Focus. What's your daily routine? Daily routine. Well, the thing is, to be quite honest, my
daily routine changes from day to day. I mean I can get up one day and be like, "I
wanna start drawing and I'm gonna start working on my own projects." Or other days, it could be like, "I don't
wanna get up right now. I'm just gonna lay in bed and be on my phone." But the thing is I don't feel guilty about
the things I just wanna do at the moment. Of course, you know, there is deadlines, you
know, there are priorities, and there are things I have to handle. But at the same time, I don't pressure myself
and feel like I should be doing this and feeling guilty if I'm not doing it. So the routine goes into more of the interests
of things you wanna go for, that passion of things you wanna do. And it could be things like games, it could
be watching films, it could be hanging out with friends also. And I think those are just as important as
a daily routine on top of doing the actual creative aspect of it, because, for me, the
actual life experience, going out there and living is also a huge part of being an artist
too. So if you wanna tell stories, well, you gotta
go out there and live a little bit too. What do you think is the balance though? The balance is when those priorities are out
of whack and the quality that you're supposed to get, that you're supposed to be consistent
with, suffers. Right? So if you're not hitting the same consistency
in terms of quality, then there's an issue of balance problems. But if you can also still do those things
and yet produce the same consistent level of work, then hopefully, that means everything
is in a perfect kind of balance. I was talking to some guy on Instagram. He was asking me for help. And I had a feeling that he wasn't really
putting in the time just from talking to him. And I ask him like, "What do you do like most
of the time? What inspires you?" And he said, "Oh, video games and movies." And I was like, "Cool. How much time do you spend on video games
and movies?" And he says, "Pretty much all day until I
go to sleep." I was like, "Oh, well, that's not inspiring
you." He says that's what inspires him. And it's like if it inspired you, you would
actually go and draw after... Inspiration is the fuel that has to then lead
into, you know, any kind of art form or creative outlet. So, yeah, okay, you can play games, but if
that's the only thing you're doing all day and you don't really take that information
in some ways as an experience or a visual and apply it somewhere for yourself, then,
yeah, that's not necessarily a good balance as to what you have in daily life. So, you know those outlets of anything that
you have can be used to your positive advantage, but they can also be traps without you realizing. So you do have to be very aware of where you
do put your time. But I am definitely saying that a lot of different
experiences always add to the things you wanna get into. But, you know, even if it's not the art form,
it's about the trends and knowing what's going on, you know, staying in tune to the front
lines of all the stuff around us, I think is also important too. So being in the know is quite important as
an instructor because for a lot of my students that wanna work in the entertainment field,
a lot of the older generation instructors right now, are not very much involved in entertainment
so they don't know what's going on. They don't know how to tell...advice about
this is the kinda portfolio you should have. This is the games that they're working on. This is the stuff that's currently going on
right now. But if we're not involved in it ourselves
as professionals, then, of course, we are not gonna be able to give them that proper
advice. So I think it's also important for me as an
instructor to be involved with that. Awesome. Thank you very much again. Of course. Absolutely. Awesome. My daily routine is wake up, make lunch for
my daughter, go to work, skip my lunch by going to...just to drawing, work more, go
home, play with my daughter, put her in bed, draw. Yeah. It's the little details. Here and there. I'm sure there's other things too. And you work at Pixar? I work at Pixar, yeah. Pixar. Cool. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. So in the day, you have two parts to it. You have productivity time and creativity
time. Creativity time is a very small bandwidth
of time that your brain is active toward ideas and then the rest of the day, you're basically
shut off to that and all you're good at doing is hammering the nails and cutting the wood,
basically finishing the art up. So in the morning, I do all the creative stuff. I don't have my phone near me. I have the internet on because it's giving
me pictures, but I'm not surfing the internet. It's things I need to see and I'm pulling
together the equations that I'm gonna be summing up throughout the day. And then once I have that put away, I get
away from my art table, I go play with the cats or do something normal, and then I come
back basically ready with none of the stuff that I just downloaded in my face because
I want that stuff to be in the background noise so I can start being creative about
it. And then at that point, it's all productivity
until the next morning when I go to sleep for an hour, wake up and do it again. So what daily routine do you recommend for
a student starting out? Okay. So as a student starting out, you're all gonna
