Links to individual posts and the associated art at the end.
But first, some thoughts.
Want to start by saying this was an excellent and very fun event and even though the English fandom is very small, it was fun to participate. I will be adding on more monsters into the sketchbook to fill it up, but probably not at the rate I've been drawing this month. I would like to someday make the complete monsterbook, including the descriptions from the game, organized in groups based on evolution, but that's a big and very casual project for the future. No promises. It's just a shame that such a resource doesn't already exist. There are videos on youtube that let you look at the monsters in a players completed monster book, but none of them go for the little descriptions and all of the videos are ancient potato-quality rips or just straight up filmed from a monitor rather than screen-capped. It's just not the same as big fancy drawings. But also I will never not be salty that you cannot rotate the monsters in the monster book. I wanna see what these guys look like! SOMEBODY PUT EFFORT INTO DESIGNING THEM, LET ME SEE THEM! AUGH!
Skills I learned from this draw a thon:
People are hard to draw. But the Loomis method for heads simplifies a lot of facial anatomy with easy proportions to remember and landmark guidelines that are more than just "draw sphere, draw a cross on that sphere, put your eyes on that cross and manifest a jaw from the ether, slap hair on that and place ears somewhere. You're on your own for the mouth and hairline. Did you do it?" The Loomis method, at least the videos I found, very gently explained where all the lines go and what they're for. Rocky start but I think I'm getting a handle on it? Not an expert, clearly, but I'm getting better.
People are hard. Hands are harder. And yet if I have a reference of exactly what gesture I want to draw, I can do it? Which is very strange. Hand construction still eludes me, so I will be practicing that, along with feet because those are also hard, but I'm actually somehow way better now at just... taking a pic of my hand on the selfie cam on my phone and just... "Okay, yeah, that's what the fingers look like. Makes sense. Let me just slap down the contours for a rough idea of the const-- Oh, nevermind. I just made the hand perfectly the first time..." So yeah, any of the good hands you see are either me looking at my own hand and drawing it directly, me looking at a reference and drawing it directly, or, especially on the monsters, me being incredibly lucky every single time. All the bad hands? Construction or agonizing over trying to utilize indirect reference.
Monsters are easy except when they aren't. Aside from a few small proportion issues that can be easily remedied during the digital inking and coloring phase, I think basically every monster is either exactly what I wanted or pretty damn close. You can see with the Polwigles from 2011 that I was not having a good time trying to construct them. Like, they're spheres, but not really? But they're not hemispheres, and definitely not a hemisphere stacked on a sphere, even though that's the closest approximation. I struggled forever trying to get the body shapes right. And then literally after like, 2 or 3 attempts not shown here on various other projects over the years, I am suddenly the expert with Polwigles? Basically every single doodle I am happy with when it comes to the wigles. They are very inconsistent design-wise between the game and the manga, and since their mouths in the game open almost all the way around during damage animations... I am opting to lean on the design sensibilities of Onshuu no Richter. Still, basically every Polwigle is constructed without reference. So I guess, somehow, after 13 years, I understand the shapes? I dunno how it happened but it did?
I think most of my troubles with the monsters boil down to one of 2 problems: Not being good at construction, that is, constructing unique poses from indirect references to make an educated guess about how a thing would look like from a different angle if we were to rotate or tweak its fundamental shapes in 3 dimensional space. And then not being able to FUCKING SEE THE MONSTERS. JUST LET ME LOOK AT THEM. There are lots of Polwigles from different angles in the manga, so if I NEEDED to use a direct reference, I could. But for the rest of these guys you basically only get the standard 3/4 facing to the left pose from the monster book and if you can even get a clear frame to look at, there's very little dynamism in the pose. The Lailah for example. I wanted to having it point a blade toward the viewer. But the blade is a complicated shape. I am poor with construction so the best I could do is imagine it as a rectangle and sort of carve the contours out of it to the best of my ability to try to get that foreshortened. Because I have no way to study the shape from other angles besides the ones shown directly in the monster book.
The rest of my problems are me standing in my own way. I did try to practice a lot of new skills. Combining references, taking risks, drawing for fun and not just drawing for a final product. And all of them were helpful to a degree. But I think part of the reason my art doesn't turn out well is because I see failing even 2% of the time as being "too much failure." I see anything less than 100% as "not good enough" so I get discouraged and stop trying. Which makes it impossible to learn and grow and also isn't a healthy way to look at art, because even the pros who do this for a living will have pieces that they tear up or don't post because they just... didn't turn out good. To be at a point in my artistic journey where I can even say I like more than half the pieces I did for this draw a thon? That's above average. That's what success looks like for most people.
I think it's the rejection sensitive dysphoria of ADHD. Because I spent so much of my early life either succeeding at everything right away (usually with help and preparation from adults like my mom) and academic "giftedness" I started seeing "success" or "good end products" as things I could reach with little effort. Especially because any time I DID run up against a roadblock or a challenge, I could usually fix it by powering through. Like, if I just did the thing a little harder, I could do it. Which is why whenever I did run up against real challenges, things that needed muscle memory, for example, like riding a bicycle or those Heelie shoes or those waveboards (My obsession with 2 wheeled modes of transportation era was fraught for real) I would have MELTDOWNS because I couldn't just get on a two wheeler bike and go without even learning or trying. Especially because if I saw peers who could do those things "right away" my assumption was always "They're just better than me, I just suck at this thing." and never "they had help learning that I didn't get" or even "different people have different learning curves for the same skills and comparing yourself is a futile exercise."
