Rainy Reflection in Zen Garden
The Artwork
Like many of my peers at this age, Japan has produced a good portion of the culture which I consume. In between the food, the inspired scenery which can be seen online, or the shows, you get this sense that there's calmness in living in Japan.
Around this time I started my journey in the development of an icon / character which I could use as the face of my business. It started with a logo about a year before. But I expanded to attempting to draw the character within the logo in different scenarios.
In my personal life I was preparing to face a lot of change and I was seeking peace. I sketched up a quick version which I could not find at the time of writing this. My sketches at this time are also extremely crude and most likely not interesting enough to look at. The core idea was the garden, when I visually look at zen gardens I've always felt peace. When they're displayed in shows the scenes are peaceful as well. So the garden was the background, and there was always going to be a bridge. In the first version, I wanted to incorporate the bridge from Avatar the Last Airbender. There was a seen where Sokka walked with Yue by this bridge. I really wanted to include the bridge with a character walking across it holding a hot cup of matcha.
Ultimately I started drawing in a different perspective, and I'm still learning as an artist so I struggle to shift perspectives for objects. You can actually see this quite dramatically with the pagoda. It's reference image is in the same perspective the pagoda is in, which is different from the rest of the entire work. But this new perspective lead to many changes in the work.
The below image is photoshopped. I went to an art show inside a warehouse with some friends, I thought manifesting having my work up on display would be interesting to see visually. This image only exists because I took so long to create this art work.
Which brings me to the lesson from this work. Which was to realize how much time you're investing in something. Especially something which is fundamentally flawed. I think it's okay to spend years working on the Mona Lisa. It's not okay to spend months working on something that you're compromising on in order to get some more work out the door. It took me maybe 6 months to finish this work.
I spent the most amount of time drawing up these sakuras. I don't even think I drew them all individually. I believe I had 4 archetypes. After the 4th I kind of gave up because I was taking too long and I'd position them in various places. I really do like the end result, but due to some of the flaws of the rest of the work I wish I took much less time on this.
The other thing that was important to me was the koi fish. I wanted to get this one right. Again, I love the detail in these fishes and I think it really worked out. But the hero character to me is the one that deserves the most amount of time when you want to work in a time constrained manner. And yes, I did spend lots of time on the main character sitting on the little bridge. But I should have, as a result, thought of a simpler design for these koi.
In the end, this work did not sell at all. I am still proud of the work I did and the lessons I've learned. I am not sure my behavior has changed since the publication of this work. However I'm much more mindful of my time investments now and I am trying to improve.