It's okay to mess up!
It's okay to not like the change you just made to your art, or to not like it at all once you finish. To spend an hour selecting the perfect stock only to hate it once you import it...
It isn't a sign of weak art, but a sign of a strong eye for improvement and what can be better! We experement as we draw and if we let ourselves get discouraged every time we ended up creating something we didn't like, we would never improve.
Take theses examples:
This design just went south from the moment I began. I had a cool idea in mind, but just couldn't translate it to the art... I didn't like how drastic the transition was, how short it made the horse look, or the red/green eye making it seem sick... It just... Looked bad...
![6TQxnMh.png](https://i.imgur.com/6TQxnMh.png)
So I changed up my approach and ended up getting and selling this beauty:
![XxME4ig.png](https://i.imgur.com/XxME4ig.png)
This one shows that you can use the same idea and concept, just rearrange and pluck out the glaringly bad features (i.e: Changing the eye color)
This guy was cute but I also thought the pattern made him too short, and he almost has a cartoonish appearance. Not what I was going for, and I almost wanted to just abandon a pattern for the batch, but really wanted that blue white brown contrast...
![wIb7kZG.png](https://i.imgur.com/wIb7kZG.png)
So... I started fresh and this pretty man came of it! (I almost kept him <3)
![MOqLBHY.png](https://i.imgur.com/MOqLBHY.png)
Much lighter eye color, an elongated pattern, and richer brown all made me happier with deciding to change up my origonal idea and come up with a better overall horse with the same color. Even if I started anwe!
This was part of my Gem collection and I sat on this one for a while, wondering if I should just include him and if his design was passable, or scratch him and start over... But he just didn't look like the gem I was basing him after, and the patterns look really off and fake... I am glad I decided to change things up because the result was a big improvement...
![KefEFpE.png](https://i.imgur.com/KefEFpE.png)
Go a little darker and match the gem a bit more...
![POEeRxY.png](https://i.imgur.com/POEeRxY.png)
Viola... A proper Gem horse, prime and ready for market. <3
Theses are only examples of some of my adoptables that I have had to remake, but there are plenty of manips that I get half way through, spot a weird angle on a marking I don't like, and suddenly I am redoing nearly the entire thing to make that one are look nicer.
It is all improvement and improving your skills, even if it turns a 2hr piece into a 4hr one.... Or a 5hr one... Or 6- You get the point...
Don't be afraid to mess up! Infact, go make misstakes in your art, so you can find them and fix them, and find where your paths to imrpovement are! We are our own worst critics, but also our best supporters...
Go color outside of the lines!
-Kern