 Hi, I'm Kyle and this video is brought to you by the Old Road Zeme. Today we're going to talk about how to accept critique and fix your work before you release it into the world and improve your art. This map is something I was really excited about from the beginning of the campaign. It's a map of the spheres. It's a space map. So if you ever get tired of kind of kicking around the old roads, you can immediately leap into interplanetary travel, interplanar travel, and a lot of these locations on this map are based off of public domain stories and ghost stories and folklore and things like that. And I got a little too excited about it. I got a little too invested and I just kept cramming things on to this map and it really caused some problems for me. Now at some point you may have come across the phrase killing your darlings. This phrase is attributed to writer William Faulkner and the idea here is that you want to eliminate the things that you that you love the most about your work, but cannot explain why they are important or integral to the work. And I just started cramming things in all of my favorite things. I've always wanted to draw for people on a map all of the kinds of beautiful gaming I've wanted to introduce to people. It's all here. It is the Smash Brothers of fantasy space maps and that became a big problem. I thought I had done a good job laying out where all the text was going to go and clearly presenting where everything needed to be and I thought for sure I had enough room, but I made it so detailed and so tightly packed that by the end of it you couldn't read a dang thing on this map. It doesn't really look so bad when there's no text on it, but as soon as you add the text in Photoshop, it really became clear that there was a problem. So then it becomes a question. If I feel there was a problem, what is the next step? Can I trust my judgment anymore? Where can I find help? So when I finished up everything and I got all this cool grid line work done and I scanned this and I tried to turn it color negative like a star map and it looked terrible and as soon as I started adding labels, I knew something was deeply wrong with this. This was entirely too crowded. So I reached out to a couple of friends on a couple of different Discord servers and just said like, Hey, is this too crowded? When you go to people for feedback, it's always a really good idea to have a question instead of just, hey, what do you think of this? Be mindful of how much time you're asking people to invest in this. Go in with something that you're trying to solve and then don't haggle with people. Don't tell them, well, I was going for this. Don't defend your work. All right, you have you have already called it into crisis by asking for feedback. So just accept whatever comes out. Your job as an artist looking for feedback is not to just do what everybody says to do to fix your work. It is instead to listen to people where there's where they say there is friction, where they say there is unclearity or there are problems. You have to solve it in your own way as an artist. That's that's up to you to solve that problem. But listen to other people to find out where that problem is. This is the finished map. I I should have known better that, especially when I plan to include text like I have on city maps in the past, it becomes really important to leave a lot of extra white space. So each individual thing reads as a distinct shape. So let's kind of compare and we can see what the differences were and how I interpreted critique. So the first thing that you'll probably notice is I had to cut down content on this map by about 30, 40 percent. The stuff that I felt like where it was the most obscure or the least evocative, that's what I decided to cut. And then, of course, all these wavy, hand drawn grid lines as as cool and as evocative as they were, the detail density was spoiling the readability of this map, the legibility of this map. It was just it was too much information. So by increasing the space in between that grid and making that grid on the computer itself, instead of hand drawn lines, it gives it a very separate quality and then also making sure I have this nice halo of white space around all of the words and images really helps these read as distinct elements. We did a version of this map without the grids and it just kind of looked like a stack of things that's one of the things that I always like to put grids into my maps is it helps it read immediately as a map. So shout outs to my friends, Ginger and Christopher, who who really helped me kind of iron this out and nail down how to fix this. I have to admit, when I sent this out to discord and said, is this too crowded? I really, really was hoping that everyone would say, no, it looks fine. So I didn't have to do any extra work. And internally, I was very grumpy that anything needed to be changed at all. That's just what it takes to be an artist that's part of the process. And you may as well get used to it. But I think if you follow the tips that I've given you for for taking that feedback and accepting it graciously instead of defensively and you don't have to explain yourself, you you just have to accept that your the impact of your work is communicating one thing and you want your you want the impact of your work to be communicating something different than giving a different experience. How you address the problems that are pointed out is ultimately up to you. But once the problems are pointed out, especially if there's repeats, that's then you know there's definitely a problem there. That's it for this video. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments. If you heard something nifty, leave a like. If you like these videos, maybe go ahead and subscribe. And maybe one day we'll meet on the old roads. Farewell.