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Phew.
P H E W.
I can't express how relieved and liberated I feel.

It took almost 14 months and 400+ hours of time investment, but I'm done. Kinda.
I actually don't think it's done (figures) and I feel like I have to redo the entire background to be fine with it, but I said that if it's not done by 15th august, I'll just have to stop.
Gotta respect my deadlines, or they won't mean anything.

It is, indeed, time to stop. In fact it's been time to stop for months now, but eh, too late to worry about that.
So, how did this happen?
1) The goal of this drawing was to be a kind of "super challenge", testing most of my skills and going against what I'm comfortable with. It sure was a challenge, I can tell you that... Since I've never drawn something as complex as this before, I had no idea how much effort this would take, and, well, let's say it was more than I expected (and I already expected it to take more than any drawing before it)
2) Detail hell. I started with a very vague idea of what the background is going to be... and by now there's almost nothing left of the the original idea. At first I tried to stay close to official Lastation bgs, but I found it restrictive, and it was difficult to come up with anything, so I started straying away from them until there wasn't much left. I heavily relied on improvisation (like I usually do) and as such kept coming up with and adding detail as time went on, so I added more detail... and more... and more... and more... and then some. I also had to redraw older parts of the background to match the new details... so yeah, that ate a lot of time. (also, because of that the background is a bit of a mess, but I tried to keep it at least somewhat coherent)
3) This drawing was started in june 2017, right when my layer usage peaked and got really out of hand, so it "inherited" my bad practices. In fact, I ran into 1000 layer limit (yes, there were that many), I couldn't create any more layers and had to merge to continue. On top of that, huge filesize made it impossible (due to RAM usage) to continue in a single project file, so I split characters and background into two files. In total, they ended up at 2 GB+. This lead to two causes of slowdown: I couldn't find what I need in that huge amount of layers and just end up creating more; and everything runs slow because there are just so many damn layers and it eats so much RAM.
4) Good old sunk cost fallacy. Spending more time on it because I already spent so much time on it. I did multiple revisions as I improved because I wanted this drawing to stay "up to date". It's like duke nukem forever in a drawing form.

So, was it worth it?
I do not think the drawing itself was worth the time I invested into it (I do hope it looks okay though), but:
1) It's directly responsible for a huge amount of improvement, and was by itself a demonstration of that improvement (thanks to revisions).
2) Due to various reasons, it solved some psychological issues I had with art, namely self-doubt. That's the most important part, because I could've probably improved more with multiple smaller drawings done in time it took to finish this, but only a big, long project would've had such a mental impact.
3) This is the kind of thing that only gets you once. I definitely don't want to spend so much time on a drawing ever again. Doesn't mean I won't draw something as complex as this again (I will), I'll just be more careful and wise with my approach.
So, overall, I think it was worth it just for the experience, if not the result.
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Anyway, this year has been so far... uh, pretty underwhelming in terms of finished works, but now pretty much all roadblocks are gone, so I'd like to catch up.
One important thing here is deadlines - I pushed myself by setting deadlines before, but found them ineffective and stressful and ultimately rejected them at the beginning of this year.
This didn't really have a large impact on how much I draw (and it gave me more time to experiment), but, as you can see, it certainly affected how much I actually finish. I only ended up finishing works that I had deadlines for - Miria's birthday, which was a deadline I could not move, and this one, for which I just decided that enough is enough.

So it seems if I want to actually finish my works, I need deadlines. But there was a major problem with how I used them: I only set the next deadline and only focused on one work at a time. This forced me to work on the same drawing even if I really didn't want to, and because of that I ended up "stretching" my work towards the deadline even if I could really finish it much earlier. And I started with a blank slate after I finished something, so it felt like an endless chase.
So, contrary to this, I'm going to set the schedule for the rest of the year at once.
I should finish 7 more drawings this year. I'm allowed to skip a deadline if I miss it, but just once (so it's either 6, 7 or I failed).
I'll display the dates on my page so that it's a bit harder to just ignore them.

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