think that you don't need to draw very much. You just know that you can draw because you
watched the video. The thing here is that I don't like using
this equation because it gets beat down really badly, but it's like sports. You have to go out and swing the bat a 1,000
times to know you're swinging it in the right place to hit the ball. Then you have to swing a thousand more times
to know that you're hitting it in the home run space versus a second-base space versus...you
can actually control all of that. The pool player is the same way. They can hit the ball with their cue and hit
it exactly the way they wanted to spin the ball back to them if they want to. That requires a lot of physical training over
and over and over again to fail. The goal here is failure on a daily basis
because if you don't fail when you're doing, you won't recognize it so that you have an
answer for when you need to solve it as a professional. Learn how to break your day down so that you
know when it's creative time and productive time. Build on basic exercises first so that your
brain warms up. And that would be like the circles and the
squares and the straight lines. Then build on your weaknesses so you have
a list of weaknesses. Today, I'm going to work on arms up because
every time I try to draw these muscles, they look funky, they don't feel right so that's
a problem to solve for today. Go into the anatomy, learn that. Then go try and draw it from a photograph
using the anatomy you learned. And that's a big problem-solving thing for
the day and then wind down the rest of the day with shading a picture or something that
you can actually do that you can turn your mind off to. But you can still be productive because if
this thing isn't moving all day long, this hand isn't moving all day long, you're not
connecting your brain with your hand so that you can be responsive on the job which is
every company here at this Comic-Con. They expect you to be responsive and if you're
not, they're just not gonna hire you at all. Cool, man. Thank you so much. Yeah, you're welcome. Those are awesome. Yeah, you're welcome. Absolutely. Daily routine. Brushing my teeth. And then I wake up, I got to walk my dog. So you brush your teeth before you wake up? Haha! Yeah, I brush my teeth before I wake up. That's how you be a pro. Exactly. You start your day before you wake up. Exactly. I have my dreams and then it tells me to brush my teeth before I wake up. That's time management right there. Exactly. I usually stress out about my email because
I'm like, "I really hope I didn't get anything overnight." Right? It's like, "Oh, my God. I just want it to be cleared." Or it's just like one thing. Drawing-wise, I draw maybe half the week and
the other half, I'm filming, I'm editing. I'm doing stuff for clients, stuff like that. So it really varies from day to day, but sleeping
and brushing my teeth is definitely part of every day. Haha! That's it? That's the only thing that's part of every
day? Eating! And... Do you draw in the morning or at night? Always at night. I always draw at night because I feel like
I'm more creative at night. Okay. So and then in the morning, you focus on emails
and marketing and stuff like that? Yeah. Like what am I gonna draw later at night and
I... Okay. Basically. Awesome. Thanks, Ross. That's the last question. Really? You made it. Thank you so much. Awesome, here. You did it! I did it. I did my interview. Mission complete. Daily routine. Pretty, pretty boring. The artist life is not a glamorous one, you
know. You said you come to conventions like 10 conventions
a year, right? Was that right? Yeah, I'm doing 10 this year and that's the
most I've ever done and it's getting to be a bit much. But, yeah, usually at least six or seven a
year. My daily routine is coffee, of course, answer
emails. I edit websites. I do like a lot of stuff that you wouldn't
think an artist should be doing. Because like once you start getting more and
more successful, you realize the less and less you actually draw. So I draw maybe a few times a week and then
I actually... Like I'm doing more office work, the whole
time before that. Emails, marketing? Yeah. You know, like, obviously social networking. Then you're looking at all that other stuff
and then you get a few days, you know. And that's the thing they don't tell you about
art, like being an artist especially like somebody that is like, you're a self like,
when you do your own business and everything else that, you know, when you do it on your
own it's like a lot of the stuff that you gotta do is admin which is not... A lot of artists don't wanna hear because
you just want to draw, but like if nobody's willing to buy your stuff... You can draw all day if that's the case. But like you have to do all that prepping
and all that curating of your social network account and all, make sure the website always
looks up-to-date and all that stuff takes a lot of time and more than you would like
to give it, you know, so... Yeah, same here. Yeah, so you know... Yeah, exactly. I'm not drawing right now. Yeah, I think I'm supposed to be drawing right
now, but I have no time to do it. So I'm trying to get those drawing days where
you're actually on point to do it. They're a rarity, but they're worth it when
they happen. When you were a student, were you drawing
a lot more or did you have a drawing routine? Ah, you know, yeah, I drew every day, like
