Advice For Artists Who Are Too Hard On Themselves

[Music] hey guys it's Adam from this pixel and welcome back now today I want to slow things down and get a little bit more personal and by personal I don't necessarily mean personal about me more personal about us as artists as professionals as humans because I find that although all humans are of course human in that sense of the word we all have thoughts and feelings and we all have good days and bad days when it comes to the mind of an artist the world inside our heads and outside of our heads can be something of a tornado sometimes and we might not even realize it's happening because it's commonplace for us it's the way we think it's the way we feel it's the way we live our lives so we tend to take for granted just how many amazingly crazy things we have to juggle emotionally mentally professionally physically sometimes there's a whole slew of things that we have to contend with and I wanted to give you some context I want to just give you an idea of the kinds of things that us artists have to juggle in our minds for starters the very career of being an artist is one that is completely unset in stone there is no one shaped artist there's no one set design for the world of art there are as many different styles of art out there there are many different professional ways of going about doing your craft as there are artists quite frankly and as artists we don't know not only people that have to juggle our knowledge of information of data but we have to train our hands physically we have to temper our emotions and use them practically we have to be able to see things that other people in the world can't see we have to be able to visualize three-dimensional form gesture we are students of humanity and science and medicine we juggle a lot furthermore there's no set guide on how to pursue things professionally what do I want to do where do I belong am i more of a sci-fi artist am i more of a realism artist am i an impressionist am i somebody who likes to make dolls at home am i somebody who works in a studio and works on professional productions is it video games is it film is it both do I work in special effects maybe I should learn 3d maybe I should stick to 2d and I'm just kind a touching off of the surface I'm just grazing the surface furthermore where do we go for guidance there's a million different places to go for guidance what kind of guidance do you need are you at a time in your life where you need a little bit of tough love and practical advice irie at a point in your life where you're all done with a technicality for a little while and you need somebody to just you just need to express you just need to explore things in a very carefree way are you somebody that expresses yourself in a very deliberate very precise very technical way or are you somebody who just creates and allows your canvas to surprise you there are a million different ways of going about your career there's a million different careers to have and there's a million different ways for you to doubt yourself and that's what I want to talk about today I want to get inside your head and I want to explore some of the doubts or many of the doubts that you might have as an artist and before I continue forward I want to make something very very clear I'm not a doctor I'm not a psychologist I hold no degrees in any of the above I'm not a philosopher I'm not a self-proclaimed soothsayer or guru I'm just Adam I'm a teacher I'm an artist I'm a dad that's what I am so understand that I'm coming from a personal place and I want to share with you some personal advice some wisdom that's been passed down to me over the ages I want to start with a scenario just to illustrate where I want to go with this imagine that you're young and you have a parent who is constantly constantly on your back about watching your temper now you're not necessarily somebody who has anger issues you're you handle your emotions as well as the next person but you have a parent that's constantly reminding you that every single time you lose your cool you might one day cross the line you might end up legitimately hurting somebody you might become a domestic abuser or a wife beater or a husband beater you could turn into some horrible monster and every single time you get even slightly peeved you have that phobia thrown back into your face day after day after day and it starts to fashion in you this belief that anger is wrong it starts to fashion in you a great insecurity that anytime you lose your cool it could be the beginning of the end for you you might end up in handcuffs so what happens to you what do you end up doing well it starts to it starts to manifest itself as an insecurity as a doubt as a fear and when you fear something those fears tend to be at their worst they show their faces the most when you're in a vulnerable place and what better a vulnerable place is there then well being really pissed off about something but because you're afraid because you're afraid of hurting somebody because you're afraid of what your temper might do to somebody else you turn that pain and you turn that hurt on yourself I don't want to hurt anybody else so I'll hurt myself instead so maybe you smashed something maybe you put your fist to fist or your foot through the wall maybe you you know scream at the top of your lungs in rage just so long as you don't touch another person and this happens every single time you get upset every single time somebody crosses you a bully picks on you somebody shoves you up with against the wall somebody picks on you or belittles you you turn that pain on yourself now imagine after all those