Finding Your Art Style - The Andrew Price Podcast

welcome to the andrew price podcast now streaming on spotify by the way i should let that uh fly at the start so that some of you don't think you have to come to youtube to watch it um it's on spotify it's on a bunch of other stuff but the links are in the description um this episode is going to be all about you so i asked you to send in your video questions and a bunch of you did send in uh some mumbly incoherent stuff make sure i can hear it and also make sure there's a question in it i would say that is a key piece of advice to sending in a question um but i picked out five that uh that i thought were really good so we're going to go through them um this week of course this week all over the news all around the world really has been the big event that we've really been leading up to um i am of course talking about the blender conference which is a conference every year normally hosted in amsterdam but this year is online because of covid because everything is covered related and i'm not going to stand for that much longer i've been sick of everything the other day i went to nando's and i ordered something and i ordered a takeaway and then i changed and i wanted it to be dine in so as i was like collecting it i was like oh can i change this order to dine in and then they're like oh no no we can't do that because of covid and i said but you do have dining right yeah like you do have customers in your store like yeah yeah but because of covert we can't change it oh my god lazy lazy as soon as this vaccine comes out man i'm just going to be i'm just going to be screaming like it's fixed it's fixed what's fixed sir they fixed it put it on a plate do it do your job god damn it i'm sick of this oh man you can really feel the the pressure of like being stuck in a place stuck in your home more confined than you normally are and it's just kind of like this like the water in the water in the titanic i don't know but like as it's like building up you just gotta have an outlet and some people do take their outlet to the streets as you can see but anyways um yeah so blender conference was uh was online this year thanks to coverd and actually i kind of liked it believe it or not um normally each presentation at the blender conference is like 30 minutes to 60 minutes and let's be honest most people are not you know public speakers some of them it's their first time speaking and uh let's just say it's the least efficient way to convey information when you're sitting in the audience of a 60-minute presentation by a very highly skilled engineer but uh has not done speaking before so this year's was instead ton rosendahl the founder of blender uh said instead you get two minutes so figure out what you want to say in two minutes and then we're just gonna play it all in one video one after the other and uh so i think they picked like 60 so it became like two hours maybe it was less than that it was like half 30 of them i don't know anyways um i contributed my video to it um because tom asked and i don't really see my point like me contributing because you already see me through the screen you know it's like i got an invite to um vidcon this year which uh vidcon for those of you don't know is the annual like youtuber conference youtuber tick-tock all the young kiddies with the crazy hair and weird fashion um they come there and they do their thing and uh it's actually kind of cool because you get to meet all these other creators and talk about things it's it's that's the value and i got an email from them this year going uh good news vidcon is still on this year it's online so you can buy a ticket to an online event where you can watch your youtuber your favorite youtuber on video and somebody at vidcon thought let's greenlight that idea um actually to their credit i don't know if you did actually have to buy a ticket it might have been a free event in which case props to them but if it was paid god i mean i know their business is affected everyone's uh every live of a man i tell you what once covered kicked off and you saw like everything shut down i'm like thank god i have an online business that is already remote we do not have office workers everyone's already working from home ah man just seeing some of those businesses crumble um hey that's a fun start um but anyways blender conference was cool so i actually really enjoyed it there was a whole bunch of contributors i think in ian uh captain disillusion was in there uh some of the cg cookie guys you probably know and then probably a bunch of others but then also i mean the real value is seeing a bunch of other people from around the world who use blender france or germany i don't know those aren't exotic places those are basically like a hundred percent of the attendees at the blender conference it's like ton starts the conference by going like all right raise your hand if you're from uh africa and there'd be like maybe one person australia and i like scream extra loud to try and make it sound like there's more of us than there are but it's usually just me uh and then they get around to europe and then they're like germany and then like the entire audience's hand goes up you're like ah now i know what to expect i'm not gonna be meeting too many diverse people at this conference um but anyways um yeah you get to meet a whole a whole bunch of creators in this this sort of two-minute session thing um and yeah i kind of digged it it was kind of fun so check it out if you haven't already the blender conference it's like an hour and a half long it's a good meal good something to watch good thing to watch when you've got a meal or just sit around and watch something and it's it's a very fast way to get a lot of information i thought it was good so watch it if you haven't already it's on the blender channel so let's kick it off now to our first question our first video fella by the name of samuel keel keel um who there we go play hey andrew this is samuel um i wanted to ask how do you find your art style so different artists like ian hubert who does image projection and