From my Homeslunk blog for those who are interested:

homeslunk:

Perhaps some of you might be interested in what the creator of March Eridan has to say about the story of the notorious ‘March Calendar Page’ that spawned him. I’ve been avoiding thinking about the whole issue for a long time but frankly I need to do this for my own personal catharsis, I need to articulate my thoughts on how it all went down and share it with the Homestuck community. I hope you find it reasonably enlightening.

The thing is, I look back on this picture now and I think it’s ugly. I do that with all my art, though. When I painted this, I would have looked at something I’d done exactly one year prior and thought ‘yuck, I didn’t know what I was doing’. All artists do this - the good ones, anyway. Because if you don’t you’ll stagnate, and you’ll never grow.

The real tragedy is that the reason I put so much effort into this picture at the expense of knocking up some undoubtably more popular ‘cartoony’ or ‘anime’ option was that one of the first artists to complete her piece for the calendar was Skeptic Archer, with her December piece. It was so incredibly stunning, so beautiful, that I felt like I had to step up to the plate and really push myself as an artist, well outside of my comfort zone and beyond my current skill level, to provide something that would be in the same league as her’s.

The Art Team spontaneously decided to create the calendar for two reasons, one, we wanted to have a bit of fun and informally create something the community could enjoy, and two, we were still experimenting with ways for the Art Team to receive money for its efforts (the musicians had a self-sufficient way of generating cash but the Art Team was more problematic and weren’t really getting paid at the time). Andrew gave it his approval and our only stipulations to ourselves were that we ought to pick a month and have at it, make something cool and have fun.

That’s just what I did and when we released it I was very pleased with myself and went off to hang out with friends.

Lo and behold, when I got back I opened a Skype chatlog that went on for quite some time written by a very concerned art team about how I was going to react to the extremely venomous and hate-filled reaction to my image. I had to re-read it to make sure I hadn’t misinterpreted, and sure enough, a quick look around proved that I was suddenly public enemy number one for creating such a horror.

I don’t really think you can possibly understand how much it bruised my ego.

It nearly put me off art for a year and it certainly nearly made me leave the Art Team and the Homestuck community. The only thing that kept me in it was that the Art Team were there for me and encouraging me, and that Andrew Hussie himself gave me some emotional support. When I told him the onslaught was really getting me down, he said “the whole thing sucks and was unwarranted”. This is the guy who made up Eridan in the first place. He liked my image. He personally thanked me for sticking with him and wanted me to continue working on the comic. Andrew really is a great guy and if it weren’t for his personal comfort just in time I wouldn’t be writing this post.

On the other hand, I can’t say I completely regret creating the picture. Do I understand why everyone hated it? Looking at it now, yes, I do. I am looking at it with a superior artist’s eyes to the one who painted it back in 2010, and I can see several rather bizarre anatomical mistakes which look very uncanny-valleyish. But do I think I deserved quite the amount of backlash I got for it? Hmmm… what do you think?

I had friends who becked thy call and even a few strangers who came to me out of the blue and told me personally that they loved the image and urged me to ignore the haters. I couldn’t, really, but the touching support in my time of need was just what the doctor ordered.

I managed to keep going and eventually I put in my red miles of Green Sun in End Of Act 5 and it felt a bit like my standing had been restored.

That, and every damn time Andrew updated the comic with a new page, I remembered why I loved Homestuck so much, and still do. Why I sent Andrew the PM in the first place, and why it meant so much to me when he first said, “this stuff is great. You’re in.”

Over time I also came to realise that quite a lot of people really loved March Eridan and that I’d started a bit of a craze. I still have a folder filled with wonderful artwork of him and people would send me pictures of cons they’d been to where some girl had perfectly cosplayed March Eridan and that really made it worth it. Something I’d created, through whatever adversity, still had a cult following. And in fact I actually contacted a few of these fans and have made some very wonderful friendships through it. Milku, I’m looking at you.

I can also honestly say I am a better artist now, and I can’t beat myself up for pushing myself beyond my limits. When you do that, you’re bound to fail.

But you’re also bound, in the long run, to improve.

Now I don’t make the same mistakes when I draw the human face, or the human body. I’ve learned. I like to think I would have learned even without the tsunami of fanrage, but in any case it was definitely a slap in the face that I have never forgotten when drawing faces. In a funny way I actually appreciate the experience for doing that to me.

To artists who are going through any small magnitude of the same thing, don’t give up. Just keep going, and promise yourself you will improve.

If I can do it, you can too. And just so you all know I will be joining in this year with some March Madness Eridan here on Tumblr.

~

Thanks for reading. <3