There's a good chance that your art is not nearly as creative
or as influential or as unique as it could be
because your creativity has been slowly robbed by these different ideas that are
slowly planted into your head over time as you share your artwork online.
Not trust me.
I have experienced this in a huge way.
I'm trying to become a successful independent artist
from basically scratch, complete beginner and share everything with you all.
And from doing that, I have a lot of attention on me
and I get a lot of feedback on my work, and I'm starting to see that happen
to a lot of other people.
And I think it has been going on a lot and I want to warn you of it.
We're talking about same face syndrome.
That's a really common one.
Everyone's like on the same side of we're talking about
just being more diverse and adding more of this or that.
If you're not adding enough of it in your artwork,
that's something everyone supports, you know, just be try different stuff.
And then there's also my favorite.
Why don't you draw men?
You draw too many women, and sometimes some people say you draw too many men.
Things like that slowly eat away at you without you even knowing.
But the problem is, a lot of it is masked with or
it is truly coming from a more moral case.
So they have a moral agenda that they're trying to add on to you as an artist.
And my problem with that is that artists should really be free of any agenda.
I see too many people trying to impose other agendas
onto artists in a way that seems very authoritarian.
And I see too many artists not questioning whether or not
this is something that they listen to.
Intention is everything when it comes to people telling you
you should draw this or you shouldn't draw that.
So the best way to go about this is to just know who you want to be as an artist.
Know the things that you want to do.
Paint draw.
Know the places that you want to work.
Know the types of content that you want to create the story that you want to tell.
And then when you get people telling you stuff as you should or you shouldn't,
then you compare it.
Well, does this match up with what my goal is?
And if it does cool, I'll just decide to take it in stride.
But if it doesn't, you can pretty much forget it.
You don't have to do it. Nobody's forcing you to.
So why should you?
Artists are free to be whoever they want to be within reason.
Now, come on, you know, don't disrespect individuals or groups of people.
That's that's not cool.
Now, a lot of you may be saying, Well, Josh,
I don't really know exactly what type of stuff I want to do,
who I want to be , what I want to do when I grow up.
Right.
And I definitely feel you there.
It's not easy to know exactly
what type of stuff you want to make, especially when you're still learning.
And for you, the best thing to do is to ask questions.
So the first example that I have that I really like to use is same face
syndrome, and some people have accused me of this a lot,
which I think is pretty funny because I don't think I have it.
But you know, it's subjective. Art is subjective, right?
I think it's honestly a pretty good thing to recognize.
Faces are, you know, it's how we interact with each other.
We look at each other's faces, you looking at my face and it's unique.
Do you guys like my haircut?
And it tells its own story, especially as I age.
That's important.
It's very important to recognize different faces.
But when you're just labeling it as a just a thing that applies to everybody,
same face syndrome, bad, you're all your faces look the same.
You're a bad artist. You're not good.
But I'm going to counter that. I don't think so.
There's several amazing successful artists who are in the hundreds
of thousands of followers making a complete living on their own,
working with incredible collaborations that pretty much have same face
syndrome across all their work.
And I'm not going to mention them
because this is already seen as a negative to the majority of the art community.
So I don't want to be seen as like slandering them.
Those artists are independent artists who are not focused on trying
to create these diverse, vibrant worlds.
They're just doing their own thing with their own interests.
And then a lot of people
like to criticize Disney and other animation studios like that.
And the thing is, there's a lot of really good reasons to use it,
especially if you look at anime.
If you remove the hair and the clothing for a lot of anime characters,
they will look exactly the same regardless of what gender they are.
But that doesn't really matter because you're looking at their character,
right, which is going to show through their personality.
Their hairstyles are just wildly different.
The way they move is different.
Their clothing is usually extremely indicative of their personality as well.
And animators in the manga animation industry in Japan know this,
and they're also on extremely tight schedules.
And so having the same face, which is usually one of the most
difficult things to get right consistently as characters moving around
just makes sense.
And in the case of like Disney,
whether you like it or not, Disney is a big company trying to make money, right?
And one of the things you've got to do is to maximize you've got a min and max.
And so when you find a face that works, you just keep using that.
I've talked about it
at one of my videos about how to draw cute faces way earlier on in this channel.
They figured out what works.
The audience likes it, they love it.
They come to see every single Disney move.
We afterwards and then they just keep doing it right
and especially on YouTube and me being somebody in social media
and seeing how audiences work when something works.
You don't question it, you just keep doing it and you move on to the next.
If you are trying to do something out of the morality of just being unique
and different, cool, that's great.
But if you want to be supported by it or successful
in a financial way, that doesn't always work.
And that's not something to shame people for.
Now what I will say, though, is if you want to be able
to draw more different faces at the end, if you want to be a concept artist
and you can't draw different faces,
you can't draw a different nose, you can only draw one type of nose.
That's where you do
need to start to draw different faces, and people will call you out on that.
I watch a live stream on Twitch called Wild Blue Studios.
I believe that's the actual name of their studios,
and they actually critique people with that same criticism.
They're like, Oh, I remember a reason one the main host was talking about.
I can tell there's this one knows, you know, how to draw
and you draw it on all of your different characters,
so you need to get better with your structure and your anatomy.
And if you're like that, and that's the reason you're only doing the same faces.
Definitely.
That's a good reason for you to actually take that suggestion and do it.
Now the second one, right?
Why do you draw? You should draw more men.
You should draw more different genders, right?
Well, yeah, that's a good thing, right?
There's representation.
There's multiple different types of people on the planet.
There's not just women, there's not just men.
There's both, right?
And I'm saying this because this is always the criticism I get.
It's always one or the other.
And it's funny when I should start doing is saying,
why are you assuming the gender of the person I'm painting?
