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Description
.... Um... Ok, how should I go about explaining this?

This was a friends suggestion... Sort of.... In a very round about way... Except not.

In class about a week and a half before school got out, I wasn't currently doing something, so one of my friends sat by me and started talking to me. We somehow got on the topic of art, and, specifically, my art. I ended up explaining to him that one of the things I did and still do to become better at art is I realize the problems of my art and strive to better it. This means telling myself that I suck at drawing and so work harder to improve even though I'm already at a fairly high skill level. I mentioned that this is why people asume I'm a pessimist when I'm actually a really big optimist. He put the term "Reverse Optimism" to it.

Then he came up with an idea for something that I could draw. Unfortunately, despite his long explanations, it was clear that he had an image in his head that only he could see and he wasn't very good at explaining it and was being really vague. The only thing I caught was that it would be titled reverse optimism and that it would have a reflection in water that was different than the thing being reflected in it. He spent so long attempting to explain it to me, that I felt bad and wanted to draw it despite my not knowing what he was talking about.

And so, I kind of had this idea of a person on a bridge looking down at her reflection and seeing angel wings in the reflection. It would be my first real attempt at drawing a reflection in water. I know perfectly well how to draw water, but not when there's a reflection in it. I discovered that it's really difficult to make reflections, and even harder to make when you don't have the thing being reflected there to tell you what exactly is being reflected (if that made any sense just now). So now, I'm sure most of you are going back to the picture now because you didn't see the angel wings in the reflection the first time you looked at it. Am I right? Some of you still might not be able to see them. Yeah... I eventually gave up and just stuck with what was already there even though it's hard to see.

Now to talk about reference pictures. Reference pictures are wonderful. Finding reference pictures is not. There are little to no good reference pictures out there. So what I had to do was model the scene in Autodesk 3Ds max. Unfortunately, this meant that there were no trees in the scene since modeling trees is hard, and it also meant that there was no person in the scene since people are even harder. So I gave up on the trees and made hills instead and I scrounged together two different reference pics for the person, one of which was a picture of Daricio that I found on facebook. I'm sick of finding 50 million reference pics now.

Oh, and I tried to draw this picture several different times before now, which is why I just now got it done despite about 3 weeks since the idea got suggested to me. I'm not actually sure why I didn't just give up on the picture while I was still ahead.

I was originally thinking of turning this into an oil painting, but I'm going to save myself the added frustration.

Long story short, this picture is filled with aggravation and frustration, and it still didn't turn out the way I wanted it, so I clearly suck at drawing and will have to improve my ways if I wish to call myself an artist. Reverse optimism.

Description
.... Um... Ok, how should I go about explaining this?

This was a friends suggestion... Sort of.... In a very round about way... Except not.

In class about a week and a half before school got out, I wasn't currently doing something, so one of my friends sat by me and started talking to me. We somehow got on the topic of art, and, specifically, my art. I ended up explaining to him that one of the things I did and still do to become better at art is I realize the problems of my art and strive to better it. This means telling myself that I suck at drawing and so work harder to improve even though I'm already at a fairly high skill level. I mentioned that this is why people asume I'm a pessimist when I'm actually a really big optimist. He put the term "Reverse Optimism" to it.

Then he came up with an idea for something that I could draw. Unfortunately, despite his long explanations, it was clear that he had an image in his head that only he could see and he wasn't very good at explaining it and was being really vague. The only thing I caught was that it would be titled reverse optimism and that it would have a reflection in water that was different than the thing being reflected in it. He spent so long attempting to explain it to me, that I felt bad and wanted to draw it despite my not knowing what he was talking about.

And so, I kind of had this idea of a person on a bridge looking down at her reflection and seeing angel wings in the reflection. It would be my first real attempt at drawing a reflection in water. I know perfectly well how to draw water, but not when there's a reflection in it. I discovered that it's really difficult to make reflections, and even harder to make when you don't have the thing being reflected there to tell you what exactly is being reflected (if that made any sense just now). So now, I'm sure most of you are going back to the picture now because you didn't see the angel wings in the reflection the first time you looked at it. Am I right? Some of you still might not be able to see them. Yeah... I eventually gave up and just stuck with what was already there even though it's hard to see.

Now to talk about reference pictures. Reference pictures are wonderful. Finding reference pictures is not. There are little to no good reference pictures out there. So what I had to do was model the scene in Autodesk 3Ds max. Unfortunately, this meant that there were no trees in the scene since modeling trees is hard, and it also meant that there was no person in the scene since people are even harder. So I gave up on the trees and made hills instead and I scrounged together two different reference pics for the person, one of which was a picture of Daricio that I found on facebook. I'm sick of finding 50 million reference pics now.

Oh, and I tried to draw this picture several different times before now, which is why I just now got it done despite about 3 weeks since the idea got suggested to me. I'm not actually sure why I didn't just give up on the picture while I was still ahead.

I was originally thinking of turning this into an oil painting, but I'm going to save myself the added frustration.

Long story short, this picture is filled with aggravation and frustration, and it still didn't turn out the way I wanted it, so I clearly suck at drawing and will have to improve my ways if I wish to call myself an artist. Reverse optimism.