years of that parent or that guardian or that friend or that lover filling your head with this phobia with this fear with this inevitability one day they turn around and say I made it all up you have never hurt anybody in your entire life despite everything that I've said you're the type of person who doesn't even like to kill spiders you'll pick them up and put them outside in the garden so that nobody accidentally steps on them or so the cat doesn't get to them you've never heard anybody in your entire life in fact you're the opposite you've been a protector you've always been gentle you've always been caring and you've never hurt you've never even considered hurting anybody else it's not even in your in your blood to do that imagine how that thought how that new reality would instantly transform that person's perspective on themselves furthermore imagine how much that reality would transform the way they behave because they no longer fear hurting anybody else it no longer becomes an option and next time somebody comes up to them and calls them a name or picks on them or shoves them up against the wall they push that person away they tell them they don't like it and they walk away and they don't even their heart rate doesn't even go up by a single beat everything steams cause stays calm and cool and they manage to be able to handle that problem with a lot of diplomacy and a lot of balance here's the thing I've learned here's the big lesson I learned in my life and it resonates into everything that I've ever done and it resonates into every relationship that I've ever had including with my family with my girlfriend with my children with my students with my friends people are what you accuse them of being and if they aren't what you accuse them of being they will become what you accuse them of being if you try hard enough for long enough if you call somebody stupid every single day then every single time that person screws something up or doesn't get a fact right you nail them to the wall with their with their ignorance and you tell them what morons they are how could they not know something that's such simple information everybody knows that then that person will grow up with a fear of being stupid and they'll do everything in their power to prove that the aren't or if they're more passive they will succumb to the reality that they're idiots when they never were in the first place now everything that I've done so far I've externalized I've painted this picture as somebody on the outside doing this to somebody else a force outside of yourself that is internalized and changes and manipulates your path in life for good or for bad but what I want to talk about today is that other person that other individual that other entity that is doing exactly that to you every single day of your life 24 hours a day seven days a week any guesses of course I'm talking about you there's a very good chance that you do this to yourself and what aggravates that situation what makes it worse for artists in particular is because we live in a world of such uncertainty what is our blessing is also our curse we have the blessing of being able to make ourselves adaptable in any situation because our passion our path in life requires us to know many different varying things we're not just required to be extremely good at law or extremely good at carpentry we're expected to be extremely good at a whole slew of things because as as artists we have to adapt ourselves to any situation we have to go to get into the minds of different people from different cultures and different orientations in order to be able to capture them and understand with an eye of empathy or sympathy depending on the situation and because of that we live in this world of very little solidity there's very little set in stone for an artist apart from the fact that we love what we do as such any tiny little vulnerability and vulnerability always comes from ignorance and in ignorance I mean ignorant of self that we end up being our worst trolls we end up being our worst hecklers our worst haters and because we're not directing our insecurities at other people then technically speaking we're not doing any real harm well here's my wake-up call to you you are you're doing yourself a lot of harm you are creating a script you are creating a reality out of thin air in your very gifted artistic way you are fabricating your own reality the reality of your own incompetence the reality of your own inability to keep up the competition the reality of your own technical weakness the reality of your own financial instability or your own lack of being able to make money in the first place your lack of being able to fit in your lack of having that style that people are looking for the lack of adaptability to work in different types of studios the lack of social skills to be able to snooze with the big bosses the lack of coolness that allows you to fit into those big cool studios when everybody's sitting down having lunches or group dinners with the with the studio you are utterly riddled with insecurities now of course I could be doing right now what it is I'm trying to help you get over and that is convincing you that you're something that you're not I'm not speaking literally I'm speaking hypothetically you might not possess any of these insecurities that I'm describing right now or maybe you possess every bloody one of them and you can throw another 65,000 on top of the pile I know for myself that every single insecurity that I've just mentioned are all ones that live inside me and notice I didn't speak in the past tense I speak in the present tense I feel this today I feel