Hello!
Last year I made a $1,000 bet with my younger cousin.
Normally when siblings make bets it's over something fun
like doing a backflip on a motorcycle or something crazy like that.
But mine was purely artistic.
So the bet was: I had to get 1,000 likes on ArtStation, within six months
for something that I'm terrible at which is 2D painting and drawing.
And to make things more interesting, if I actually succeded,
I would actually get nothing.
The deal was: if I failed I would give him $1,000
and if I succeeded I would get nothing.
So why would I do that, right? Why put myself through that?
Basically, I've always wanted to learn painting
but somehow the motivation was never there.
And then I learned about "Loss Aversion".
Which is that you're much more motivated to stick with something
when you have something to lose.
And it worked!
For the next six months, almost every single day
I was drawing, painting, going to drawing classes on weekends,
all sorts of things.
Learning to draw.
And I'm pleased to say that, with just 3 days left in the challenge,
I disappointed my cousin
by reaching the 1,000 likes on ArtStation.
Now, I don't say this to impress anyone, of course.
I say it because, while I learned a lot about drawing and painting,
I learned a lot more about how to be an effective artist.
Because, previous to this,
the way I learned Blender was the way most people learn new things.
Which is: they learn it when they have time,
they drift around, they watch tutorials, whatever.
But when you have something to lose, like $1,000,
it really throws things into question.
So what I've done is: I've distilled down the 7 biggest lessons,
the 7 biggest habits into this presentation.
And throughout it I also talk about
the habits that some of the world class professionals today use.
You'll learn what, for example, Stephen King, Pixar
and even Kanye West have in common.
So, you guys interested?
Alright, good, yay!
The first habit is deceptively simple:
Daily work.
You need to be working on your task, your artwork,
whatever creative goal you have, every single day.
Now, you think of this and think "Why every single day?",
"Why can't I just do it when I have time?"
"If I worked 1 hour monday to friday by the weekend that's just 5 hours.
Why can't I just do 5 hours on saturday or sunday?"
Well, the thing is that these large blocks of time
that we imagine, they very rarely ever pan out.
And this is why most great artists across history
achieve whatever it is that they do, writing books, music, whatever it is,
by putting in time every single day.
So, for example, J.K. Rowling wrote the world of Hogwarts,
Harry Potter, across 5 years. And she did that whilst raising a child.
And instead of waiting for these big, grand moments where she'd have free time
on a weekend far away when she could block it off with the childs
and the babysitter, she worked on it every spare chance she had, every single day.
Jerry Seinfeld wrote the Seinfeld series by putting an X on the count of
every single day that he wrote jokes. And then, after he had
a couple of days in a row, his next goal was to just not break that chain.
Mike Birbiglia, another comedian and a screenwriter,
found that he was putting off writing his movie scripts
because he had too many meetings with other people.
So, instead, he did something interesting which was to make himself a meeting
with his script. Everyday at the cafe. To sit down for 2 hours at a laptop
and type away. He found, by doing that,
he wouldn't put it off.
And personally, from a first-hand experience, I can speak on daily work
in that it sounds simple. Who wouldn't want to work every single day?
Everybody would want to do it. Why don't people do it?
And the thing is: after you've worked the whole day at the office,
listening to your boss ramble about stuff, you come home, you're tired,
the last thing you want to do is punish yourself by learning something new.
Instead, you end up on Netflix, Reddit, videogames, whatever it is.
So one thing that I found worked for me was to agree to do the smallest amount
of work possible. So, in my case it was to put the pencil on a paper
and draw one line.
So in days when I felt like "I can't do anything, I don't wanna do anything."
"I've had such a tough day I just wanna sit and relax"
I'd say "Alright, can I do one line?" So I go "I can do one line."
The thing is, by the time you clear the table, get the notebook out,
you get all your pencils ready, you get the sharpener, the eraser,
you get the chair, the lighting, you sit down.
By the time you do all that, of course you don't stop at one line.
Before you know it, you've done a couple of hours.
And you've just lost track of time.
So that "getting started" is often the hardest part about it.
Once you can do that, it's always fine.
That's what worked for me. Obviously it's a much bigger topic, "Motivation",
there's a bunch of books on it if you're interested.
Daily Work! It always trumps short sprints.
The world "trump" looks funny now, doesn't it?
It's like it changed its meaning.
Number 2: Volume, not perfection.