stuff like that he has very defined art style ducky with his 3d ducky with his um procedural uh abstract sci-fi stuff and then carl poiser with his really cool floaters like in the sky uh big mega sci-fi ships and stuff like that do you just actively seek out different styles and try just try different things until you find one that you like or is it just something that comes naturally to you good question samuel kiel very very good question that is a it's probably one of the it's one of the top questions a lot of beginners have in art is how do i find my style right because it makes a lot of sense like if you wanted to just capture something realistically you'd pick up a camera right if you're if you're drawing or if you're creating something in 3d or or something that allows you to infuse your personality into it you want to do that that's why most of us got into it because we saw you know some amazing interpretation of a landscape that somebody painted where the lighting pops and the the curves and the shapes and it just kind of like looks great right um and so we want to do that that's that's what we it's what we want to get into but i think it is a very very big mistake to uh to try to create stylized work without the understanding that comes before it right so as an example um let's say you wanted to copy sparth right sparth is i think he was the art director on halo he's probably the number one artist on art station in terms of followers um very very popular um artist who creates like environmental landscapes uh that are painted right and they got these kind of like like bold colors and like really interesting shapes and every single one of his images ah like you look at and just go like wow that is cool right and here's the thing if you're a beginner you don't know what actually makes it cool you could have a guest like oh it's something to do with punchy colors or something to do with shapes right you could imitate him right you could put his like like on your screen on the left and then start painting and draw something else to that style and the way he draws you know the character that's standing in front of the landscape kind of copy the same sort of shapes but without knowing what led to the decisions of each one of those brush strokes you will end up with a very confused piece so um for example actually i um the other day i typed in sparth into art station and it pulled up artworks right as as a default not the artist but the artworks and i realized it was a bunch of people who were creating sparth inspired artworks and um uh it was done in the style of right it was like inspired by sparth but you could tell it was obviously not as good and it's because the the simplicity of the style that you're seeing the the less is more kind of thing like the clean shapes the flat the flat lighting across everything that actually takes more work than doing something realistic as in like it takes a lot of um it takes an understanding of what you're doing to know when to break a rule and when to keep a rule so the shapes that he choose like the rounded forms for the mountains or like the jagged edge like when to put a jagged edge versus a rounded form or when to like simplify shading across a surface versus putting in the individual values across across a surface or or detail continuity which is a really big one right like you don't want to have detail like in the bushes like way in the background if that's not the intent like the focal element of the scene right but if you don't understand all this then you will do that you'll start like drawing individual like grass strands because you won't know what you don't even know what detail continuity is or what a focal element is or what what even would create a focal element right contrast um things contrasting each other generally um right and all of that stuff builds into this amazing piece that a beginner when they see it don't understand it's like the like a popping candy right put it in your mouth you just kind of have that effect when you look at some this stylized artwork and you go like that's so cool but you don't know why because that part of your brain isn't developed yet so to give my own example um as i've said ad nauseam i did like a six month challenge to learn how to draw did a presentation you could watch online called habits of effective artists where i talk about the lessons i learned and episode one of this podcast talked about a revisit of that topic anyways in that i was doing a lot of stylized stuff um and it was because i was inspired by this kind of realistic exaggerated realism i guess you could call it right like like like the shading uh is is realistic but like the body proportions are kind of like the eyes are big um like the head is big maybe the shoulders are small i like little things like that and it looked cool to me and i loved it and that's what inspired me and got me into it but i could not do it i couldn't do it even close to what i was trying to achieve because i didn't know what i was up to i just thought it was all about like just like simplifying things but i didn't know what to simplify so it was just i was getting lost um and then i i this year or i guess last year i got back into drawing and then i eventually realized i'm just i'm just treading my wheels i'm not getting anywhere with this i need to go back to realism so i did the hard process thing i didn't want to do the fundamentals of making a realistic face because it's time consuming and it's kind of boring it's make it's recreating an image one to one that you can already see photographed what's the point of that what's the value of that well i decided to do it and i realized as i was doing piece after piece after piece after piece that i was um i was learning things i was learning that like each brushstroke has kind of a gesture to it right a little bit of an emotion and when you simplify something when you put more detail in one area your eye is drawn to it and when you put less detail it actually helps the picture to because your eye is now drawn to the thing which is more detailed so simple so