PERSONAL

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What's On My Chest

7 years ago4,867 words

My recent creative work has been driven by an unfulfilled desire for connection... in various forms. I'll use this post to talk about something I've been playing around with recently. And also the thing in this screenshot.

This is a continuation of ∞ the previous post ∞, where I talked about a drive to create again, uncertainty about what to actually do, and fears of whatever I make being criticised if I ever release it. This time, I'll be focusing on my recent efforts - from the last few months - instead of things from long ago.

During this time, much of my creative energy has been spent - quite frankly - trying to relieve some of my sexual frustration. I've talked about this before, perhaps more openly than I should, considering the innumerable taboos and judgements we have around the reproductive act. Saying that I'm not a sexually successful person seems like something I shouldn't openly admit, as it probably lowers my respectability or value as an adult male, but it's true. I've only shared that experience a few times with one person, in my early twenties, and it's been years since then. Since sex is a basic desire not too different to eating or sleeping (for most of us, at least, especially young males), the biological urge is an overpowering one, and it makes sense that - since I have the skills and freedom to do so - I'd channel it creatively in some form.

I'd love to be out there in the real world writhing around nudely and sharing bodily fluids and all that with another real human being, but it's frustrating how I just never seem to meet anyone... Or least not anyone with whom there's a mutual desire to interact so intimately. The opportunity actually arose during my first year of university, but I didn't take her up on it because I didn't feel that way about her. Instead, I wished I could experience it with someone else, who wasn't available or interested. Annoying, how these things work.

So the deep-rooted desire to procreate just lingers, the quest unfinished, frustrating me. I mean, there's porn, and masturbation, and they're, uh, weapons I use in this inner conflict against my evolutionary drives too... It's just that I prefer the thought of channeling those drives into at least developing my creative skills even if I don't get anything I can show to other people out of it. It's easier to draw an attractive woman than, say, a wolf or a table, because the lust serves as an additional layer of motivation.

Some people unabashedly let their lust drive their art, and publish the fruits of their labour for the world to see, as porny pictures, sensual stories, or whatever. I'm embarrassed though by the thought of associating my name with smut, as it contrasts with the persona I try to present both externally and internally. It's not like there's a deep inner conflict inside about actually having a sexual side to myself in the way there might be if I were, say, a homosexual anti-gay preacher, but... well, I suppose it's largely about fear of being mocked and tormented by guys and rejected by girls, for being 'perverted' even though the people saying that probably do worse things themselves. Annoying, how these things work!

It isn't as if I do anything particularly perverse though. I mean, there are all kinds of quirky things on deviantART - vore, inflation My Little Pony porn, rough furry yiffing - whereas I just pretty much draw or paint naked girls posing non-sexually, doing nothing.

Well, usually. Recently I've been trying to channel these drives into a sort of experiment.

During my end-of-academic-year exams two or three months ago, I had to do a lot of studying that I was completely unmotivated to actually do. My libido comes in waves; I'll go a couple of weeks where the very idea of anything sexual feels painful and unappealing (I'm in such a phase now), then a couple of weeks where I can't think about anything other than sex (and how I'm not getting any, and how much that hurts... so it's pain all the time really, just in different forms). Annoyingly, I was going through one of the latter phases during this revision period, but didn't want to let it distract me so much that I failed the exams. I was also lonely, and, as usual, often had nobody to talk to.

So I made this thing...



Essentially, it's a 'game' where two girls talk to each other. It's not very interactive; you choose from a list of conversations - arranged on a calendar, corresponding to days in their lives - and click/tap through the dialogue, that's it. But it's sort of like a distillation of the bits of RPGs that appeal to me personally the most. I enjoy reading and writing dialogue, and being able to focus on just that without having to worry about things like exploration or combat was like having a Nutella sandwich without the bread. Yum yum.