even when I actually had a job when I was a graphic designer before I actually became
a professional artist full-time, I did spend... Every time I worked my regular job, I was... Even when I was working at a clothing store,
I'll take breaks... You get your lunch break, your 15-minute breaks
and I would carry a sketchbook with me and I would draw during those breaks and draw
during my lunch...I'd get lunch, but I sketch a little bit. Like, so you find those times. That's why when people say like you thought
when you're having a full-time job and you have to be economical about your situation
like you have to pay rent first. And then so, therefore, you squeeze these
little times in where you can actually practice your craft until the craft can actually take
over and be full-time. And then when I got to that point where I
can draw all the time and then never. Now, I do realize you can't draw all the time,
you know, so you find the time, you know, so... Yeah. Well, that's good to know that you can be
this awesome and not draw every day. Yeah, yeah. Cool. That was the last question. Thank you very much. Oh, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you coming back around, man. Thank you. Old school. What's your daily routine as a professional
artist? As a professional, well, I have kids. A lot of professional artists have kids. Yep. I get up at 5:30. You grow up. Yeah, well, I'm an old kid. So I gotta get up early like, 5:30, 6:00 in
the morning and start a page, sketch a little something, take them to school, get coffee,
get working. Oh, you get coffee after you do all that? Yeah, because otherwise, I'll be exhausted. Yeah, go get coffee first thing. Yeah. I'll stop around midnight or 1:00 in the morning
and then again... Midnight or 1:00 and then you wake up at 5:30
or 6:00? 5:30 to 6:00. And that's pretty much every day, even the
weekends. I'm not telling my secrets, am I? These are mechanical pencils, but I found
out that it fits my crow quill. Oh, wow, a mechanical pencil? Yeah. With an inking nib? So it fits perfect. I can work for hours, better handle than the
old ones. So something that you do every day. That is important, that you think other artists
should also include in their routine. Yes. Let's grant that you have the kinda obsession-compulsion that makes it so that when the job starts, you're on the job. Let's grant that. Then there is another problem. And that's burnout, is that you can work so
hard that you burn yourself out. And I got advice from a photographer who was
very inventive, Gary Ramsey. Sean's uh... Sean's what, brother? Sean is agreeing. Sean Ramsey's great-grandfather or...? I have no idea. I didn't put it together that there might
be a relationship. Gary was one of the first people who switched
over to digital from traditional photography. And this was, I mean back in the '90s. And he was solving one problem after another
after another, so I'd call him up for advice. And I'd say, "How do you do all this?" And he said, "Mountain biking. You know, I'm working on a problem. I can't solve the problem. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I just get on my mountain bike. I go out for a ride. And I swear, Marshall, I never go out there
trying to solve the problem. I just go out there to relax. And 9 times out of 10 when I come back, I've
got the answer." So there is this rhythm that you don't wanna
just stand with your two feet locked for 24 hours because you wear yourself out. But walking is less exhausting because walking
means you relax one leg and then tense it and then relax it and tense it. And so there is a natural rhythm not to work
for a week straight, but to work for a day and sleep for a night and work for a day and
sleep for a night. And that comes down to the small levels too
which is to work until you can't work anymore and then do something unrelated, come back
refreshed. And if you catch that rhythm, you find that
not only do you meet your deadline, but you also meet it creatively because that downtime
is where some of the best problems get solved. But everybody has their own rhythm. I found that mountain biking wasn't for me. For me, it was walking and for other people,
it will be just conversing, you know, going out, relaxing in the backyard, or whatever
else. But the counterpoint of not... just like a bulldog,
sticking with it all the way through and then collapsing, exhausted. If you can fit that into your schedule, that's
the best way to do it. Daily routine is wake up in the morning, get
the kids to school, you know, usually if it's not summer, come home, walk the dogs, otherwise
they get pissed at me, and then just start my day roughly about 8:00 a.m., and then I'll
work till usually about 4:00 or 5:00, and then that's when I call it kinda quits and
then have family time, whatever. Awesome. Perfect. That's it. Yep, right on, brother. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. You bet. Your daily routine. Oh, my daily routine. You might not tell from my drawings because
they're very stiff. I'm still working on that. So I start out every morning and I draw gesture
drawings. They're loose, but I'm still trying to be
considerate of the line work and the line quality. I'll take a pose, I'll do it from reference,
and then I'll try to move that pose into all different angles. Cool. That's my morning routine. Then it really depends like on certain days,