it right now I felt it yesterday I felt it last week and I'm probably going to feel it in two years from now but the difference between the 15 20 25 30 year-old Adam and the now almost 45 year-old Adam is I've learned how to reanalyze myself I've learned how to see myself objectively from the outside and ask myself the question have confidence and be able to ask myself the question Adam is that really who you are and then I can answer myself and say not really that's kind of silly to think that but despite all of my wisdom in my age in all of my ears which aren't that many if you think about it for decades isn't a hell of a lot of time I still catch myself every single day thinking these feelings and when you reach out to me in the comments or you email me or message me and you thank me for helping you through your own insecurities that does not mean that I have overcome them it just means that I said something out loud that you've been thinking all along and never thought of saying out loud what I'm doing by sharing these stories with you is I'm making your thoughts an actual tangible thing I'm making it a thing because unless somebody actually verbalizes it it's just a feeling and when things are just a feeling the aren't due you can't see them you can't touch them with your hands you can't move them around and analyze them from different angles they just float around in your head like a cloud and that cloud confuses you and discourages you and fills you with all these doubts and that cloud just grows bigger and bigger and bigger until somebody says hey there's a big cloud in your head and as soon as as soon as somebody says that you go oh yeah it is a thing and you pull it out of your head and you look at it and when you do that it allows you to let it go a lot of people ask me the question where do you come up with all these ideas for these art talks I come up with all these ideas to put these art talks because I'm always analyzing myself I'm always up in my own head all the time and it's amazing how many thoughts I have every single day just as many as you do I have all of these thoughts in my head and I think to myself that's something that needs to be spoken about this is something that nobody ever talks about it's for that reason that like that artists like Bobby Chu Anthony Jones Chris Utley Chris Utley uh he's fantastic when it comes to this stuff they have this ability to verbalize things that every artist deals with but never realizes of the thing and when you hear somebody like any of them or Oh Dante is another excellent example of this when they take those very intimate thoughts and they put them on a page for you boy do you appreciate them for doing that they're a darkened there's another one who does that all of these artists have the gift of being able to shine to hold up a mirror in front of your face and say hey look that's you and you go holy you're right I didn't even realize it that's why I listen to them all the time that's why I value what they say so much it's because that's exactly what they're doing and that's something that I'm trying to do with you today I'm trying to hold a mirror up to you and say hey all of those things that fleur on your head they're actual things and it's actually a part of who you are you're an artist you're creative person so you're not only good at creating things that are beautiful you're not only good at creating things that are compelling magical emotional of octave you're also really good at creating your own fictional phobias your own realities we are so good at crafting believable things out of nothing that we can do that with our own lives with such incredible precision that we end up believing it and I want to add an ingredient to these thoughts that I've mentioned in the past and that is something that was passed down to me very unexpectedly at a gym of all places from a friend of mine who's also a fellow artist 2d and 3d artist who also went to the same gym as me and we ended up getting caught up in a long conversation I've mentioned this before I'm sure I have because this is something that's very meaningful to me and his name is Xavier if you're listening and he's have yeah des is a friend of mine who we don't see each other very often but he's traveled the world quite a bit he's very an incredibly empathetic person he's incredibly fascinating he has the wisdom of a 95 year old he's like a young good-looking version of David Attenborough who's from South America and has a beard if you can picture that right and he's in very good shape too and we were sitting at we were standing at the gym and I was talking we were just shooting the about art and 3d and all that kind of stuff and at one point we went off attention talking about more personal things and I mentioned him to him the fact that I had hypothyroid I had hypothyroidism and nothing too severe nothing that was never too terribly unmanageable but something that was an ordeal for me for a little while and I went on to say at the time it's probably because I smoked for 20 years I probably did this to myself smoking for 20 years and I didn't say to myself with any level of self-hate I wasn't feeling a total I wasn't feeling shame or guilt to any great degree when I said it I was just trying to be objectively critical of myself and say yeah well yeah I paid I paid the price for being stupid and doing something irresponsible thankfully I quit years ago but and I said very nonchalantly and he stops me this is Adam and he looks at me right in the eyes and I said what and he goes what did you just do and like I said this isn't like we're not best buddies we don't hang out all the time