In a Bright World Like This Even I Cast a Shadow

                           If
                     the world
                glows bright the
         only way to shine is to hide
in the shadow of someone who doesnt.
If we expect everyone to be doing okay
          the only way to prove you
               are too is to find
                   someone
                     who is
                       not.
 
Finished: 25.10.2014
Tools: Paint Tool SAI + Photoshop

Just thinking about how we see everything in perspective.
What is truly enough, if one thinks a home with clean water is luxury, and other finds it hard to give up a weekly hairdresser's appointment? What is "normal" when to someone it means acting like everybody else, and to someone else it means giving up on their far-fetched dream?
Our ideas of what is good enough and what is normal are based on our observations of other people and what those observations make us believe in our heads. The more people pretend to be okay when they are not, the more they contribute to the belief that there is no weakness in them. The less we see weakness around us, the more we start to think it is not acceptable to show it, bringing us a society where happiness is a norm no one lives up to.

In a world like that our only way to prove our success is to compare it to those who don't have it.
But because we aren't what we seem, we end up comparing it to ourselves - the true us inside us.

The brightest light shines from your own shadow.

- - -

Who was it that said the poses of the birds in my artwork are always the same?
Oh that was just me.
What about that other guy who kept reminding me how lifeless my linearts were and how I was so lazy with backgrounds?
Wait, that was me too.
It must be me again who says after every finished work that I could do better than that.

I'm my own critic and I'm merciless. So, since I already moved to a new apartment and sold my parrots I thought I could try some other new things as well.
This work has been under way since February, but I have been -thorough- lazy with it from time to time. Lineart (=thoroughly cleaned up sketch in reality) is partly from spring, partly from late summer, but shading was done within the last few weeks. My summer was so busy it was hard for me to work on art, I wish I had the chance to finish more pieces.
Anyway, it's good to have this forever project out of the way. If I had worked on it more it may have been the best I was capable of, but right now I'm already looking forward and seeing the little mistakes in this one I can't fix anymore.

I swear next time I make a larger artwork it's not a bird.

Quanafyron, art ©