The problems with being a pefectionist

Sometimes I wonder why I'm a perfectionist.  I mean, I don't think I can control myself with being a perfectionist, but why do I let myself do this?

The problem is, when I do something, be it sewing, drawing, animating, and it doesn't come out perfect, I feel the urge to redo it.  Even if it took so long working on the first thing, I just have to do it again.

Like my doll kimonos.  I've remade them three times and I'm working on a fourth (which reminds me,  I really should work on it...).

My old, ugly, terrible - I mean, my old drawings  :P

Recently, the thought came into my head that the illustrations in my book, The Story of ABBA For Young Readers, look terrible.  I have to admit, pre teen me wasn't the best artist in the world and I didn't know all the techniques that I know now on how to color with color pencils without leaving white spaces.

Though my drawings are cute and they give a nice, childish look to my book (because, after all, it is for children), I feel that they could be better.

Colorizing with Ribbet

So, I have made the decision that I am going to update all the illustrations in my book.  However, I'm going to do it differently because color pencils take forever and my scanner doesn't pic them up very well.

I'm going to colorize them digitally.  Originally, I used a free program called Ribbet to colorize my drawings.  Though the desired look wasn't really achieved with Ribbet, my drawings still looked nice, and Ribbet made colorizing a much simpler process.  But then they changed it so that you have to pay to get all the features that I used to use.

Colorizing with Gimp

I tried to find other ways to colorize my drawings, but because of Ribbet's simpleness, I just couldn't do it.  Gimp, however, was very easy to master, and though it is a longer process, I'm able to colorize my drawings again and, to tell you the truth, colorizing with Gimp gives a better result than Ribbet.

With Gimp, all I have to do is do a simple drawing with a mechanical pencil, scan it in, enhance it with Ribbet, download it again, then colorize it.   Since Summer's just around the corner, I think I'm going to spend it updating my book so that I feel satisfied.