Good Enough is Enough

drawesome did a "10-year redraw" challenge recently. And I actually don't have any art from ten years ago because I went through a long phase in my life when I wasn't making any art of any kind, so to find something over ten years old, I had to actually go back 17 years and found some doodles that I'd done while at work.

The 2007 versions have the advantage that I had recently taken art classes at the time and I had a desk job that was incredibly boring with a lot of free time on my hands so I probably spent more time on them. The 2024 versions have the advantage of being larger so I should have theoretically been capable of better detail, but I couldn't shake my "meh, fuck it" attitude. It was easier to display them here at the same size, but the originals of the ones on the right were much larger.

2007	2024

I don't hate the new versions, but I think I was hoping I'd magically see improvement. I want to believe my skill has grown since then, but I also have so much less patience than I did when I was younger. (I'm also just in a bad art phase right now. I don't think I've really liked anything that I've done this year.)

I did this for drawesome challenge #62, but I don't like it enough to bother cleaning it up.



I might play around with the idea again another time when I'm more in the mood.

How has it been almost a month since my last post?

I swear I've been doing art. It's just ... not really been good enough to share. Just lots of scribbles and kiddie drawings (following along with a "how to draw" tutorial video that is aimed at little kids is my happy place, very chill) and boxes. So. Many. Boxes. I'm determined to finish the "250 Boxes Challenge" even though it's not going particularly well.

I did watch a sketchbook tour from someone else who was doing the challenge and the guy was so proud of how much his boxes had improved and I'm like, "But your boxes are wrong! Your lines aren't converging properly!" (I didn't say any of this to anyone. This was just the critic in my head.) And I think maybe I might be taking this concept of the lines perfectly converging on the same vanishing point too literally. So I need to learn to chill just a little. Which is maybe the point of doing so many boxes? Because it's inevitable that you hit the "screw it, good enough" stage?

Anyway, the current plan is to count up to 300, because I feel like the first 50 boxes that I did months ago don't count toward building muscle memory and hand-eye coordination. If I can do 8 to 9 boxes a day, I can bang this thing out in February and move on to the next next annoying challenge.

I finished box #106 yesterday.

Challenge #4: IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

Uh ... hi. I'm Toad. (She.) I make art. Occasionally I make excuses for not making art.

My goal is to keep this journal public to share said art, but that means I'm also a little less open and personal here. I have a personal friends-only journal at oldtoadwoman which lately has been a lot of boring whining about daily stuff. (Seriously, I bet about 50% of my posts are chore day posts because apparently the only way I can motivate myself to do chores is to brag about them like they're major accomplishments.) So if you are looking for chit-chat that's where you want to look. I'm going to try to make a rare public post over there for snowflake_challenge, but I have a habit of marking old posts as private when I'm overcome with another wave of cringe. ("Why did I post that?!") So no guarantees that it will stay public for long.

Challenge #2: In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year.

Draw steadily this year. (Not putting a quantitative goal on this one as I don't want to feel like it's a chore. Any time I get behind on a goal it starts to stress me out which doesn't work well with creativity.)

Paint this year. (I haven't done any painting in years.)

Finish uploading images from my old sketchbooks. (This one's allowed to feel like a chore since it's not a creative project.)

I think I need to do more ballpoint pen sketches. It's so much faster than most other media and it's hard to get hung up on being perfect when it's ballpoint. Maybe it's just a lifetime of doodling at work. My brain accepts that ballpoint doodles don't have to be perfect or "finished" to be good enough.

I have been looking at apartments and houses lately. (I haven't even narrowed down what state I want to move to, but as long as I'm moving somewhere I figured it doesn't hurt to look around. 50/50 chance I play it safe and just rent a different apartment across town, but who knows.)

Anyway, tripped over this horror and it reminded me that I had an AI rant in mind.

( AI images being abused for misleading real estate listings )

Anyway here's the rant I've been meaning to make. (And just so you know how long I've been planning to get around to posting about this eventually, my current streak on Duolingo is 107.)



Why does the owl have a face on its butt?

I have the Duolingo widget installed to remind me to keep my streak going and it changes images several times a day to attract your attention and one of the images that cycles through is this one.

First thought, gotta be AI. Big company can't be bothered to pay real human artists for a handful of images. Jerks. But then here's where the real rant comes in. It occurred to me that there's no way to prove this isn't by a human because long before AI, human artists would do weird shit. A human artist might very well decide to draw an extra face on the owl's butt to signify ... okay, I have no idea what that would signify. Duo is busy and and being pulled in two directions at once? (Except Duo also clearly looks bored.) Duo is always watching you? I don't know.

But the point is that the established role here is that artists do weird shit and art critics debate what the deeper meaning is.

Except now, I think I'm hesitant to put as much weird shit out there. Draw a person with too many ears or eyes or fingers or whatever and people are just going to assume it's a "fake" AI image. Maybe I just felt like drawing extra ears today? Artists should be allowed to be weird if they want to be.

I'm sort of dreading the day a youngling dismisses Salvador Dali as "obvious AI". It's only a matter of time.

Have you ever abused an art supply to death and only afterward gone, "Oh, wait, that was not how I should have used that" or is that just me?

I bought a Tombow calligraphy set, not because I ever do calligraphy, but because it listed an interesting collection of pens/markers that I was curious about. I'll post about the others another time, but this is about the "Monotwin"



It's an oil-based marker so pretty much a fancy Sharpie equivalent. And I was like "meh, whatever" and focused all my love on the other pens in the set and used this thing completely up doing this...



I knew it wouldn't look good. This was just one of those meditative pieces you do when you don't want to think. (I did some other stuff too so I didn't use it up entirely on this one page, but this was the page that finally killed it off.)

Here's the thing. Notice that name is "Monotwin". There are two ends to this marker and one of them was a very fine tip that puts Sharpies' "extra fine" tip to shame. I absolutely should not have wasted this marker on a mindless filler page.

I don't need a fine-point oil-based marker so it's not high on my "buy again" list, but it still feels disrespectful to have killed this off when I have a ton of other black markers that I could have used for this.

2022 Drawtober, day 4: prompt = letter
2022 Drawtober, day 5: prompt = dark

I drew the basic drawing for the letter last year and didn't get around to coloring it in until this year. This was right about when last year's Drawtober just fell apart for me. I have to rant yet again how much I hate this sketchbook. You can see how I had to wedge it open with binder clips just to get this picture.

2022 Drawtober, day 6: prompt = gravity

The only part of this page that I filled in last year was the sloppy prompt title at the bottom.

2022 Drawtober, day 7: prompt = tea

I drew this one last year, just as a simple black line drawing, and colored it in this year. The spoon annoys me, but I'm fond of the tablecloth.