Hello, everyone.
Mummy or auntie, whatever you want to call her, Bayonetta
has brought you all here today so that I could tell you
all to stop asking professional artists the wrong question.
So let's get started here.
Sorry about that.
I just finished watching Cruella, so I had to shake off the accent.
But yeah, this is what the video is about.
You read the title,
but you're like, Josh, there's no such thing as stupid questions.
What are you talking about? Everybody knows this.
And you know you're right. And do you know why that's true?
Because when there's a question asked, no matter how dumb it may be,
there's always somebody who could benefit from it. Right.
I won't lie to you guys.
Earlier this week, I researched how to boil water
because I didn't know the difference between simmering water and boiling water.
And everyone in the comments was laughing about how this video exists.
But I was one of the millions of people who clicked and actually
needed to know the difference.
So what do I mean when I say the wrong question?
Well, the thing is a question is the wrong question.
If it doesn't help you,
because that's what I want to do here today, I want to help you out.
Yes, you can ask a question that's not stupid and it could be right for someone.
But I see too many people in the art community asking questions
that are not helping them.
And a lot of times these are the same questions.
When you ask a question to someone, you should usually try to ask it
from a place of failure or an opportunity to learn.
So usually you failed at something, you've had a problem,
and then you ask a solution to that problem.
The more specific the problem, the better the question
you can ask and the better response you're going to tend to get.
And notice I said failure first, because I want everyone to start
looking at failure as simply a learning opportunity.
A lot of people say, well, that wasn't a failure or this wasn't a failure.
When they're able to look at other people and see that, oh, they learn from that,
there was value in that.
But a lot of times when we look at ourselves,
a failure is just a failure and nothing more.
But it's the same thing that we say to other people.
We should have that compassion to ourselves
where a failure is a learning opportunity, that we can go ahead
and learn from others by asking them help on how to solve a specific problem.
So I want to give you some examples here.
And the most obvious one is going to be with Kim Jong-Il.
I'm sure it's it's pretty much a meme now, but we all know about how
a lot of people have the urge to ask him, what brush do you use? Right.
And if you stop and think for a moment, how silly is it to be in the presence
of someone amazing like Kim Jong-Il himself, who can draw anything?
And you ask such a simple question like that.
Yes, it could help someone to know what brush he uses.
But is it going to help you? Probably not.
I also want to say that this happens in all kinds of different industries.
If you want to be a doctor, if you want to play basketball, football,
any type of sport, you can ask questions that are going to be really, really
generic and not help people.
Or you can ask questions that are going to be specific and tailored to you
that are going to give you an excellent response.
However, in this video, I want to focus on the things that I know
about, because, of course, I can't really give you a good example.
If you want to be a dentist
and give you an example of what a good question would be,
because I don't know the steps to becoming a dentist.
One really quick example I also want to mention is last night
I was in Ross Strauss' Stream.
Somebody asked Ross about colors.
And Ross's reaction to that was so funny.
He was like, oh, my God, this is such a loaded question.
But come on, guys. We know Ross. He's an amazing artist.
His colors are the last thing that he struggles with, right?
His colors are amazing.
But the person who asked him, how do I get good at colors
basically caused that reaction from Ross. Right.
And the reality is, a lot of times these really simple step
one questions that we ask are extremely overwhelming to the people
who have the most knowledge in that, because there's so much to do .
So what happens is they can sometimes
give you a worse answer than the person who knows less.
A lot of times they'll just give you the same quality answer.
They won't necessarily give you the greatest answer.
But sometimes, you know, there will be people who know
kind of what you're going through and they will kind of walk around.
You wanna answer
and ask you another question and help you get to that right mindset.
But a lot of times they'll just kind of give you something basic.
But imagine if the person asked,
oh, Ross, I love doing horror or moody scary paintings.
And I wonder, do you have any tips on what colors I should pick?
Oh, I guarantee you, Ross would probably be like, oh, yeah,
stay here on the color wheel. I love using these colors.
You can probably do this and look at this to study those color types.
Try not to saturate too much and do this here.
You would have a very clear thing,
because I'm sure he's painted painted plenty of scenes like that.
And imagine how much that would help you, right.
If you. I asked him that then he could go back to the drawing board,
start working on the things he said, and then run into another problem
and then continue to ask yourself or ask others how to improve.
And all of a sudden, you have a ton of experience on
not just color, but coloring specific themes in your work.
By the way, really quick here, I just wanted to stop and plug myself.
I hope you're enjoying this
painting of Ben or a drawing of being added that I'm doing.
I'm actually doing a video on my picture on where I just talk about the process
while I'm doing it.
It's part of a lot of
different types of videos
I do there, including really simple step by step tutorial.
So consider supporting me there.
You also get all my sketches and stuff as well that I do every month because I draw
a lot more than you see here, especially also on Instagram as well.
So that's a that's a plug for me.
It's for me. I'm patron, if you can.
