All in Good Time (if Polly doesn't get Too Tired)

Everything that is good does not only take time, it takes too much time. I believe that the entire value of something is decided by how much Too Much Time it took (not mentioning the eternal values created by exceeding a budget with the loudest bang possible). Nevertheless, illustration is a craft that demands Speed, and thus the Illustrator has been experimenting with more pencil+digital lately, as in this late 18:th Century dress. (Resized detail from a perpetual book project; I think that I've mentioned it; good mainly for trying out this kind of stuff.) In theory, you find the pencil dancing hurriedly over the paper, immediately followed by scanning, Swosh!, and guaranteedly smudgeless yet quick sploshes of digital paint. But if you want it to splosh nicely...

...you have to spend quite some time with it anyway; letting the highlight play its part, allowing the shadows to form the dress into nice flows and creases.

The same goes for the equally perpetual oil painting that I've spent some time with now; scales and all. I believe that I could finish it off fairly quickly, but I'm told it's no hurry, and I believe that the time between painting the details makes the details better. (I think this concept is called Ma in Japanese.)

You can see that the underpainting of green, black and white is shaped into scales with light overpainting, wet on wet. Oily, all but smudgeless. (There is also a pagoda or something in being.)

This is not to say that everything that you spend Too Much Time with automatically becomes valuable. You might, for instance, spend Too Much of the oily ma-time doing Cold Calling -- the bane of every freelancer -- and too much writing about it instead of merely doodling this feeling; something like this:

And now Polly is very tired. (Polly is thus drawn in very sloppy Digital.) See you in February.