but he got right inside my head he said what did you just do and I said what did I just do what what did I just do what are you looking at me like that yeah and he goes where are you why are you blaming yourself why are you being so hard on yourself and as well I'm not being that hard on myself and just just stating a fact and goes no Adam it's not a fact there's no reason in the world why you should be so mean to yourself and blame yourself so heavily for something that your body's going through he says is anybody in your family have hypothyroid I said yeah my mother does she goes well that's where you probably got it from it's hereditary you didn't give yourself hypothyroid by abusing yourself now even if you did even if I did that wasn't his point he said he stopped and he said something to me that has resonated in my head my entire life to this day at the gym in under floodlights he said Adam have some compassion for yourself those words hit me so hard because we never give ourselves a chance to care for ourselves we spend so much of our lives being hard on ourselves and being gentle to everybody else don't worry despite all of the despite the hurricane of thoughts and feelings that go on in our head we never stop and say you know what there's not a goddamn thing that's wrong with you stop accusing yourself of being something terrible stop accusing yourself of being incompetent of being stupid of being fat being ignorant of being ugly of not being good enough of not being cool enough stop doing that you are none of the above you are exactly what you accuse yourself of being and I spent my entire life unapologetically accusing myself of all of these different things and have yet stopped me and he said have some compassion for yourself what he did was he stopped me from being a troll to myself he stopped me from attacking myself emotionally he made me we analyzed the words that I used to describe myself to other people that I do so so easily because it's such a reality in my life when in fact it just wasn't and I started making a daily effort from that point forward of accusing myself of not being all of those terrible things I call myself and it's funny how with my students I see these students of mine who have such incredible talent and even if they're complete beginners even there's somebody who's spent their entire life being a programmer and they're getting into art I look at I look at my students and I see nothing but incredible brilliance the ability to overcome these gargantuan obstacles of the mind to be able to create art is something that we take for granted all the time and even a beginner artist when I see them accomplish something and see something with their eyes and capture something with their hands that never existed prior to that lesson it's remarkable and then in the same breath I hear that students say yeah I know it sucks I'm like dude if you knew what you accomplished if you knew you literally created new synapses in your brain that didn't exist how many people in your position how many programmers are engineers can accomplish things like this most people just do bother and that's why us artists live in such a unique lonely place it's because very often what we value as people and as professionals hold absolutely zero value and zero weight and 0 significance to a lot of other people and what I'm saying is everything that you think and feel is a real thing I feel it you feel it and your whole community all those people out there every artist that you see on art station it doesn't matter if they're from Dubai or they're from Singapore or they're from Frankfurt or they're from Wellington or they're from Montreal or they're from Vancouver or they're from Santiago it doesn't matter every bloody one of us have that commonality every one of us and you my friend my very talented beautiful compassionate wise well trained exceptional friend are all of the above and I want you to stop doubting yourself I want you to understand that art is something you're never going to completely master it's not the point what makes art great is not the fact that you get great at art it's that you get great at drawing it's that it connects you with the world around you it makes up you a professional human it makes you a professional observer of life and the one you should be observing more than anybody else in the world is yourself and when you do I recommend that you color dodge the out of the thing all right you got to do some color dodge time on yourself capisce so hopefully it didn't get too heavy today and hopefully I didn't come across as being too much of a sage type of character I don't want to do that I'm very anti culty but hopefully this comes across as being some healthy balanced advice and hopefully it gives you a chance to take some way weight off of your shoulders because I know you're probably dealing with a lot of it so with that said I love you all with all my heart and happy painting take care [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Adam Duff LUCIDPIXUL

Views: 151,467

Rating: 4.979013 out of 5

Keywords: art self improvement, art personal growth, art motivation advice, concept art motivation, illustration motivation, how to cure artist block, self improvement podcast, how to succeed at fantasy art, breath of the wild book review, god of war art book review, diablo iii art book review, dark souls art book review, art of bloodborne review, how to train your dragon art book review, horizon zero dawn art book review, incredibles 2 art book review, art depression therapy

Id: w6StfT6_a7g

Length: 28min 3sec (1683 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 02 2020