Honestly speaking, who here would consider himselves a bit of a perfectionist
when it comes to their artwork? Show of hands.
Most people, right?
Most artists have this affliction. And a lot of artists would actually
consider one of their strengths. To be a perfectionist.
Now, while you should be striving for a high standard of excellence
and for bettering the work that you did last,
being a perfectionist actually undermines your growth.
Because it prevents you from reaching the next epiphany
the next lesson.
Ira Glass, from the famous "This American Life" radio show
said it best by saying that the most important thing you can do
is a lot of work. It's only by going through a volume of work
that you're gonna close the gap.
I want to give a more well-known example. Think of Picasso.
Most people can really only pinpoint sort of a handful of his work.
So they go like "Yeah, that's Picasso, we know that."
But actually his library of work includes 800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures,
2,800 ceramics, 12,000 drawings, and this isn't including prints, rugs
or tapestries.
So Picasso has a huge volume of work, and most of us can really only pinpoint
the hits, the big ones that really went on to success.
So he has this huge volume of work. And if you're wondering
if the volume of work had anything to do with the success,
researches say that it did. They did a study on 15,000
musical compositions from Beethoven, Mozart, things like that,
and they found that the more compositions that a composer produced
in a 5 year period, the greater spike in the odds that they actually created a hit.
So, volume is very important.
Speaking from a personal standpoint, I found that when I was creating these
2D works, the perfectionism stage - that last little bit where you've done
most of the work, but is tweaking it, zooming in really closelly, and getting
the fine details in the shadows and the lightning, all that kind of stuff -
it eats up a lot of time. An interesting thing is that
you don't actually learn a lot in that last bit.
The majority of the learning comes in the stuff before it.
When you're putting down the big shapes, getting the anatomy of the face...
All that stuff. That's the stuff that you learn the most from.
The stuff at the end, that's easy. It's putting reference next to the thing,
zooming in closely, and just painting over it.
And that's the stuff that eats up a lot of time.
My point is that if you're a perfectionist, you're not able to
get to the next lesson, to get to the next big epiphany.
Volume, not perfection. Get on with your next work.
That's number two.
Number three: Steal.
Right.
It's common to look at the work of our idols and just assume that they
were born to do whatever it is they do. That Rembrandt,
first time he started painting, he just had this idea for how to
paint light and shadow. Or that Quentin Tarantino was born to
make these fun, interesting stories.
But that's not how the human brain works.
It's always built upon the ideas before it.
Our idols, the stuff that we look at and go like "They're such an original!
how do they do this thing?" They built upon stuff from their idols,
stuff that they loved.
And this is why, if you look across history, you'll find that
most great artists recommend stealing.
David Bowie says "The only art I'll ever study is stuff that I can steal from."
Steve Jobs openly admitted in an interview that they are shameless about stealing
their great ideas."
And you've got Banksy stealing the stealing quote from Pablo Picasso.
Quote: "The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal."
Love that one.
So if you're curious, "Why are all those people suggesting stealing?"
Stealing is immoral. That's what we grew up with. That's wrong.
Well, there's a difference between good theft and bad theft.
And this is outlined in the book "Steal like an artist".
There's a list there, but the one that really stands out to me,
the most important one is third from the top:
Stealing from many versus stealing from one person.
Steal from one person and that's called plagiarism.
Steal from many, people can't tell.
Or, as Gary Panter put it best, "If you have one person
you're influenced by, everyone will say you're the next whoever.
But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you're so original!"
So one thing I would recommend is: find your idols. Find things that
you truly love right now. And this is very easy to do with the internet
world today. You can just go on ArtStation and find stuff you love.
So this is what I did: at the start of my challenge, I started an evernote file
I and just went to ArtStation and I just copy-pasted
the stuff that I love and put it into one file.
Don't overthink it, don't over discriminate.
I didn't even quote the authors. I don't know who some of those people
even are. I just copied and pasted it. And this worked as both reference
and inspiration in the future. So when I was making a face
and something wasn't right about the eyes, I just opened this up, went to all these
different ones, and I'm like "Oh, that's how they did that,
that's how they did that."
And then on really dark days, when I really wasn't motivated to work,
this also works as inspiration. Because opening it up reminds you
why you got started. Stuff that you love, truly.
Not thinking about traditional painters or anything like that.
Stuff that you truly love.