I'll go teach at Brainstorm. If I'm doing that, then I'll just prep for
class. On other days, I'll just spend the next like
10 hours working on videos and usually that's broken up into like doing a research phase
where I'll sit and just maybe read about something or gauge what other people are doing with
the topic. And then usually I'll start my videos by writing
out a script of some sort, so I'll try to put my thoughts into words first and then
start sketching and then the inevitable phase of editing because I haven't gotten an editor
yet, so that's the next step. Yeah. Thanks so much, man. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Take care. Daily routine. Wake up at 9:00, change clothes. I don't work with pajamas, but I work at home. And then I start work from 9:00 to 6:00 and
then I do warm-up. When I start with warm sketch, I do some life
models, so like 30 minutes and then when I feel that I'm comfortable, I start working. Till 6:00? Till 6:00. And then I have kids, then I have to take
care of the kids and then from 9:00 until 2:00. Oh, you work again from 9:00 to 2:00 a.m? Yeah. Oh, dang. Well, thank you very much. Oh, thanks for stopping by. What's your daily routine? So I shower and wake up. I think if I'm drawing, it depends on the
project I'm working on, but I tend to probably do some scratchy sketching, doodling in a
sketchbook that I don't show anybody so there's no pressure. And I know that I'm not going to show anyone
so it frees up my mind. It just gets me warmed up and then maybe some
simple warm-up exercises if I'm using pen and ink, couple lines here and there just
to shake the rust off or if it's digital and then maybe I'll even do some warm-up sketches
that I just kinda delete or whatever. So you do all those warm-ups before you actually
start drawing? Not every day, but I think if it's for an
assignment, I definitely do it just because I don't like going in too cold. Sometimes, I'll sit down and apply all that
to just a daily sketch which I may post or I may not because I'm like, "Urgh." All right. That's really shaking off the rust. Last question is daily routine. It switches depending on my deadline. Now, personally, wake up, meditate because
I think that's important. Then check the emails and probably wish I'd
meditated a little longer. I get going on a drawing board hopefully. And then you draw. Draw for about...yeah, draw, my overall time
is about eight hours a day, but I do that in increments, you know, three hours or two
hours, take a break depending on the workflow. How do you balance out all the work? You go out and... I'm still trying to figure it out because
there are days where I'll wake up earlier and I can get done before 3:00, 4:00 in a
day. That's a very refreshing feeling, but then
there's times where I'm working till 3:00 in the morning and I end up having later starts
the next day. I end up doing it because it's kinda a necessary
evil so you get the job done, but I don't like that I had to do that. You know what I mean? Awesome. Well, that's it. Thank you very much. Oh, cool. Awesome, man. Daily routine. I warm up every day by doing two-minute gesture
drawings. Oh, cool. That's it and then I just start drawing. Sometimes, I'll do studies. I'll look at guys I like and do studies and
stuff like that just to warm up. I work from home so like I literally draw
every day, but it was important for me to have hours like a set of hours like a 9:00
to 5:00 because if I didn't do that, my whole life would be art and I would never have like
friends or an outside life. So I think the important thing is...yeah,
have a daily routine like set your hours, but remember that like to have a life outside
of art too. That way, art doesn't become work. You don't wanna it to be like not fun anymore,
you wanna like, look forward to it, you know. Perfect. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. Nice and easy. Daily routine. Ideal day, I get up 5:00, I do exercise and
meditations, ice cold shower which is important because it wakes you up big time and it helps
your immune system, and then I go to work. It's generally a lot of meetings in the morning. And then I'll start painting and drawing into
the night till about 10:00, start all over again. Perfect. Thank you, man. That's it. All right. Right on. My daily routine. It's really, really funny. My Twitter is Caleb is drawing. Caleb's rarely drawing. Caleb is mostly teaching. Caleb is mostly driving. My daily routine: get up, have a gigantic
coffee, drive to school, greet as many students as I can before class, listen to my students'
complaints about arts, try to listen to their concerns about arts. I always try to convince them that their struggles
with drawing are...they're not singular to them. I struggle with drawing too. In fact, I struggle with it probably more
than they do, just on a different level. But I always try to engage them as often as
I can to try to use positive reinforcement to encourage them. And then if I'm lucky, I'll get in some drawing. You know, I'm an old man, so 9:30, 10:00,
I'm down. But you wake up, what time? That's when I wake up. 9:30 or 10:00? No, no, no. I wake up at about 6:00. Cool. Well, thank you. Hey, guys, in the comments, let me know what
can you change in your daily routine to improve it to be healthier and more productive? And if you miss the other three Asking Pros
videos, there's links in the descriptions.
