Advice for beginner artists today

there are some things that you can do that will drastically impact how fast you learn and how effective you are while you're learning hello and welcome to the while you Renda youtube segment that's what I decided to call this thing thank you for everyone who suggested names I really liked while you render because it's the sort of sort of thing you would watch are you bored waiting for something to render so today's question comes from a fella called CTM podcast great name what piece of advice that you know now would you like to have known when you got started with blender good question sir now the advice that I would give actually has nothing or very little to do with actually blender it's more to do with how you approach learning and it's something that most people don't even realize is important and I certainly didn't when I got started so to tell you my story if you haven't heard it already I know I've said it like a parrot many times but I got started learning blender when I was in high school I think I was 15 at the time I'm now 28 and I really like the game Need for Speed and I was playing it one night and I was watching the little car on the turntable and I was like oh man I really want to make my own 3d car so I went online and I found an image that someone had made using this software called blender so I thought if they can do it I can do it so I'm gonna learn that software until I can make that car but the way that I actually approached learning was really bad really blase just all over the shop like spontaneous like a kid walking through a store like oh that looks interesting ooh that looks interesting and as a result I sort of just that goal was just put off put off put off put off making the car because I was just like oh I'll do this tutorial that tutorial I didn't really know what I was doing and I just jumped around all over the shop and I would give up like I would hit this this roadblock and I'd be like oh that project failed I couldn't finish it because I didn't know how to do the lines around the grenade or whatever it was that I was making and I just felt like this demotivation right so I've since loans now over the last few years and particularly there are some things that you can do that will drastically impact how fast you learn and how effective you are while you're learning so I'm gonna outline some of them in this video some of them you might have already heard if you've watched my presentation the seven Habits of Highly Effective artists if you haven't you can watch that after this but this video will sort of give like a bit of an outline a few other things in this video so let's get to it first thing is is that you need to have a clearly defined goal for what it is that you want to learn okay so you say you want to learn blender specifically what do you want to learn in blender because there's a thousand things that you could do there are people making architecture they're making cars they're making scientific visualizations this character animation character design rigging animation yadda yadda you could just the list goes on forever right so the reason that that's a problem if you don't have a clearly defined goal is that like I mention at the start you will just be jumping from everywhere and you'll just be in constant reactive mode you'll see on Facebook like someone posted a tutorial on making marbles you're like oh that looks cool on this one oh that looks cool and you just jump all over the shot and you'll you'll also feel a little bit sad inside because you'll feel like that goal of whatever it is that you truly love is being put off and it's like you you'll feel like oh man I've been working you know for like three years on blender and I still haven't achieved what I'm gonna do and I can't do that cuz I don't know how to do it it's so sad right whereas if you had a clear goal and you said right I really like post-apocalyptic environments right I just want to be the guy that just makes post-apocalyptic environments right that now you know specifically what it is you go you know that you can ignore all the tutorials on characters animals maybe and you want to be focusing on like nature and city design or something like that that that's your focus so now you know when you see a tutorial on character rigging you can ignore that you can just focus on what it is that you want to do it's actually a quote i'll read here by Tim Ferriss from the book 4-hour chef which is a great book for learning if you want to if you want to know the easiest way to avoid being overwhelmed is to create positive constraints put up walls that dramatically restrict whatever it is that you're trying to do so constraints remember that having these clearly defined goal is going to give you that constraint to help you get towards it so number two deikun Strasse deconstruct the process that you're going to follow to get towards your goal so I highly recommend spending at the very start like once you've figured out your goal deconstruct that goal and figure out how you're going to get there so the way I I recommend doing this is go online find some artists that that you admire that are achieving the work that you want so the post-apocalyptic environment guy you'd find somebody who's who's done some really nice pieces figure out what how they learned maybe they've said in a blog somewhere or an article the specific things that that really helped them a lot of artists have have done interviews like that or maybe they just follow specific people you can follow those people and figure out what influenced them how they got it and just you you learn through like researching this stuff and just going through all that all that stuff that there are there are what you call it there are similarities between them like there are a few things that like this like this one book that all artists recommend and they all say you got to read this book this book is amazing all they say you know there's these three core areas that most people gloss over and they just completely ignore it so now you know you've got to do that and so then just basically start putting it in the right order that you you should be learning it so maybe if you're completely new to 3ds cover the basics then it's you know get get good at hard surface modeling if you're the the post-apocalyptic environment guy don't know why pick that topic it's such a long one to say but you figure out the the exact process and the priority that you use for for the work number three is have an established