Sometimes while working on a pic there's this weird discontentment valley in the middle of it where my brain is a baby: before the picture is a certain level of done the hindbrain gets Angy that the picture looks so bad!1! except that it's not that it looks bad, it's that it's unfinished. Yeah yeah sometimes doing more work on a pic makes it look less good blah blah blah, but time and again what happens is I start working, my brain does its angy kickyfeets that IT LOOKS BAD!1! right up until I reach a certain amount of progress at which point surprised pikachu face, the pic is actually good? (The rest of me slaps my fluffy little forehead and sighs.)
Unfortunately for this one pic the angy kickyfeets are not stopping. I blocked out the shading: it's bad. I flatted the colors: it's bad. I'm beginning to suspect I don't have the skills to pull off the rest of the shading/image color balance to the tapioca tyrant's satisfaction and I will reach the finish line still being spammed with IT LOOKS BAD!1! messages, which is a shame because the composition/posing is pretty great. This pic has some good things going for it! But it's a bad sign when I finish coloring the characters and still hate looking at it.
This is twice as DEEP SIGH because the little tessellation I tossed together today was thumbs up from start to finish. So it's not Literally All Art (which would indicate some kind of overarching mood/etc problem) but this one specific picture. A picture I really want to finish sooner than later, even. But short of some kind of magic wand to render a squishy mental image into pixels, I'm not sure what will appease the tyrant!