They're both characters I've been drawing for years... The one on the left, Gemma, is someone I brought into being way back in 2012, when I first started trying to do art 'properly'; I used her as a generic character when I just wanted to practise anatomy or styles without thinking about who to draw. Here are some of many varied examples from throughout the years:



The scarlet-haired girl on the right, Erin, dates back to 2014, where I used her as a character design while doing the Video Games Art course that I did. Eventually she became my first 3D human model:



Both of them appeared in a short-lived project that I worked on called Wavelengths, which was... also from 2014, apparently? Weird. Feels like both longer ago and more recent than that. Interesting.





Oh, and Gemma appeared in Miasmon as well, briefly. More like a cameo, really. So that's something.

I have a sort of emotional connection to these two, as creators tend to with characters they've had for a while. Mostly I'd drawn them, though; they hadn't been given much of a voice before, and their personalities weren't clear.

This 'game', then, was pretty much just these two characters talking to one another, displayed in the visual style of a mobile-based text conversation, which I find inherently satisfying because getting messages is a rare treat for me. Erin was made a psychology student, who was studious and knowledgeable about the material I was supposed to be revising, while Gemma was a friendly but less-informed art student who was curious to hear what Erin knew about psychology. Both struggled with loneliness and depression, though Gemma was more successful sexually than Erin, in an awkward kind of way. Gemma represented the part of me that's creative, that plays video games (ones like Zelda and Pokemon, at least), while Erin was more cerebral and academic. The heart and the head, that kind of thing.

Their conversations were essentially Erin explaining psychology to Gemma, so then I could actually learn the material (teaching someone else helps a lot, and being able to do it virtually like this meant I needed to understand the content fully to make it work; I could also benefit from rereading the conversations I'd written to further enhance my understanding). They were peppered with sex jokes and references to Gemma's sexual experiences, to appease my libido (though nothing particularly pervy, really), and also some exchanges about depression so then I could get a sort of support by proxy... Writing characters listening to and caring about each other's emotional difficulties felt almost like a substitute for real support, and had the benefit of always being there without having to bother a person who might not be in the mood or available, or who might not say the right sort of thing.

The characters are female both because I'm attracted to those, and because I don't really have any appropriate male characters to use, but also because generally (and I'm aware we're all individuals so this doesn't apply to everyone) women tend to be more open about their emotional experiences, to have open-hearted discussions about what they're going through, whereas men are expected to bottle it up, and to bond instead over physical or intellectual activities, or games, or whatever... Sometimes I wish I'd been born female just so then I might have grown up sharing platonic love and cuddles with my bezzies and all that. It's comical imagining young heterosexual boys sharing a cuddle as they talk about their feelings and how they'll be best friends forever. Comical. Not that everyone female gets to experience those kinds of connections anyway, or that their presence immunises them to emotional illnesses. But still.

Overall, this project felt like a way to address many aching personal issues while improving my technical skills.

Results were mixed. It took longer than I anticipated to write the conversations, and I didn't learn as much about psychology as I hoped I would from doing so. Writing cut into my study time, if anything. But after the exams ended, I continued with the project because the benefits of just watching these characters talk did enhance my life at least a bit. While none of the content I'd made was arousing or anything, despite the motivation that had led to its creation in the first place (it was more occasionally titillating, rather than something I wrote with one hand), I felt like the connection I already had with the characters had deepened; they felt like friends, in a weird, distant, lonely kind of way. I know that's sad - everything I'm writing about here is - but it was at least a reprieve from lying on my bed unable to do anything. It got me creating, and writing, and exploring imaginary others' experiences, and I feel that in particular having Gemma talk about sex as if it was a normal and often disappointing or even painful experience helped me feel less frustrated that I wasn't getting any.

It was also a good way of trying to better understand sex from the female perspective. A while back, my friend linked me to ∞ this TED talk about young women's attitudes towards sex ∞, such as how even the boldest of girls typically take subservient roles in the bedroom, and how so many young women have terrible first experiences coloured by coercion and guilt in some form or another. It was quite eye-opening for me, shedding more light on things that I'd only had a vague awareness of before. Sex was no longer this always-wonderful thing I was sadly missing out on; it became more nuanced, doubled-edged, potentially difficult, especially for girls. As such, in these conversations that I wrote, Gemma described her own sexual encounters not in pervy, porny terms, but rather as something which she had very mixed feelings about, which played into her insecurities as much as it made her feel wanted. While it began as a way to appease my beast within, it developed into more of an attempt to understand the world from a different perspective.