That's "Steal". Find your idols and steal from them.
#4 Conscious Learning. So, show of hands,
who has heard that "practice makes perfect."
Most people! The other one of course
is "if you want to get good at something, if you want to
master something, you need 10,000 hours of practice", right?
Well, I used to think this was the case. And this was the advice that I gave
to people in my podcast or my tutorials. If someone emails and says:
"I want to get good at Blender", I say "You gotta practice!"
"Practice, practice, practice..."
But that's not all that is.
Because the human brain is wired to avoid pain.
So practice can actually, if you're not carefull about it,
it can become a source of procrastination.
We tend to think of practice like this: The more time I put in,
The greater the results will be and it'll be a linear graph.
But really it sort of becomes a little bit like this:
You get a little bit of growth at the start,
but after that you can sort of stagnate, with just pure practice.
Before I started my challenge I just e-mailed some people that I liked
and I was like "Hey, can I ask you a couple of questions about painting?"
And one of them was the artist Efflam Mercier. I love his work.
And he said something I never heard of before, which was that
One of the biggest wastes of time is not being conscious of what you're doing.
Or, in other words, "doodling around".
And it really didn't ocurr to me, until later on, what he actually meant.
One thing I like to do, by myself when I'm working at home.
Just on the computer. It's very lonely work what I do.
I don't talk with a lot of people. And so, at the end of the day,
sometimes what I like to do is I just like to hear people talk.
So I put on my headphones and I listen to podcasts.
Bill Burr or Your Mom's House Podcast... A lot of comedian talk.
And it's relaxing to me. So what I do is: I open up a notepad,
I put on the earbuds, and I listen to podcasts and I would just... sketch.
Not really a goal in mind, but I would just sketch.
And what I was doing was not good. It was really quite horrible actually.
Some of them don't even look like people.
But I thought, you know, the age old mantra:
"Practice makes perfect." If I just keep at it, I'll get better.
But I look through the previous work, I flip through the pages,
and I notice that from a couple of weeks ago
there wasn't any difference between them.
I wasn't getting better over time. They were sort of about the same.
And I thought "I'm putting in more and more hours here,
but I'm not learning." So I thought "Okay, I've got to go back
and I gotta learn something."
I actually hate watching some tutorials.
Some tutorials, especially drawing theory videos
can be incredibly dry stuff.
My wife took this photo of me when I was watching a facial anatomy course.
One of the most boring courses I ever sat through.
But I did this, and I hated it. At the end of the day I don't want to
challenge myself. And I'm sure you can relate to it. After you've done
a hard day, if you're gonna sit down with Blender, sometimes you just want to
do what you know, right?
And I hated doing this stuff. But in this process I learned,
I discovered that I completely misremembered several facial measurements.
I was drawing faces that were totally wrong.
And they never would've gotten better unless I learned this.
After I completed this, my faces improved almost immediately.
Just like that. Because I stopped to relearn. Had I continued
just praticing, "practice makes perfect", It wouldn't have got better.
So, really, this graph looks a bit better like this.
When you include conscious learning in it, you go up a step.
Your areas really improve at greater amounts than if you were just
doing practice alone. Practice is important, don't get me wrong.
But practice alone makes perfect? I don't agree with it.
It's conscious learning! It's not always fun, but it's the fastest way to grow.
Rest!
Who here has had an experience where maybe you're working on a scene in Blender
and then you're just stuck. You hit a brick wall.
You don't really know what's going on and you're stressed out.
Who's had that experience before?
Oh, yeah, lots! Okay, that's good to see! Not alone there.
I have this a lot. And you've probably had this experience as well.
That maybe you walk away and start doing the dishes,
and then suddenly you come up with the solution. It's weird.
Maybe you're in the shower. You're somewhere and you just go
like "Oh yeah, I could put the lightning on the other side,
I could change the color of the shirt, that will match the thing!"
And you just think of this thing when you're removed from the work.
This is actually a strategy that most professional artists use.
For example, Stephen King, he reckons
What would he know?
Stephen King, he says that any novel, regardless of its size
shouldn't take longer than three months to complete the first draft.
But then, after the three months, you should stop work
and not look at it for six weeks. Six weeks, do something else,
go on a holiday or start another book. Do something else. Then after that,
when you come back to it, it's like you're reading somebody else's work.
You see it from a completely different perspective. One that you would
never have gotten had you just sat there and just continued to type away.