My assumption was never "that peer spent 3 hours a day for a week falling on their ass just to learn to ride their bike for 3 minutes and then those three minutes eventually became 3 hours and then indefinitely because they finally got the hang of it." My assumption was always "I suck. So if I can't get it in five minutes like they probably did, then I must not be any good and I should give up." Because 5 minutes of really intense effort used to be the magic ingredient to fix the roadblock for other tasks. So I never had reason to assume it wasn't the solution to EVERYTHING.
So I built up this mindset for myself that if I just press harder, I can fix it, and if that doesn't fix it, I can never fix it. And that's been a stumbling block for everything in my life, basically. I brute-forced my way to getting good at basically anything that I'm currently good at. And I'm having to unlearn that. Because growth isn't something you can brute force.
And growth is ALSO not something you can get without failure and risk. Because the other unhealthy mindset I built by brute-forcing my way to success was that I became unfamiliar with failure. Failure was a temporary state of self. My failures were always either easily written off as failure on someone else's part (It's not that I didn't do my homework correctly, it's that the teacher couldn't read it! That's her fault not mine! [incorrect buzzer noise from future me. There are some assignments that I still think this about but, like, no actually young me, a lot of those were actually a you problem and not a teacher problem {The ones that were teacher problems make me livid to this day, but that's another post entirely}]) or they were VERY temporary. "You got this problem incorrect." "Let me look at it again. Okay, I immediately see what I did wrong, I can fix it." "That's correct." "Easy. I just needed to work a little harder." While ADHD, being shuttled ahead through the gifted program, and with how the USAmerican education system treats failure not as a growth opportunity but as a moral failing are certainly contributing factors, I can say with certainty that a lot of the bad mindset surrounding this hurdle for me was also just my lack of drive to try things that were difficult. Why waste time on things that are difficult if there's already so much I can already do that's so easy!?
Then add the cherry on top of the culture we have around failure where it's shameful to ever admit you failed before unless you can turn it into this big inspirational story of how you "learned instantly from that one bad experience and never failed again!" Easy cocktail for an absolute clusterfuck of imposter syndrome, perfectionism, and control freak behavior on my part.
I am having to systematically reprogram my brain. Failure is a part of life. Just because you don't see other people sharing their failures, publicly, online, all the time, doesn't mean that it's not happening.
Watching Scott Christian Sava's content on Youtube has been doing a lot to help me rewire my brain. Failing is part of the process. And I need to learn to be comfortable with it.
And I think I'll have to keep relearning the lesson a few more times before I get it. Because every time I start to internalize it, I backslide and relapse and get back in that old brain-space of "that doesn't apply to me. Everything I do should be easy because that's how it's always been, and if it's not easy the first time, it's because I personally suck and not because I'm growing."
But, little by little, I'm getting better and better. I am catching up to what I used to be in 2011. And in some ways I am getting even better than I was. 10 years of art atrophy isn't great. But climbing back to the summits I've seen before and realizing that a 10 year backslide doesn't mean a 10 year climb is refreshing. I'm still not where I want to be. But I'm discovering more things I like about drawing, more things I want to contribute to my own style, more things I want to polish up on, more things I'm excited to learn.
I've started of thinking of hair as ribbons which is helping me construct more interesting hair in my art, for example. That's new. And fun. Hair is starting to be a less scary thing. I'm incorprorating more natural lip shapes but still leaning into the anime-esque simplifications and exaggerations of expression. I'm getting ever so slightly better at the shape of the palm of the hand. Fingers are still insane foreign objects to me, but I am learning.
I've developed much better line control. And learning to fail means learning that sometimes your lines won't be perfect. But I have also noticed that I'm able, more often than not, to make the strokes I want on the first try when I finalize a drawing.
I'm still messy with my sketches, which does need some work, but I'm getting better at picking the correct shapes out without agonizing over the line stage anymore.
I'm at the point where a lot of the art books I bought in my youth that were so far beyond my skills at the time are actually... full of manageable if not nearly useless advice for me now. I am growing. And while a part of me will always be dissatisfied that I'm growing so slowly, I am still happy that I'm growing.
Thanks again to everyone who participated! I loved seeing the art! I hope to get more DotNW fanfic up soon, too!
And finally, here's the links to the original posts with their original thoughts and captions.
Day 3: Blast From the Past: Aqua and Polwigle sketches from 2011 and Polwigle doodles from July 3 2024
Day 5: Assorted Plant Monsters
Days 7-9: More Plant Monsters
Days 10-12: Decus and Even More Plant Monsters
Days 13-15: Alice, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and STILL MORE PLANT MONSTERS
Days 16-24: Aqua, Tenebrae, the last of the Plant Monsters, and some Beast monsters
Days 25-31: A couple attempts at Richter Abend, More Polwigles (specifically Pontus from Onshuu no Richter), Emil Castagnier, Aster Laker, Ratatosk, and some more beast monsters
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