I'm very aware though that my experience with sex is limited, so I'm no doubt relatively naive about it all... I just did the best I could with the understanding that I do have, and tried to learn what I could without going out and having the experience again. I dread to think what someone who actually has sex in their life would think of my writing, though. One of many reasons I'll never show it to anyone!

As in the games I made, the characters emoted, in the sense that their 'models' changed based on the line they were saying; the simple art style made it relatively easy to quickly draw a few poses for each one (which is why I chose that style):



One notable thing was that since I was creating just for myself, and didn't intend to show this to anyone ever, I felt so free to indulge my own preferences, and to not have to worry about making everything good or right. The drawings of the characters aren't good; they're good enough for me, but I wouldn't be happy releasing something like that into the world. Without the worry of striving for perfection, or striving to please some mass of hypothetical strangers, creating actually felt fun for the first time in ages. Genuinely enjoyable.

Recently, I rewatched Yu-Gi-Oh: The Abridged Series, after whimsically remembering it from years ago and digging it up in much the same way many people might do with MARDEK. I watched all the episodes, and they were okay (if annoying in the machismo of the style of humour; much of it based around put-downs, including frequent use of emasculating words like "bitch", and homosexuality being used as an insult... but that's a whole other kettle of fish, and typical of much male humour in general rather than just works like this specifically), but I read about some things afterwards and discovered that the creator struggles with depression and relentless self-criticism as a result of the actual external criticism he's got over the years. He worries about being a disappointment, about his work not being good enough to make people happy. Feels like he's failed his audience. I can understand that completely... and as I said earlier, the desire to make something that will please people - and the fear that you're not good enough to achieve that - is a deeply draining thing.

I want to make something that I can show to other people, that can enhance others' lives... But am I ready for an audience again? For unpleasable critics who see me as no more than a vending machine, who must be smacked when it breaks or takes too long? I have such mixed feelings about that. I'm showing these things now because the urge to show off what I've made is a strong one. Creating feels sort of pointless if the results can't be shared. And yet I can't stop thinking that I might regret writing this post... I'm rereading it again and again to be sure that posting it is the right thing to do.

Though I doubt I'll ever achieve much of an audience again, like I did with my games, which were easily found by being on the front page of popular Flash portals. Whatever I do next is sure to be more obscure, and I think I'm okay with that. It won't bring me fame or fortune, but I don't think my creative work ever was going to anyway. The field - the world - is too oversaturated with media as it is, and the topics I want to explore might not have popular appeal. But I'd rather focus on something that means a lot to a few people, than something that means a little to many.

Anyway. Being able to create without making things perfect was liberating... But I suppose the inner critic, and perfectionism, have become too integral a part of my self now to be completely absent. Before long, I could no longer enjoy this project because I felt it could and should be more than it is.

So I started experimenting. I wanted the characters to be animated in some form, so I made full-body 2D models for them which I animated in a program called Spine.



Plus backgrounds! Seeing them emote like this made them feel more alive, made their conversations more fulfilling to watch. They're also physically closer, as having them on opposite sides of the screen felt as if they were separated by more psychological distance than they should have been during intimate dialogue. Also, I realised that I could easily add clothing variations using this 2D doll approach:







I became aware of the limitations as I added more, though. I wanted them to be able to sit and talk too (standing like this also doesn't feel very intimate), but couldn't do that very well with these 2D models. Some poses are also difficult to do without drawing new parts; one of Erin's arms in the last screenshot there is overlapping her torso uglily, for example. I also felt that the dead dot eyes and overly simplistic art style came across as sort of creepy considering what they were actually talking about!

Around February, I decided to return to 3D modelling, which I'd had only limited experience with in the past. I think it was because I was teaching myself Unity since Flash was no longer a viable games development platform, and thought it might be interesting to be able to make a simple game with 3D graphics for the first time ever. I didn't really make many models and still don't really know what I'm doing - everything I know, I learned from online tutorials and experimentation - but long story short, this:







That's quite a big jump, if I say so myself! I tried to make a 3D version of this talky thing I'd been working on so then the characters might have even more life, so then I could put them into more interesting positions like sitting (though I never actually got around to that), and, well, to see if I actually could. I learned a lot in the process.