From a personal experience, I drew this Rey from Star Wars over a couple of nights
and I didn't really know where to go with it. I was like
"Hmm, black and white. Traditional, got a black background, whatever."
I didn't really know where to go from there. So I took a 3 day break.
I went and I just started some other drawings and did some other stuff.
Then after 3 days I came back to it. And I remember feeling
completely detached from it. In a good way.
In that I could work on it like I wasn't "in it" anymore.
Like I could experiment with it. So I remember seeing a brush
that I'd never seen before in Photoshop, and I just drew over the top of it.
And I was like "Oooh, that was kind of interesting."
And then within about fifteen minutes I had this interesting effect.
This sort of "force", kind of a weird aura about it.
And I never would've gotten there had I continued to work beyond those 2 days.
That break, that rest period, gave me a period where I felt detached from it.
Having this rest period is very important.
It's also what we actually do now at Blender Guru as a strategy.
So if we got 3 artworks we want to create, for like a trailer,
like "Grass Essentials" trailer, or something. Instead of doing
all 3 of them. Like: we complete one to completion, then start the next one
and then the next one to completion, then start the next one. We do all 3 of them
simultaneously. We work on this one for 1 day, this one for the next day,
this one for the next day... Then loop back.
And every time you loop back to it, and you repeat the cycle, and go
through it one by one again, you see things that
you never would have seen before. And I'm sure you can all
relate to this feeling, So that's Rest.
Take a break, and see your work with fresh eyes.
#6 is Feedback.
We sort of imagine, when we think of "original thinkers", great artists
across history, that they were originals, so they had to
thumb their nose to the critics, the naysayers, the people that said
"Oh, that's not good, you shouldn't do that." And they had to just do
because they knew what they were doing was the right thing.
But if you actually look at professional artists and you listen to interviews
or biographies, you find that the exact opposite is true.
They seek feedback more than anyone.
And that's the one thing I found true looking across musicians, writers,
anything like that. They all seek incredible amounts of feedback.
So, for example, Pixar, they have a room called the "Brain Trust", which is that
when you walk in the room, your role is removed and you are free to
speak your mind. You could be a junior artist at Day 1, and you could
sit down and you could say "This movie sucks!"
Sitting next to you could be the CEO of Disney.
And you both have equal say and you're not gonna get fired.
You're not gonna get any repercussions. It's a free process
to speak your mind. And this, Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar,
says is one of the most crucial parts to their success.
Because their early movie suck. And he went on to great lenghts
to remind people how bad the first versions of their movies are.
He said they are not these great masterpieces that they just come out
from day one and just make it. It's through a process of
iteration and feedback. They change the movie to be totally different
from what they've started with. That's the only way that it gets there.
And in terms of people seeking feedback, the one person you would imagine that
would be least inclined, maybe, to seek feedback, would be this guy.
Guy that's sort of sure of where he's going. Kanye West.
If you look at his most popular, most celebrated album,
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, this album was unanimously loved
by critics. Some people say it's the best hip-hop album of the last decade.
Or decades, or of our generation. Just unanimously loved by all critics.
This was the work of several artists. I actually had a look, there was 38
artists and producers that contributed to the album. He actually rented
a studio in Hawaii and then flew in his favorite artists. People like Jay-Z,
Rihanna, Drake, a bunch of people to come and both contribute to the album
but also critique it. Pusha T mentioned in an interview the process for it.
Which was that he would basically take people in a room and say
"What do you think of this?" And he was sincerely interested
in what they had to say. And when you compare this with Pixar
it sounds a very similar process. No one is going to be persecuted,
it's true honest feedback. And that's what can contribute to the success.
To give a 3D example, this is sort of a 3D conference,
Gnomon School. Who knows Gnomon? You guys heard of Gnomon?
They are the #1 CG school in the world. I think they have a 97% placement rate.
And I think the second school underneath that is like 50%.
Crazy, they're doing some amazing stuff there. And I actually came
to Australia, to Melbourne, and they had a weekend event. And I went there
and I was talking with Alex Álvarez, who is the founder. He was saying that
although all students there have a high standard of excellence
in every classroom there's about 1 or 2 people that are the rockstars.
That will go on to huge amounts of success and have no problem
finding work in the future. And so I asked him
"What separates the rockstars from all the other students?"
