Sketch #3 (I'm Sorry)
What did I mean when I made this?
I feel awful.
So, what I wanted to do was make a cute little drawing for my beloved subscribers to ring in October, which happens to be my favorite month. The plan: A googly-eyed Halloween spider with leather thigh-high boots on her legs. That sounds cute, right? Everyone would have loved that, I think.
(Here are some googly-eyed spiders, for those who can’t seem to picture it.)
Well, I would have loved that too. But when I set about bringing her into existence, some things got in the way. It was supposed to be a little Tim Burton™ with a winking gay twist. But spiders have so many legs, and they got in the way of each other, and the boots weren’t super legible.
I thought the problem was that maybe because the spider was black and the boots were black, they were getting lost with each other. I made the spider purplish instead, and then I thought, “ooh, what if I make the body like one of those fluffy feather pens from Claire’s?”
Then everything went wrong.
Lisa Frank entered the conference room. Then Mean Girls. Then yaassified Toni Collette. The result is something I don’t recognize. This is not an image that was born in my brain. This is an image with its own agenda, existing by accident, for no one and by no one.
Look, I’m a big boy. I’m a semi-professional. Failure is fine by me. I can see on a technical level what went wrong. There’s a grainy halftone effect for some reason. The fuzzy body reads as flat. Some parts are detailed while others aren’t.
It’s not even that the result is all that terrible. She has some fans on Twitter. It’s more about the psychic violence it inflicted upon me while I was making it. Nothing was working. No matter what I did, something unwanted happened instead.
But, you know. When I came back from my second coffee run to assess my day’s labor with fresh eyes, I laughed really hard. I can’t believe I have to do an entire graphic novel. I imagine I’m going to mess up a lot. Hopefully, I continue to find it funny.
I hope you all have a wonderful October.
-JP
As someone who has a hard time creating for fear of messing up, this is v comforting (and funny!) 💕 thank you
I love the spider too! I think she represents the constant way we watch and critique ourselves, but I think she likes herself and approves, plus finds the surveillance funny, by the looks of those gorgeous eyes. I think she's toasting herself!