Again, it was never meant to be seen by anyone but me, so I could do what I wanted with it and not worry about things actually looking good. The poses are awkward, the environments are primitive and lifeless, and the models themselves have figures that actually rather irritate me now; Gemma's got a tiny waist, huge hips, and enormous bazongas that were meant as appealing exaggeration, but in hindsight just look silly. I was considering whether to actually edit the model - or at least the screenshots - to make it at least a bit less ridiculous before including them in this, so I wouldn't feel quite as ashamed, but it's too much effort so I might as well just leave it as it is.


(There are some little graphical glitches in this turntable animation which bother me - like bits of skin showing through the clothes - but it took longer than it should to make, so I'm not redoing it!)

The big boobs bother me because they were deliberate; I - like so many guys - am carnally excited by bloated blobs of fat dangling off women's pectorals (to put it as sexily as I can). But it seems so sexualised, especially with the other ludicrously exaggerated aspects of the figure. I think a lot about the psychology elicited by physical proportions when designing characters, and I've written about it before. Women feel bad enough about their bodies as it is, with the media encouraging unrealistic standards of beauty that most people just can't attain, and I feel bad about contributing to that. I imagine women frowning at me, having no interest in my work or in me as a person because it makes them feel bad about themselves, and I don't want that. I don't really want to appeal to drooling guys either, who'd see female characters in purely sexual terms. Hearing that one of my characters had "nice tits" would feel sour; I wonder if it's not too dissimilar to how a girl might feel hearing the same, or a father hearing such a comment about his daughter?

But it's interesting noticing the kinds of art that people on deviantART produce. I'm surprised by how many female artists draw busty, tiny-waisted vixens, and I always wonder about the psychology of that... and whether it's similar to the reasons that male artists might draw roided-up super hunks. Hmm. I suppose we all prefer people who are physically attractive though, and when we're not bound by the confines of reality, and are free to create whatever we want, then most people are going to create something that's easy on their eyes.

I know that I'm upset by the kinds of 'hot' guys that girls draw though, when I compare myself to them and find myself very lacking, which is why I'm so aware of how my own work might make others feel, and why I feel the need to comment about all this at all.

It also worries me that I'm conditioning my own mind to think that this is what women look like - or what they 'should' look like - such that more realistic figures would look less attractive and I'd forever be disappointed by reality... but the allure of exaggerating appeal really is hard to resist. ∞ I wrote about this a while back ∞, since how we portray proportions in art to elicit psychological responses - or to share, consciously or not, our own idiosyncratic perceptions of the world - is something I continue to find fascinating. In that post, I edited the stylised proportions of the characters in the project I was working on to be more 'realistic', and found the result rather off-putting. I tried it with this model of Gemma:



Though the 'realistic' proportions are based on those of a very slender model, she looks quite chunky and odd to me. I find that strange, and it worries me. Perhaps if I'd started a drawing with realistic proportions in mind from the start, it would have turned out better, but as it is, hmm. Maybe it's due to familiarity with the exaggerated one as much as anything; anything similar to - but different from - something we're used to tends to evoke feelings of unease and dislike.

I talked in the other post about how pushing attractive traits beyond the limits of what's physically possible leads to what's essentially supernatural attractiveness; beetles bunglingly buggering big brown beer bottles and such. If it's possible to choose this supernatural attractiveness over something more mundane, as when designing a character, resisting the urge requires more integrity than I probably have myself.

(Though I'm personally quite put off by breasts that are 'too big'. An... eye-opening ∞ search for 'boobs' on deviantART ∞ makes it clear that many people aren't. That's a link you should definitely click while having a lovely meal with your boss's grandparents. Puts my worries into perspective, though! The in-my-opinion 'huge' breasts on this character of mine are like grapes compared to the immense watermelons on some of those... people. Makes me feel like it's silly to be worrying about her proportions at all. Also, I wonder what the lives of the artists behind those are like... What their friends and family think, whether they know. Whether they feel embarrassed, proud... Hmm.)

