That overly detailed feel (Chat)

[Kiskia]

Just wanted to share something that happened today with people who might understand the feeling.

I spent hours working on a really detailed panel for my comic. I thought I was done. Ready to do finishing touches and then I'd be able to upload in the not too distant future. Only to look at it again and realize...I drew the planter and thought "I'll go back and add the plant later" and then never did. Too many details, almost missed one.

Tell me about a time something like that happened with you. Was there a detail you missed, something you forgot? Writers, did you accidentally contradict yourself and have to scrounge to fix it at the last minute?

[Rasp]

The advantage to being a writer is you can edit things whenever with few consequences if you're not terribly popular. There are HUGE problems with my novel at the moment but I'm not in a rush to fix them because... pffff nobodies reading it might as well wait for my editor to finish her job.

I think we have a tendency to overestimate the consequences of failing more often the reverse. Especially for unknowns like myself. Its okay to totally mess up odds are nobody even noticed.

Does remind me of a time I was reading a comic and the artist was drawing a police officer and I made a crack about the officer not wearing gloves... turns out the artist had intended for the officer to be wearing gloves but had colored the hands wrong.... oops.

In the end it got fixed and nobody ever thought or spoke about it again... til now I suppose?

[Kiskia]

I think that's probably one of the reasons I'm doing my comic in black and white right now. That and I don't have the time to try to color my pages if I'm going to have a consistent update schedule.

I have made typos in the text on my pages and had to go back and edit them. Definitely more difficult than when writing prose in a word processing program. I don't have any published writing on here, but I have written a number of things (fanfic, original fic) elsewhere and that was about the closest I could equate the feeling to when I realized I'd forgotten that one little detail. In writing when you get to a spot and you're like "wait, was he wearing a hat? a helmet? how can he run his hands through his hair if..." and then you have to read back through to check.

[Rasp]

Yeah then you have to throw in a filler line about tossing the helmet aside or something it tedious.

The lesson here is never to wear helmets!

Clearly I am a role model for children everywhere

[DeformedSunflower]

In writing when you get to a spot and you're like "wait, was he wearing a hat? a helmet? how can he run his hands through his hair if..." and then you have to read back through to check.

Hahaha, I understand that.

There's a page in my comic where the main character is running towards the door, one hand holding his friend's and the other reaching for the doorknob. The moment he opened it he saw a huge man wielding a knife, and so he shut it back. The next scene is of said huge man banging on the door relentlessly.

I just realised that MC hadn't bolted the door because he was holding his friend's hand and now they're gonna get killed and the story will end just like that. Oh well.

[unknown_user]

When I started to draw that chibi:

I had a reference before my eyes, for the first half of a hour. But then, I concentrated on refining and coloring too much and almost forgot about the original. Then I uploaded it and realized, that I forgot about a red ribbon on her hat!
So I took 5 more minutes to add it.

[Kiccha]

As someone who sometimes draws very detailed pieces I can really relate to this feeling and it's the worst, just when you think you're done you see that something is missing or the perspective doesn't work or an object just doesn't fit. And then you realize you have to go back and fix it which can mean at least 30 min of more work when you thought you were so close to being done ;_; (it's even worse when you know that no one is going to notice it or care aside from you but you still need to fix it)

[Elixiink]

I understand how you feel :'D A little too well I suppose. Considering how extreme my cases are. If I even see a speck that isn't supposed to be there. Like a dot. I worry so much that "No I need to fix that right away." I wanna get rid of this flaw so bad but my inner "perfectionist" just dominates me so effortlessly.

Its so tiring. I keep on wondering why I do this to myself. I redid my one of my chapters 5 times. And I wonder, did I really have to redo it?

I guess you just gotta remind yourself that if you dwell too much on that tiny little thing... you'll never move on towards your main goal and you'll never get to see the big picture if this goes on. At least that's what I tell myself.

I just wish I'd listen to myself more.

[rajillustration]

Accidentally drew a character with his jacket open when it's closed in every single other frame in the sequence. Half of me doesn't want to fix it.