A lot of people have told me that, you know, oh, there's a lot of value
in getting unique perspectives from different artists.
You know, it's always get good to get a well-rounded opinion.
And yes, that idea is true at its core.
But when you ask a question as simple as how do you get good
at perspective, for example, you're going to get the same five
to ten canned responses from everyone.
And at that point, there's no point in getting different perspectives.
And let's be honest for those types of questions.
If you type it out on Google, you'll find 10 to 20 videos
from different people on those topics already.
So there's, again,
not really any point in asking people when you have that rare opportunity.
Speaking of Lightbox, I saw a question asked in one of the live streams.
I'm not even going to say which livestream it was,
because I don't want this person.
Perhaps they might watch me to feel bad and think that they're being ousted,
but I'm going to call them out.
And so in one of the last films, this person said,
I've been working on my art for about a year, hasn't been going too well.
What are your tips for a complete beginner artist?
And I was shocked. You know why?
Because they said they were working on their art.
They started out a year ago.
You're not a complete beginner artist anymore, pal.
I really hope this person does get to see this.
So what happened was the person who responded,
I don't even think they actually got to ask this question,
but the responses were fairly simple and canned.
Watch tutorials.
You know, maybe stick, learn the software well.
Make sure you learn the fundamentals, things like that.
They give they just splatter all those things out that everyone says.
Right. You'll get a few different variances here and there.
But I felt so bad that that person who has been working for a year on their
art thinks that they've learned nothing and basically wants to start over
when they have a year of experience.
Even if they only made artwork every two months,
that would be six artworks that they've made
that they could have had a question to ask about how to improve those things.
They should have run into problems.
They should have had multiple failures within that year
that they could ask more
specific questions on so that they could get closer to their goal.
But instead, they felt the need to ask, well, I don't like where I'm at.
I'm a complete beginner,
and I just feel terrible that people are thinking this way.
And I really want people to know that what you want to do is ask your questions
based off of the data you gathered from your problems, from your failures.
That way, they can help you more.
Try not to ask questions that are based off of complete ignorance
or unaware ness or lack of involvement in the thing you're trying to learn.
Do something. Do the work that the last person told you to do.
Do the work from the video or the tutorial that you watched.
And do it to a point where you can at least get to where
you're stuck somewhere else and then ask a new question.
Because the art journey is a journey.
It's a series of between one to 10 to 100000 questions
and responsive or collective answers to those questions.
And that's what makes somebody really, really great and talented. Right.
It's thousands of responses to those questions that come together
to be an amazing skill set.
It's not just one question that they ask,
and they know the magnificent answer, too.
So if you keep asking the same question that a complete beginner would ask,
which is not a stupid question because everyone starts somewhere,
then you're going to stay in that spot when you need to ask one, two,
three, 10000 more questions to get to wherever you might want to go.
You see what I'm saying here?
You need to keep moving forward, no matter how small of a step it is.
Keep going forward.
Keep getting into new problems,
keep running into new issues and look for the new solution.
The way people are treating their art careers
is as if you want to go out digging for gold.
And then every night you fill those holes that you already dug.
When you dig for gold, you already know where the gold isn't.
So no matter how much you fail, you at least know that gold
isn't in that hole I dug.
But if you fill it up every night,
you're starting from the same place every single day.
Now, the real power to this is when you start to ask yourself
the right question and then you can answer in self critique .
Now, you can't do this really well in the very, very beginning, but
you can start to really use this to improve very quickly later on.
And then when you really, really need a lot of help
and you need overall general insight, you can get that from people
who are more experienced than you and make even bigger leaps .
So I hope what you
get out of this video is that I want you to keep asking questions.
This isn't to tell you that your questions are dumb
to get you to just stop asking questions.
I want you to ask questions that are the right questions for you.
Questions that are going to help you in the future, that are going to help you
now, that are going to help others after hearing you right.
I know people are still going to ask, you know, how do I learn procreate?
How do I learn digital art? The very first question.
But if you've already opened procreate, you know who you are.
The people who have gotten into art for at least six months by now,
you no longer have permission to ask those questions.
I'm telling you right now, you got to ask something more detailed.
You've got to ask something more specific. Right.
I am doing this because I love you all.
I want you all to make an incredible amount of progress and to be happy. Right.
Not even the progress. I want you to be happy with your work.
I want you to be happy with your journey.
I want you to enjoy making art. That's my goal with this channel.
And so if you do this,
I think you're going to see that things are going to be a lot more fun
and you'll start to understand what the journey of art really looks like.
So thank you all so much for watching this video.
I hope you enjoyed being in that chair.
It was a wonderful experience drawing her, and I loved it. It was great.
And I hope you enjoy the drawing as well.
And again, check out my patron if you want to see more in-depth art
focused content where I talk about exactly what I'm doing on this video
at least, and more step by.
Editorial's, does he know what YouTube will do
if I put that up here and I will see you all in the next one.
Please keep drawing and stay positive. Piece.