Anyway, I've rambled about bosoms much more than I needed to, but it is something I'm very much aware of when making things like this, and it's the primary source of my embarrassment and reluctance about showing off what I've made. Shame about what I like or want because of how others might feel about it. Hmm. (I wonder what it's like to be the sort of person who - rather than worrying about things like this - would wear ∞ something like this ∞?)

But back to what I actually did make. I found that - unsurprisingly - it's quite difficult doing facial expressions on 3D models, especially since I'm so new to modelling and self-taught. Proper, Pixar-level facial rigs take a LOT of work and skill to do right, and I just don't have the time or interest for that... So instead Gemma's smile in the previous screenshot looks off, wrong, uncanny. Hollow; like a fake smile at best. She is smiling with her eyes as well as her mouth, but there are many subtle muscles that contribute to that which I wasn't able to animate with such a simple model/rig.

I actually experimented quite a bit with smiles, and the results are all kinds of unnerving:



They all feel so different to me, like entirely different mental states being communicated, even though they were all attempts at a basic toothy smile. The bottom right one has a mouth taken from a photo (one which I thought had a particularly nice smile), and it's interesting how grotesque it looks in this context. Including the crease lines - which are clearly visible even on little girls - seems to age her by decades, too, which I find bizarre; I suppose you dip too much into the uncanny valley when you try and blend stylised depictions with certain realistic details. I wonder whether the mind is usually 'blind' to things like those creases when comprehending smiles in real faces though? I mean, our mental programs never observe every detail; it's more like they get the essence from certain key features, and ignore the rest. So making it clear that those usually-ignored features exist might be what's causing the "something's off here" feeling? I'm just speculating, as someone who does both psychology and art!



Perhaps the models look off in general, actually? I think they look okay (if anything I'm really pleased with them considering my inexperience), but I'm well aware that my subjective assessment is biased; other people might find them ugly. But I suppose the same could be said of all art? At least that of intermediate level artists working alone. There's plenty of not-quite-right-looking stuff all over deviantART.

I should note that the models are deliberately moderately low poly, for those of you who know what that means, because I personally really like the look of it. It reminds me of the sort of games I grew up with, I suppose, and I'd rather have visuals like this than ultra-smooth billion-triangle models. Especially since those are irritating to edit if I've made some modelling mistake or something. But that probably doesn't mean much unless you've dabbled in 3D modelling yourself!

While they're talking, you can freely rotate the camera...


("Hmm, they are stupidly big", thinks Erin.)

...and you can even press keys to activate first-person cameras for each of the characters...





...which just draws attention to the issues, like the imperfect facial expression and the ridiculous proportions!

It's an interesting thing to play around with, but I have mixed feelings about it. The 3Dness is okay, but being merely okay makes it clear how much better it could be, but isn't. But is mediocre 3D worse than mediocre 2D because it's easier to see the problems, or better because it's, well, 3D? I can't decide. There are pros and cons of both.

Experimenting like this is an attempt to find a method which saves time and has an appropriate amount of vivacity to it... but I don't know. I thought 3D might be it because once the models are made, I can pose them as I like without having to make anything new. But environments are a pain to do, and the poses and expressions can look stiff and unsettling. 2D allows for more fluid and pleasing poses and expressions, but I don't have the confidence in my skills to draw characters consistently, or well. Plus it's harder to do things like clothing variations because it means redrawing every single pose, whereas adding new clothes to a 3D model allows for the animations to be retained. So there's still a lot of uncertainty about which direction would be best for whatever I do next.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with this thing I've made, considering I've been learning as I'm going and relying on a lot of freshly-acquired skills, though it's a shame that I'm the only one who gets to see it. I wouldn't want to release it or anything - gods no - but I am planning to use it as the basis of another, similar project through which I can tell stories and express myself.

I've been working on ideas for that, writing plans and doing concept art and stuff, so I'll post about it soon!