Practice makes imperfect

Picture book warm-up art with orcs and paladins

Oct 08, 2024

Sometimes, when I get excited about a project, I will just dive in. I’ll have all these ideas that I want to put on the page, and I’ll completely forget that my imagination and execution skills are not fully in alignment yet.

This was what happened when I jumped into the character design work for the picture book last week and immediately became frustrated with the results. My frustration steadily evolved into a low-grade panic as I worried whether I could even do this work at the level that I was striving for in the picture book.

Thankfully, I have some experience with this kind of performance anxiety creative block, and I recognized its tell-tale signs. I needed to do some no-stakes practice on a completely unrelated subject.

I decided to go with World of Warcraft.

Digitally painted webcomic based on characters from World of Warcraft. A green-skinned female orc hunter sits at a dining table with a blue-skinned troll mage with a bright pink mohawk. The dining table is a giant crab with a table cloth and dishes perched atop it. The troll pulls back the table cloth and peers at the crab in surprise as the crab peers back. The orc seems unconcerned by the tableau and says, "And that's when I said to Rexxar, 'Forget the bear! Crabs have so much more utility...' " — My Warcraft webcomic (2013)

This is not the first time I’ve turned to the video game to help me through a creative block. I’ve been playing Warcraft on and off since around 2006. I’ve always loved the style of the game art and the way Blizzard Entertainment treats its fantasy subject matter with a lot of humour.

(Note: if you don’t get the above joke, don’t worry. It’s a very niche hunter-player joke that only players at the time might get now.)

When I first started to teach myself digital painting using my Wacom tablet in around 2013, I felt similarly frustrated with my early results. I decided to set myself the low-stakes challenge of entering Blizzard’s monthly fan art contest and was pleasantly surprised to pick up an “honourable mention” with my first effort.

I realized I needed something equally low-stakes now to let me practice without my brain immediately jumping ahead to the needs of my picture book work.

Left photo: World of Warcraft in-game character screen showing a female orc hunter dressed in her leather armour with a spiked hunting bow. Right photo: A woman in a white leotard gracefully leaping through the air and miming firing a bow.

I started by taking my favourite game character, Nymeera (an orc hunter) and combining her with a reference pose by AdorkaStock. Over the years, I’ve learned that DeviantArt is a great website to find folks creating pose reference shots, and many of them are free to use with credit.

Two sketches done in blue pencil in different states of completion. The sketches show an orc hunter gracefully leaping through the air and firing an arrow towards the viewer.

I then focused on just trying to capture the pose very rough and loose. I’m not used to working solely on the iPad—and I’m certainly not used to drawing on it on my back as I still have to do in the hospital. The lack of friction between the iPad screen and the stylus means that I have to constantly find and refine the line work. I initially thought this was a problem and would greatly add to the amount of time these drawings would take. Ultimately, the looseness of the drawing played in my favour, and I kept pushing and experimenting with how to put the lines down.

The above might look like pencil sketches, but this was all done in Photoshop using the “animator pencil” brush tool. They’re also blue because… well, this die-hard animation nerd will always love the look of blue animation pencils.

Digital painting of a green-skinned, female orc hunter gracefully leaping through the air and firing an arrow towards the viewer. She's wearing dark brown leather armor with spiked shoulder guards and a spiked hunting bow. Behind her a forest fire rages against a stormy grey-green sky. — “Nymeera”, digital painting (2024)

Since this was meant to be a practice sketch, I made use of my Adobe Stock account and digitally manipulated an AI-generated stock photo to create the background. The photo gave me a quick reference for the lighting on the character. It took much less time than I expected to paint in the colours and integrate her into the scene.

All told this digital painting took me about five hours to create, and I learned a ridiculous amount about the workflow I was going to need to create illustrations on the iPad. Considering I’d spent the previous two days throwing up my hands in frustration at my iPad efforts, I consider this a huge win.

Digital painting a bearded knight in a green cloak standing in a misty forest. The knight stands casually with a large sword resting against his shoulder. He wears silver plate armour decorated in gold and a gold spellbook on a chain at his waist. — “A Wandering Paladin” (2024)

Stefan doesn’t play World of Warcraft but suggested that I could also create an avatar for him as practice. Since he loved the King Arthur books growing up, I drew him as a paladin. I imagined him as a nomadic knight, wandering the world in search of dark spirits to slay with a book of healing spells at his waist.

I know that I tend to become creatively blocked when I get too focused on the end goal. Perfectionist anxiety is what tripped me up after I finished animation school and kept me from creating any art for so many years. My best trick now for getting unblocked is to do something completely unrelated with no stakes simply because making something—anything!—is the best way to get those creative pipes unclogged and moving.