Practice > Perfect

OR:
Vent-ish Art of Sorts
 
Fun fact before I drone on in a "woe-is-me" fashion: this was originally upside-down, the red veins meant to convey "branches and trunks" of sorts. When I looked at it again, after applying the horizontal lines, I realized they looked more like roots hanging over an underground river, so I flipped it around. Good thing I didn't sign it ;P 

It's been a rather rotten day, the sort where this is the best thing to come out of it, and it was merely practice before the main shoot. 
I'd planned to shoot three videos today. They weren't anything special, little more than, "Hey, look at these ridiculous things" plus a trailer for the ePub edition of The River of Blood going live on Smashwords, as well as possibly some reader stores like Kindle, Kobo, and Sony. However, the first ridiculous thing video this morning simply fell apart. I had one of those epiphanies best summed up as, "The Hell am I doing?" It didn't help that for all the talking points I had worked out, they didn't fit together as well as I thought once I started rolling. It's like those behind-the-scenes docs where the team is putting together a monster costume, making sketches, forming molds, shooting test footage in the lot with a camcorder, and it's all looking real good... then they get it on set and everyone realizes how utterly ROFLMAO stupid it looks. 
So, I figure, "Brush it off, I haven't made a video in a while." and write the whole thing off as practice. I decide to hold off on the second one, which is just showing off something funny about a notebook I bought (don't pretend there aren't worse things on YouTube with a thousand times the hits my whole channel gets), and double-down on the third, the trailer. It involved a lot of fairly complex editing of very tight shots of me painting the cover illustration (or rather, an approximate likeness thereof). In the meantime, it was a very frustrating day out with my roommate, whose recovery from abdominal surgery has her in a fair amount of pain; pain's she's somehow convinced (like far too many problems in her life) can be alleviated by whining about it endlessly whilst carrying on doing things to aggravate it. It didn't stop there, suffice it to say: Not a great day on that front. 
Managed to wind down after that, get a bit relaxed so I could work on the trailer video, making the practice image above to nail down a brush technique, which can be a bit hard to do with Sharpie brushes as they tend to dry out fairly easily mid-stroke. I've got some calligraphy markers from them that may fair a bit better if I make anything like this again, though the fading does have a nice effect in their own way (like my sumi-e pieces). The video frankly looked ridiculous, totally unfitting with the tone of the story, and I realized I was simply not in the mood to edit the damn thing. Like post for my drawings, editing for videos is the step I like to minimize as much as possible. If I were a Hollywood director, I'd be very much in the Kubrick vein of the long take. 
I may still resurrect the trailer later, possibly tomorrow, on the off-chance I wake up in better spirits. It's not likely, which is why I'm posting this here.