Hours down the drain!

Well, not really.  Just reflecting on the ridiculousness of how, when it comes to creative projects, one can spend hours on one component, only to later decide to not even use it.

Over the last few days, I've been buckling down to do 15 small drawings of fighting stances, with the intent of using them in the "Basics of Lower Knight Beliefs and Practices" book I've been working on for the last few months. It's been exhausting, it took a couple hours to get photographs of the poses, then a few hours of troubleshooting with the images, then half a day to just do the rough sketches.

I had this elaborate plan for how to use them, but after spending the other half of a day doing a dry run with the roughs, I'd decided to scale it down. I didn't like how it was going to turn out. So, instead of using all 15, I'll just finalize three or four of the best sketches and only use those. 

And you know why? Because the mess of sketches didn't really have anything to with the chapter. Because last week I had to go and do a cool picture for a different part of the book. 

So, I've accidentally raised the bar for the quality of material in the book, and now I can't drop below it.  And this bar of quality is more specifically associated with how the art associates with the context of each chapter.  The cool drawing helps explain things, it tells a story.  Now, I feel like I need more art that tells a story.

Which will be a lot more work, but will be worth it.