How To Create Better Loving Self Imperfection & Getting Good With Age

When you start a project you probably gonna bake it a lil inside your head. If you lack confidence or motivation you can procrastinate in the path of execution. The time passes. Can be a week. Can be years. You probably get educated somehow. Or a lil more smart. Gonna revise it and fix/change things. Add new bits of wise. Model it better. Or starts something fresh and exciting doing it more faster.

That's a good thing, right? Not always.

I used to hand draw. Hours drawing at the school or at my home. It was always some Anime/Game character. My mom loved because her father was a carpenter.  He used to draw stuff he creates. I never saw his drawings tho. But mom said I had similar technic as him. Shadowing with fingers. That was pretty nice to hear. Feels to be part of something.

Kenshin 2002 hand drawing

But my father was never amused. My dad is a business man. Work too much for the family. Always typing contracts. Always helping small-medium entrepreneurs to sell more, to manage better their jobs. He surely never understood this Japan thing inside of me. So I tried draw people faces. And damn! I was getting good. I was so proud of what I was achieving. But when I showed to my father the best one I've made so far. He was just: meh!

Camila Carazzato 2008 hand drawing

Never drew again. The last one was in 2008. It is hanging on my wall. It is there. With mistakes. With lack of talent. Crude. But it exists. And I love it with my soul.

I have a lot of creative friends. Some of them are not afraid to create. Even whistle to a mobile record is a tool to production. Other ones, have amazing things hided in constant polish. And as I said, we are too in constant polish. So put it out there. No fear. It is a picture of you today. Finish as it is. Start something new. Repeat. Keeping moving and PUT. IT. OUT.

When I left Advertising university, I struggled to learn Photoshop by myself. I've learned textures and was using all over the place. I never really like Advertising. But I need to help my father. So I made a curriculum: put some drawings, some textures, some colours, all contacts info of my life. There. A total chaos. And it could not be any different. I was not ready. Academy just want money and do a weak job creating professionals. We are by ourselves. But at the time I was excited about meeting the world and people feedback. So I publish it on an artists forum-like site.

There I saw a 'website design' with simplistic execution that I sympathized with. I've made a compliment to the designer. Hours later this designer answer with a link to his personal blog. I thought he was showing me some cool stuff. But there I saw my CV on a post: "How not to make a CV".

owlturd.com

Yeah. Like that. And to make things worse: he was popular. He had some followers. And every single one of them threw a tomato. Laugh. My name there. My document number. My phone. Email. All there. Exposed for trying. Exposed for complimenting a random person online.

A friend tried to sense them into doing a better job to community with constructive critics. His comments were deleted. I asked: what can I do better? The answer: "nothing. it is just ugly."

I've deleted it from the forum. And struggle to convince him to at least erase my document number on the image on his blog. My confidence for posting online was dead. And this friend gave me some books and orientation. I got educated. But never loved my photoshop works. Never.

This lack of confidence plus not loving the advertising market made me search for new things as Performing Arts to be a dubber. While increasing my notion of character development and storytelling art for Video Games. I bought some books. Got educated. My sister got married and leave the house. My parents got divorce. And Ubisoft came to Brazil - they were hiring.

So I panicked. Looked at myself - what do I got? Just a crude fellow with a cool draw in the wall. And some unfinished RPG Maker projects. Not good. The fear. The insecurity. Made me a blank fellow. I got nothing to show them. How to convince to hire me?

This fired me up again. For the first time since my hand draws. I've forgot the fear -just like that. Boom! Studied C++. To code. To be a programmer. To create a new Curriculum. Yeah, me. The guy who 'used to make a good example of how not to make a curriculum'. Fuck it!

So I've got a homebrew software to create DS Rom. Open the resulting files with Notepad. And start to custom programming as my will, exploiting the software build process (yeah, a lot of things for a newbie). RPG Maker was a good thing back there, cause editing scripts with Ruby language and creating fork conditions made my mind cool for C language. And out of blue I've managed to create an interactive Rom for Nintendo DS. How cool is that?

Put that on an SD Card. Bought a SuperCard for DS. Make a physical cover. And sent to Ubisoft. The problem? Well... this took me more than one night to do. Took me a week + graphic printing. Time enough to Ubisoft hire someone else. Sigh!

But hey. I've made a fucking Nintendo DS project! What the freaking fuck? Never programmed before. On a notepad!? haha damn.

I have the ROM yet. This thing I've made. Challenge I've surpassed. Mistakes and failures. It exists. 

Success is not achieving a job. Obtaining money. Success is to have proud of your present self. To understand your past self. And to keep moving forward. With no fear. You can achieve success alone. Nobody need to hear about it. One thing is success another one is glamour.

So calm down. And look with love for the projects you have right now. Search your room/pc for old stuff you did. Organize them. If you can, put it where you can see. Try to find the beauty in your mistakes/imperfection.

You probably have a band you knew for a long time. Love their old works and are 'ok' with modern albums. You can see the nowadays production is better. They got better. They are mature. But you loved their mistakes back there too. Even more than now. Sounded cool. Made sense. You respect their nowadays works. But what touched you was the imperfection.

This is like an energy. Crude. That resonates. Embrace it. Sometimes we hold things trying to make it better forever. Destroying evidences of who we were. Or being afraid to put it out (It is not out for x people. It is out for itself. To exists in the world). Hesitation. Like not turning a page of a book dreading the end.

That is my point. I guess. Your mistakes will make sense. To you. Even to someone else. Don't be afraid to try. To put it out there. You will get good, trust me. We always do. Time make this for us. But remember to put some breadcrumbs of your work by the path. To remember how you came there. :)


If you don't know me, I'm Henry Gosuen, indie game developer from Brazil. I am making my fourth game. I have 3 mobile games with more than 300k downloads together. And I receive tons of love in the reviews and some hate too - love them both! And I'm so glad to put this games out there because today I really feel confident with my ability. :)