How dare you?
But to get to the point, I think again, it's
something that's just what an artist wants to do.
Maybe they're fascinated like me.
I'm fascinated with how streamlined and how esthetic the female figure is
and all the curves
combined with the muscular and bony landmarks and all that stuff.
I love anatomy.
But when you judge someone for doing it too much usually is coming
from a place of some other agenda that you're trying to impose on them.
But another thing to think about is where artists
for a long time, most people the average, what lifespan is around
70 plus years, right? It's probably higher.
I could spend the entire first 45 years of my life drawing
nothing but women and then suddenly start drawing men who are holding.
Blue orange is
right, I've made this analogy somewhere else, saying, like pineapples
in that could be my fixation, and that's it, right?
one of my favorite animations from Love, Death and robots is called Zema Blue.
And the guy just started painting blue.
He just he used to start with portraits,
and he started painting a specific color everywhere.
And that was his thing, and people loved it.
So why should he have to do everything else?
Well, if he's trying to be again, a concept artist, if he's trying to be
an illustrator for different things like comics and magazines, what have you?
Yeah, you're probably going to want to learn
how to draw all kinds of different body types.
But if you're just trying to and I don't see just as in like it's inferior,
but if you're just an illustrator and you just want to make your own
paintings based off of your own subject matter, then who cares?
Draw what you want.
Why do you need to draw everything else?
And you should think that way? Like, Hmm, yeah, that's a good idea.
But you know what is what I want to draw right now?
Too bad.
But again, at the same time, if you're like me
and you have a little bit of trouble drawing men,
then you should probably draw them right?
And if someone's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right.
But there are some things that I can tell you would have a much easier time
grasping about the human anatomy if you looked at it from the male figure.
Oh, OK, well, you can't refute them.
They're right.
And obviously, I'm somebody who's trying to improve their anatomy.
I've had people come to me
and say that with that example specifically, and I'm like, Damn,
you know what? You're right.
That is a very good reason to draw some men in my studies.
And so there you go.
It's completely fine to listen to these shoulds and should not.
But you don't take it with a grain of salt in that definition means
look at the intention
and then look at who you want to be and just decide from there.
And the last one I want to talk about is just adding more diversity,
and you can add diversity with all kinds of things,
but I'm going to talk more about people in general.
What I want to point out is that the most important thing
about the art community and its diversity
is that it comes from the individual artist.
It doesn't come from artists doing everything they can
to do everything that needs to be done for the world.
That's not our job.
It's not an artist's job to support a huge cause
if that's not something they're interested in
or should even be involved in based off of their experience.
Every artist job is to add beauty to the world and add diversity
by being uniquely them, being unapologetically yourself
and doing the things that only you can do with your unique experiences.
That is what adds an amazing, beautiful quality of diversity
to all of the art out there.
Try to be diverse by being you.
Don't worry too much about doing every single thing
and sharing every single thing that needs to be shared.
That's just going to make it bland and boring.
We don't need everyone to be everything.
We need you to do what you can do and to be who you are supposed to be.
Personally, I have found a huge release from letting go of a lot of these ideas.
Some of them are just like feeling like I can't draw with,
like I can't keep drawing in black and white.
I used to think I was just a bad thing.
People will say you shouldn't draw was like an airbrush all the time,
and I just found a really nice quality with my soft work,
the soft quality of my work and my fans really enjoy that on Instagram.
All of my followers always talk about that in my line.
Work used to feel bad about to drawing too much instead of painting.
People love how I draw and people love how I draw women.
I've literally they've literally said that
specifically every single thing they love how I use pink.
That's been my thing, and it's continuing to evolve,
and I'm learning to be a lot more proud of that.
And I hope that you can to as you discover who you are as an artist.
So if you've liked any of the artwork you've seen in this video
or you just want to see more of the art I've been talking about,
you should be sure to check out my Instagram page.
That's where you see most of my artwork, not in my thumbnails.
Don't be scrolling through my YouTube videos
and then talking about me as an artist by just looking at my thumbnails
getting old.
But also
check out my Patreon if you want to see really, really in-depth
breakdowns of how I create my artwork and what I'm thinking about.
And let me know if you're just interested in something that you don't see
on there as well.
I'm thinking about adding channel memberships to YouTube here.
I've asked you guys in an earlier stream whether or not
you would feel more comfortable
supporting me on the same platform versus going somewhere else like Patreon.
I'd love to hear your thoughts and what kind of content you would like for me
here on YouTube.
If I do YouTube memberships, I probably will.
Just to try it out won't hurt, right?
And yeah, check out my live streams as well.
I just did one a couple of days ago on Friday.
I'm going to try to do at least one weekly here on YouTube.
Going forward and yeah, let me know what you guys think about this video.
Let me know of you vehemently disagree if you agree what your thoughts are.
If you've noticed that there's any other ideas
that have slowly crept into your mind have been cemented.
To this fact, I'd love to know about them, because a lot of these ideas are great
and they're perfectly good
to recommend for people, but it doesn't mean that it's fat
and it isn't absolutely does not mean that everybody needs to do it.
Everyone is unique and has their own goals and aspirations and points
in their learning progress process that they should worry about.
So, yeah, not saying censorship, but just be aware.
Look at intent.
Look at yourself.
Ask yourself where you want to be and ask others
for more information and you'll be good to go.
So thank you all for watching, and I will see you all in the next one piece.
Keep drawing and stay positive.
It's the crowd of motorcyclists,
ladies drive around every single evening,
a wait for him.
Maybe this is picked up.
Maybe it isn't, I don't know.
Bah bah bah bah bah bah bah.
Motorcycles.
The bane of my existence that used to be lawnmowers and now motorcycles.