Volume 1 Page 120
Posted December 22, 2015 at 12:01 am

Yikes! Some rather wonky figure drawing on this shot of Emp, I’m afraid. Her neck is wholly out of alignment with the rest of her body, for one thing, and I’m not fond of the way I drew her pelvis as oddly squat. The catchphrase I try to keep in mind whilst pounding out Empowered pages is “embrace imperfection,” because my incessant self-nitpicking and maddening perfectionism made me an increasingly slow and unproductive artist during the end of my career in the mainstream comics field. Back then, even when I was only writing comics for other artists to draw, I’d still get bogged down with excessively tight layouts and lengthy, elaborately detailed scripts. (And that’s not even counting the hours I’d subsequently spend on dialogue edits, lettering guides, color notes and the detail-intensive like.) With Empowered, by contrast, I was trying my damnedest to make a clean break with all the can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees perfectionist bulls**t that had crippled my productivity and slowed my old work to a crawl.

Problem is, the laissez-faire looseness and spontaneity that Empowered provides me as an artist also provides me plenty of opportunities to bungle hastily scrawled first drafts and crank out tragically ill-proportioned figure drawings like this one. The perfectionist voice in the back of my head still wails upon seeing mangled images like poor Emp, here, but I usually am able to ignore its complaints and doggedly move on to the next page, perhaps with a rueful shrug. Cue the emoji! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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