[revisionstudios]

I had a scene where my main character who dresses in a lot of accessories was fighting in a place with a lot of environmental effects and had sustained injuries, so I had to keep track of drawing all of this on every character shot:

-oxygen filter
-earrings
-rings x4
-watch
-shoulder wrap tattoo
-wallet chain
-blood stain on shirt
-cuts on each bicep
-sweat
-wet shirt from where he fell backwards into water

IT WAS SO TIRING AND THERE WAS SO MUCH I WAS FORGETTING. The pages look cool though.

Definitely taught me to be more choosy about what details I want to include for the sake of realism.

[Kelheor]

The design of my characters is not too intricate (I think?), but I tend to forget minor things. In chapter 5 I forgot to draw sleeves on Zoe's top literally every panel, it was a disaster, after the fifth time I was like:

And of course Gil's forehead patch, so many times. By the way, one can still find a mistake in his headphones comparing chapter 1 and chapter 2. And I I still need to redraw this mistake xD

In the second season, Summer wears 3 freaking hairclips (should I make it 5 next season or smth? xD) and 2 earring in each ear, so I usually miss something.

But then of course I return and draw everything... because no detail is too small

[Darth_Biomech]

All. The. God. Damn. Time!
From forgetting to draw a detail to forgetting to do the whole rendering pass, my organization is a mess. T_T

[nathanKmcwilliams]

Scars. I draw lots of characters with scars. In particular one has had the same scar under his left eye for probably 10 years that I've been drawing him.
Yet...I forget to draw it when I'm making comic panels. In a one-shot I did, I ended up having to do a last minute check to go in and draw the scar every single panel he was in.

Also...I get super picky about harsh pixelation or tiny white pixels that get left out of the flat color filling stage. I always seem to miss at least one or two per page and it kills me every time I see it. even though I've spent an ungodly amount of time making sure I didn't miss any. Infuriating.

[IndigoShirtProd]

I understand hoe you feel, though fortunately my comic is super detailed. I think I have the most issues with the positions of characters and the consistency of their hair. All of my main characters have their hair parted a certain way, so sometimes when I flip the canvas and draw, I draw the part on the wrong side. It could take multiple passes before I even notice. It sucks.

[gempompadour]

I miss stuff all the time. In my second chapter I have a very detailed carriage that I have a reference sheet for. At first I drew it based on that but then I thought I can draw it from memory and did just that. It was like I was playing chinese telephone with myself. Every new version was just a little off until the last one was basically a whole new carriage design. Now I have at least 4 different versions of the thing

I just don't care anymore because to me it's not that important. I'll only retouch stuff if it's possible for me to do (I'm not going to re-draw a whole page for example) or if it's important plot-wise.

[gabriellabalagna]

I wrote the whole script for my comic before I started drawing the pages, and I'm glad I did so because there were so many things to tweak.

Sometimes, I'd write that my character had five brothers vs. four. Sometimes, I'd say a week had passed, when really it had only been a day. Sometimes, I realized I forgot to explain something about the plot earlier on in the story. Sometimes, things were just written unclearly.

As I'm drawing the pages, there are still minor edits I make with the dialogue, but thankfully all the major plots holes are gone.

[buttersphere]

I'm trying really hard to actually allow and forgive myself for not being too detailed or forgetting a detail in my comics.

Last night I finished outlining a pretty big establishing shot, trying my best not to get super into it. That one panel still took me hours to finish. I showed it to a friend and they said, "You know people are only going to look at this for 3 seconds right?"

So now I'm just trying to find that perfect balance of just enough detail haha. Gosh it's so hard to tell yourself to stop!

[lavendermintrose]

I haven't started my comics yet because I don't know how. I've never gotten to talk to people who have actually made comics, and gotten to figure out how to start... I mean, I'm still planning my stories, so like.

I'm stuck at planning. I can't get any further until I have someone to help me plot all of this out. Just, someone to talk to about it at all.

but I want to draw really detailed things. That's why I'm working on just drawings, trying to get to that level...