And without missing a beat he said: "They seek criticism, and
they actually listen to it." He didn't mention composition,
lighting, storytelling, any of that stuff. It was the sole thing that actually
separates the rockstars from the rest of the pack.
Very interesting. And from a personal standpoint I can vouch and say that
I had this work here, wasn't happy with it. I posted on Twitter,
and I got a bit of feedback, but I wasn't really sure where to go with it.
I was actually at the Gnomon event, and there was Dylan Ekren, who is a
character artist from Disney. And I came up to him and I'm like "Hey,
can I show you some work? You know, bust my balls telling
what you think of it?" And he said "Sure!"
I took out my iPhone, and straight away he pointed at it
and goes "You got two different sources of lighting" it's very odd, back-lit
and front-lit, doesn't match. "And also you got two different styles.
You've got a cartoony style face and then you've got some realistic hair.
You have to match them up." Interesting.
Straight away, I knew exactly what he meant. And it only took like a minute
but it saved me hours of work. I worked on this and it improved a lot.
I hope to say it improved a bit. So that's "Get Feedback".
It's worth its weight in gold.
#7 is to create what you love. I personally think that motivation is a
hugely overlooked area of art. We tend to imagine that the great artists
you could give them any topic and they could make it great.
That's what we sort of imagine. But really if you look at the work
that the great artists and musicians of today are making, it's stuff that
they are personally interested in.
Christopher Nolan, he makes movies about things that he is really interested in.
About the state of mind and being trapped in things and sci-fi sort of elements.
He is really interested in this stuff. And he builds these stories and these
worlds that have a depth that you often don't find in some similar movies.
Elon Musk! He's not an artist, but somewhat successful.
His 3 companies, SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, he created these companies because
he has an interest in humanity and seeing it succeed.
So this is a personal, intrinsic motivation. And it's stuff that he's
interested in. I'm sure if he started a bakery, I'm sure it would suck.
He's not a genius... Well, he's a genius. But the Midas touch, that myth thing
I think it's really themes that a particular artist is interested in.
To give a more artistic example, Brian Eno, he's a great artist,
make this ambient music, he said he got into it because he was
interested in listening to music that he wanted to hear. And that
really shows through his music.
And from a personal story, I remember when I was doing some drawings,
I was posting them up on Twitter and Facebook. These little sketches
and things. And pretty soon, after a couple of months, people said
"So you're only going to draw cute girls?" And I was like "Oh", it affected me.
I'm like "Oh, no, I'm gonna become one of those guys who
just draws cute girls." And this was family members telling me.
People online, people on Instagram, "Why you just draw girls?"
And I was like "I gotta balance it out, I gotta start drawing some dudes."
So I started drawing some guys. It just didn't work!
My heart wasn't in it. Hector Salamanca, I love this series.
But I just wasn't interested in it. And the effort required to
make something look good... You need that intrinsic motivation.
My heart just wasn't in it. And I remember there was a...
It was around the time that Myth Busters was hitting their decade of being on air
or something like that. And I don't really watch Myth Busters.
I know it's a cool show and "Science!" all that stuff. But I wasn't into it.
But I thought all the people would like it if I probably drew a nice picture of
the two guys on it.
Didn't really work. And I get, my heart wasn't in it.
It's a great show, but I just don't watch it.
After a while of having these failed attempts,
I was eating time - I've got 6 months to achieve this thing,
I was wasting time, and then I had this epiphany:
Who gives a shit what people think? Who cares?
And so I went back and I started doing the stuff that I really loved.
Honestly, I find girls to be a lot more of an attractive subject than most guys.
That is what I think! And there's enough red tape in life. The government telling
you what you can do. Your boss telling what you can work on.
Art is one of the few fields where you get to do what you truly are interested in.
And so I personally think that when you start letting other people
interfere and tell you what you should and shouldn't do, I think it's a big mistake.
So, create what you love. You'll make better work - honestly you will - and
you will stay motivated in the long run.
That's the summary! Daily work, putting work every single day.
Focus on habit building, very important. Don't be a perfectionist, although
you think it's a good thing, it's generally not.
Find your idols, steal from them. Conscious learning, although it
kind of sucks, you do need to go through and find what your weaknesses are
and attack them. Have a break, that's often better than just working through it.
Get feedback from everybody. It's not a good thing to be putting your
head in the sand and going through it. And then, finally, create what you love.
Thank you!