routine okay so this is one of the most important things and it's one thing it's the thing that most artists don't do it's having a clearly defined routine defined plan for when you're actually gonna do the work and you need to be working on it every single day now I know what you think anything oh okay well I I have I have work I have a job or I have school during the day so I can't work on this yeah I have work as well everybody's got work your job is to figure out how you can fit this this this new goal you've got into that day and the reason that it's important to do it every single day is that you probably are planning or imagining that there'll be one weekend where you've got all this free time right the wife will have the kids there won't be a distraction or you won't have any assignments or schoolwork to work on and you just be able to focus on just that thing but those large blocks of time that twenty forty eight hour period or whatever it is they very rarely ever plan out and even when they do were often not prepared for it and we fill it up with other stuff well like woohoo look no one's at home I'm just gonna go do overwatch for five hours or whatever right so that they very rarely ever pan out and so you want to be putting in the shortest amount of time like JK Rowling's she wrote the Harry Potter series while she had while she was raising her first child I believe and just using whatever time she had like ten minutes here ten minutes there to just put in the work every single day so don't don't put it off on wait for that big block of time because never gonna happen and what happened right you need to be doing the daily work there's a great quote it's in my presentation but it's that daily work will always beat the spasmodic Hercules so yeah forget the guy the two friends that stayed up for 48 hours and made a video game that's a really fun story and we like hearing that stuff but the vast vast majority of great artists across history got to where they were by doing daily work so focus on that number four have a release schedule so this is one that I have recommended to many artists over the years and this is to have a clearly defined frequency that you're going to be publishing out work to and sticking to it so say announced that you are going to be finishing one piece of artwork every week or every fortnight or whatever it is but you need to have that upfront that frequency figured out and you need to stick to it now the reason that this is so important is as per Parkinson's law that a task will swell in complexity to fill the time that you a lot to it right so if you say all right I'm gonna take three months to finish this portrait this character right three months or you say I'm gonna finish this this character in one week at the end of it you're still gonna have a finished character okay if you had to get it done you would get it done right and yes some might they might be a little bit different okay but they're still you would have spent the whole time you you would have spent the the time that you had allotted for that tasks like if you gave a classroom like a month to finish a diorama they wouldn't finish it on day two and go like oh we finished now what do we do they drag it out and that's just human nature that's just it's what we do so I see I see this a lot and it's really it's sad to see but a lot of beginners they are spending way too long on artwork that they need to just move on from like they're people I follow on Twitter and they're still posting this same I work again and again and again like like works in progress and they've been doing it for like four or five months and it's like something basic like a candle on a table and they're getting advice from people what can I do to fix it how can I can I make this better and some how can I add a texture that's like yeah what you need to do is move on you need to get to your next piece of artwork okay because and this is why this is important right the perfectionist state like if this is the length of work like this is the beginning of your artwork and then this is the end the perfectionist stage it takes up a huge chunk of time like probably about half of it if you're a real perfectionist like you spend a lot of time just tweaking settings and changing the camera slightly all that stuff takes up a huge amount of time but the learning the real learning actually gets done in that first bit okay so you want to be trying to you want to try to do that first bit a lot so that is why I recommend having a having this release schedule so that you get on with the next piece and you you you call it quits like you've got to know you gotta kill your darlings you've got to publish it you've got to abandon the artwork you have to know when to finish it for the love of Pete just put it out you know so if you could spend and so this is the other thing don't go too short of a time frame like some artists they try and do a daily artwork like there's a bit of a trend at the moment I think that'd be full guy he's one of them he's is all right that his is sort of abstract it's a little bit faster to produce but I think most of it started from like sketches like daily sketches and that's okay for 2d because you can do a sketch in a day in a few hours it's it's not that hard but 3d there's a lot more involved in it and if you are trying to pump out too fast you were gonna rush over things and you're gonna start forming some really bad habits so you need to make sure that you you've got a a frequency but it's not too short I don't like the daily one I think it's it's a mistake what I recommend a week I think a week is really good so give that a shot please let me know how you go number five practice alone does not make perfect you need to be actively pushing yourself into your areas of weakness so humans are very good at avoiding pain we just do it naturally if there is two different things you know that there's two routes to work we'll go for the one that has the flat bit at the start because that's easy to walk on rather than the the hill at the start you know we just naturally do this and so and it's also the reason why so many of us find it difficult to sit down at the computer and actually work on blender because there's a bit of pain with that there's a bit of resistance but even when you're doing work in blender you can often also fall into the habit of starting things that you already know that you can do so if you've already done one interior right you know how to do that doing another interior isn't necessarily going to