Over analyzing your art.

Hi Frightners!

Today I wanted to write a little about over analyzing your art because I find it to be something I have done way too much of in the past and it is often the reason I find myself with a million projects that I start and stop and often times never finish.

I supposed I can put this either in terms of being and artist in general or in terms of being a home haunter because I think both will slightly vary but for today I will focus on the home haunter aspect of over analyzing what we create.

Most every home haunter starts by purchasing props to create a scene with at their home for Halloween and each year we add a little more then a little more until we realize we have been bitten by the Halloween bug and no store bought prop can help us materialize our every creative idea so we force ourselves to being making the props we want or need to create the scenes we had envisioned in our sick  and twisted minds!

It is important to remember at the very point we set out to create our very own hand made props that everyones level of artistic abilities is different and you cannot let any one image or video you see of a prop similar to the one you want to build be the reason you slow up progress on yours. It is always a learning process and that process needs to develop over time.

What tends to happen to me is that I see someone building the exact same prop I would like to create and I begin to analyze their prop vs mine. Shortly after I begin to ask myself various questions such as "why does my detail not look the same?" or "does my paint job make it look realistic enough?" I begin over analyzing everything I am doing and begin questioning everything I had planned too do. Will it be good enough? Is it good enough? These are the questions that begin to form in my head. I become so consumed with it needing to be exactly like the reference I saw that I do not even bother to work on it any more.

I recently began working on a Madame Leota Tombstone prop in which I am sculpting her face while looking at reference pictures of the original. Shortly into the process I got the feeling that it wasn't looking right and I needed to step back and rethink what I was doing. I ended up scraping the sculpt and starting over. As I got into the sculpt the second time around now taking a new direction with it I got the slight feeling the same thing was happening again! I didn't think what I was doing was terrible and liked plenty about it but compared to the picture reference it was not spot on. Here is where I began to over analyze what I was doing. Now I could very well scrap the work which I have done which would amount to maybe 2 hours of my time or I can push ahead and continue and finally I decided to do just that and continue on.

It's always hard to catch perfection. I am not sure you ever can really but you can always continue to better yourself and your skill set and learn from the experience in which case I am learning with this sculpt. My goal now is always to push through and finish and enjoy the fact that I can mark the project as being done and off my list and ready myself for the next. I can always sculpt another Madame Leota in the future and will take this one as my learning project but if I don't finish it I will have nothing to show for the time I did invest and I can never look back and say "wow look how far I have come!"

The moral of the story really is not to over analyze your art. Don't sweat the small stuff and let it hold you back from finishing what you had originally set out to do because after you finish each project you will get progressively better at your craft. You will learn new skill sets, tips and tricks to make you a better artist but that is only by doing and not by staring at a computer screen analyzing what other people are doing.

So go out and get to work on whatever new project or build you have in mind and don't let anything hold you back from creating your next work of art!

Frightuy~