Mistakes

Day two—no plan, just making videos. Don't run from the robe you messed up. Sit back down, grab some blues, and make it look like Vivi from Final Fantasy.

Day Two: No Plan

Welcome to day two. I have no idea what I’m doing—and that’s on purpose.

I’ve tried to start a YouTube channel so many times. I come up with all these plans: two videos a week, talk about this, then that. I never make the videos. I spend all my time planning things that never happen.

So instead, I’m just going to keep going every day without a plan and see how far that gets me.

Don’t Run From Mistakes

Normally, if I messed up a paint job like I did with this robe (by messed up, I mean I just don’t like how it looks), I would have thrown him into the bits box or back on the shelf, never to be touched again. He’d serve forever as a memory of my failure.

I’m being hypercritical of my own work. It doesn’t actually look that bad. I just slapped some speed paint on it, so of course it doesn’t look good.

The Fix

Instead of being frustrated by not getting the results I wanted the first time, I sat back down with him. Pulled out a couple different blues—dark blue, very bright blue, middle blue. They all have that green or violet teal tone.

Now I’m just reworking it:

Paint the shadows dark
Add the midtone on top
Paint highlights on top

That’s the tutorial, guys.

Black Mage Inspiration

By now you can see the inspiration: Black Mage from Final Fantasy 1, or Vivi from Final Fantasy IX.

It turned out pretty good in the end. The arms and feet I just started with a dark color, worked my way up with a lighter gray.

The Lesson

The main thing I want to talk about today: don’t be afraid to make mistakes. After you make them, don’t run from them.

Now I’m looking at him and I’m pretty happy with how he turned out. I think it looks pretty great. I pretty much completely covered up the speed paint. The skin looks great, the staff looks great (which was just layering), and I’m very happy with the robe.

All because I made myself sit back down with it and work on it instead of running from the mistakes.