help you as much as sculpting a character okay if you wanted to become a full rounded artist if you're an architectural eyes and that's your focus go for it that's a really good idea but but if if you wanted to do characters but you've sort of been putting it off you know like it's difficult but yeah you got to go straight towards what is giving you the pain so attack those weaknesses yeah there's that this old phrase you know practice makes perfect or you've got a there's there's 10,000 hours required before you master something I think like that's largely BS because I see a lot of people that have been like I've seen some people that have been using blender for like 13 years and there are people that have been using blender for like two or three and they're already better than them so clearly time is not the only factor that it's what you're actually focusing on so if you are actively pushing towards what gives you pain and getting into the nitty-gritty stuff the stuff that you really hate because it's so difficult you don't understand it especially that is how you're rapidly gonna grow so that's how you can increase your effectiveness and efficiency of learning okay so give that a try number six get critiques especially critiques from anybody in the industry it can save you a lot of time like weeks if not months of trial and error trying to figure things out for yourself because somebody that is experienced can look at your work and see things that you will not understand that you you can't see because you're I just you're just not used to it so you can stare at an image all you want well and you'll never be able to see the true problems with it but if you handed it to an industry professional they could say oh well the reason that the whole image just feels a little bit bland is that there's no story to it the character there's not there's no dynamic facial expression it's not saying anything the you know if you want to make it the seem more balanced you're going to tilt the head slightly like this put the light from this angle or whatever they'll just say a bunch of things which just sounds crazy to you almost it's like oh that never never in a million years would I thought of that but that it's it's like a shortcut to success and it's why mentorship and connections networking all that stuff is really so important is that yeah you can get a group of people which just yeah that can help you and it's just incredibly powerful so that's also the big challenge though is how do you find a mentor I have rejected everybody that has asked to become my mentor because it's it's just like asking somebody to do a job for you right it's it's like going up to a professional like guy who works at Disney and say hey can you be my mentor it's saying like I'm gonna call you and I'm gonna ask you questions I'm gonna give you my olive to critique and you have to do that instead of spending time with your family right it's a really bad proposition so you have to be contributing value to them in some way I won't go into it in this video there are a bunch of other videos on YouTube just type in how to get a mentor or whatever yeah it's a big thing but yeah if you can get critiques go for it because it'll save you a lot of time and number seven the one the granddaddy to to rule them all is give yourself a consequence so this is the uncomfortable part of the list everybody's on board up until this part consequence makes people like I don't like that a consequence I'll give you an idea so I did as I mentioned in my presentation I did a 2d art challenge that I inflicted on myself because I had wanted to learn to do art work for years but I never got around to it so I told myself I am going to learn it within six months I'm gonna get a thousand likes on art station and the consequence was that if I didn't achieve it that I was gonna give my cousin my younger cousin who's like a sibling rivalry whatever I was going to give him $1,000 okay and I didn't want to do that so that was a very powerful force of motivation to to make me do it and that was the factor really the only factor that that helped me succeed that and I did actually achieve it within a few days of it down to the deadline it's incredibly powerful yes it's uncomfortable but if there was an artist that had a consequence and an artist that didn't have a consequence I would a hundred percent put all my money on the guy with the consequence because he's gonna do so much more than the one without it it's also why some people say like you should go to university because there's the consequence there there's a monetary consequence of if you fail this course you're gonna have to retake it and that's gonna cost you X amount of dollars okay and people still fell it anyway because they don't have to pay it up front you know I don't think you need to go to university I can do another video on that if you want but I yeah you you can set this up yourself for a very small net so 1% of your yearly salary you can use that as the sort of benchmark so it might like if you're earning $100,000 a year it'll be 1% of that would be your your wager I guess in this and then you find an organization or somebody that you don't want to give stuff to like the KKK group of America or the NRA guns if you're anti-gun whatever it is you want to find something that you don't like and then you say you're gonna give it to them and you have to tell other people you're going to do it as well and it's just it's an incredible force it's so uncomfortable which is why it's so effect but yeah I want to know if anyone actually does that because that would be really cool to to see a purpose because I know you're actually gonna do it if you if you say that if you said that so that is my advice I've got a if you want sort of like a template form of this video I have got a Google Doc which I've put the link underneath this video where you can fill it in and you can also see my example there as well and as well as that if you want to learn some more facts you can watch it in the video the seven Habits of Highly Effective artists which you can also find in the description or if you click the little I at the top there or whatever otherwise please leave your next question a question for the next while you render episode in the comments and I'll try and pick an interesting one for the next video thank you for watching bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 302,044

Keywords: beginner, blender, tips, advice

Id: 7_1i4djTBR8

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2017