The Chronicle of a Very Bad Idea

The single purpose of this blog post is to complete a set of events. Bear with me here.

This blog started off as a simple motivational tool. Yunsuk wanted to start drawing again and I wanted to start writing again, so we matched each other's progress one-for-one. At this point, I'm falling behind, and it's entirely my fault.

You see, aside from wanting to achieve our respective goals, there is something else that Yunsuk and I have in common: we both hate the medium that the other person uses. Art does not come easily to me, and writing is the bane of Yunsuk's existence. Naturally, this means that we agreed to mix things up and switch roles for a week.

After only one evening, Yunsuk produced this brilliant piece of writing (TL;DR: I hate writing.):

For the last week Lisa has been blogging and I’ve been making comics around my current and past thoughts. it all started off as a simple recollection of past works and a decision to try it again. No real reason to restart these forms of expression, just boredom and overall sillyness. To keep in tune with the sillyness that is me I decided we should try to switch mediums, I would write a blog post and she would make a comic. Oh the fun that will be had.

And now that I am sitting down and trying to type I really do realise how weak I am with words. Even spoken I have trouble putting my thoughts into words, fumbling over them and making shit up as I go. It’s easier to hide behind little drawings to take up space. I’ve never liked the written form as a method to express inner thoughts. It’s too structured, too direct for my tastes. That’s not to say I don’t like reading. I love reading fiction. The stories are a form of escapism better than any other, to be able to forget who I am and the problems I have for a time and experience another world in the eyes of someone else. That is an absolute treat.

And this is exactly why I am terrible with writing. Those last few sentences, that I now reread, are completely off topic. I cannot focus. When drawing I can make little comics because it’s just drawing a scene, I have the finished idea in my head and it’s just following the motions to put it on paper. When I write and talk, after a few words I get sidetracked and decide to talk or write about something else. This wasn’t suppose to be about my love of fiction it was suppose to be about how much I hate writing. That is the heart of why I hate writing. I get too easily sidetracked when I’m not just working. When there isn’t a direct goal in my head, a draft of a finished comic, a finished sculpture, a finished work I simply lose focus.

Lastly I don’t write because my thoughts tend to come out as depressing. And in written form it’s more annoying and whiny than in drawn form. Depressing thoughts in a cute comic form tend to be more daw or baw because of the drawings that go along with the words.

If I write again I guess I’ll have some topic to work off of. But for the most part now that I finish this short post I can only think,

“I can’t wait to see the trainwreck that is Lisa’s comic.”

And you know what? My comic was a trainwreck. It's difficult to produce a work of art when you don't have your own style of drawing. I enjoy writing because so many of the extraneous details can be left up to the reader's mind. I can't fathom how somebody could put a pen to a piece of paper and come up with a detailed character without thinking about it for hours. In my eyes, it's an everyday miracle.

Here's what I came up with after days of character development and storyline editing (it's also difficult to produce digital art without a tablet):

Of course, it turns out that my three-panel storyline was completely unoriginal. I'll admit that compressing any sort of commentary into three sentences is not my forte, but at least this one was easy to illustrate! Using my Chinese imitation artist skills, I blatantly ripped off Yunsuk's style of drawing and created this masterpiece in no less than 168 hours.

This is where the series of events should have ended. We've both fulfilled our parts of the agreement and had a few chuckles at how bad we are at other mediums of expression. Now, I'm normally not a vengeful person, but at 4AM this morning, dgsReborn sent me a link over Steam chat, along with a taunt that I can't seem to remember:

Dammit Yunsuk. You can't just draw a better comic about my bad comic. That's rude. That's like walking into a sword fight with a gun. The only appropriate response is for me to pull out a gun and shoot the guy who broke the rules. That's right, I'm writing a blog post in response to the comic that you drew in response to my comic. Take that.

This was absolutely not a filler post while I work on a Valentine's day story.