, and I made Quinn look too much like him. The author sent me a couple of images and some feedback, and I made some adjustments in Quinn. I made his jaw a little squarer and changed his facial hair, and started to feel like a police sketch artist. I changed his whole left arm because it was too tight against his body. His shoulders could be broader, but Quinn is supposed to be very tall and I didn’t visualize him as a linebacker, anyway.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for over a week. The art is done and I just need to make it into book covers–that is, put on the title and author’s name and all the text that goes on the back and spine. That’s why the picture, by itself, looks rather empty. Book cover art has to leave room for a lot of text, or the art will just get obscured. You also have to think about the surfaces where text will be superimposed and need to be readable.

If you want to take a look, here it is. The universe of Krymsin Nocturnes is set in “the twin cities” on “Borrego Bay,” a fictionalized clone of San Francisco and Oakland. That’s what the background represents. You can read the book and tell me how well you think I did with Quinn. It will be released on April 15. This is no romance–it’s got lots of action, blood and thunder, great for Tax Day!

But no more mash-ups from now on. And I may be doing more art than just book covers. I’ve really missed it.

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