instead of drawing like each like all the detail across a cheek you could kind of draw like like one patch of it or it's hard to explain but this became clear to me as i was doing the realistic stuff and i learned which parts you could break which rules you could break to discover uh sorry to create something which is different to reality and then i did this recent piece which um i've been doing like a lot of recreations from movies like taking a still frame from a movie and then trying to recreate it because movies tend to have a lot more interesting lighting than photographers do photographers tend to photograph models with soft lighting because that makes you look younger and it's just really hard to find like lighting by photographers with harsh interesting lighting so i just uh actually shot deck dot io is actually a really great place if you want to get frames from movies it's like a whole it's like everything is tagged you can search by like focal length lighting type like high contrast number of people in the show it's i just discovered it the other day it's really cool anyways so um so i was doing this one from 10 cloverfield lane of this girl with the the lighting thing and as i was doing it i would i was like started to simplify like the eyes got bigger and i added like more detail in the reflections of the eyes because it kind of like made it like more like your your attention was drawn to that i simplified areas i let some areas fall into shadow and i was just having fun with it and i realized i kind of started to edge towards the thing that i had originally begun doing 2d to do which was exaggerated realism but it was only through doing the fundamental boring stuff to learn the shading the proportions getting everything else correct is what enabled me to actually start to break rules and understand why i'm breaking those rules so that is my advice to you um i i know having an art style is like it's the it's the reason you want to get into art it's it's fun that's why you want to interpret something differently and infuse your personality into it um but i would i would say you are setting yourself up for a lot of pain in the future essentially because you'll be treading your wheels and some of your art pieces will look okay and then others won't and you won't know why and you'll just do piece after piece after piece where you feel like sometimes you're going forward sometimes you're going back and you don't you just feel like you're like if there was a graph of like progress you're just kind of like all over the place and you're not really getting anywhere whereas if you're doing fundamentals it is a slower process um but you will actually be moving in the right direction um in my opinion so that's what i would encourage you to do don't worry about art style at the at the start i believe it comes naturally once you understand the fundamentals so that you can break them and in doing so infuse your own interpretation so thank you samuel very good question let's now move to the next question which is from mitchell let's see what mitchell has to say he's got a moe a lean little mustache see what he's got and play hi andrew so my question is when it comes to emailing professional artists should i like what should i send in should i send in a picture a drawing or a render and ask them for feedback about that or is it better to ask about your learning schedule like do i need to learn anatomy do i need to learn this am i doing this right should i put this in my schedule and just the basic etiquette of emailing a professional artist like what do they expect from you what should i actually give them and what should i tell them if if any information at all if they need it every nuance you have about emailing professional artists your input would be absolutely amazing and i would love to hear about it great good question mitchell um yeah it's a good skill to learn right um the great thing about the internet is is you can reach pretty much anyone through their social media or find their email through their website or whatever so um yeah you can reach artists but here's the thing and let's just be a hundred percent clear here no professional artist hopes to hear from beginners especially beginners nobody wakes up in the morning and goes like i don't know what to do today boy let me check my email i hope i hope i've got an email from somebody who just started using blender yesterday and they want advice on what they can do in their career right which is by the way like 50 of the emails i receive right nobody hopes nobody hopes to get that um and i'll be frank i do not answer emails anymore i used to but i just realized that the time it was taking to answer them i could do one video that at worst would hit 20 000 people and reach those people or i could spend the same amount of time answering individual emails and at best answer 200 emails so 100 x 100 x god i suck at math 100x e difference so i just decided not to do it um but that said there are a lot of artists out there professional artists and i know a lot of them do reply and give give advice so let's talk about that how can you um how can you word your email or your question in a way that you would actually get a response first rule brevity okay the number one problem with emails that i have seen is that they start with a five paragraph introduction from where they grew up in a little farm often wherever and then they moved to this and they got started interested in art when they were 14 and then they went to school but they dropped out and blah blah blah blah and i'm not joking sometimes it's like 10 paragraphs wrong and i scroll and i scroll on a scroll and then finally the question is right at the very end right it's like one sentence and it it's i know i know you want to do that i know you want to give context as to where you're at but it needs to be much shorter because you've just given someone homework and they don't even know who you are yet um it'd be like if someone knocked on your door and you opened it and it was a salesman and he said okay let me tell you a little bit about myself um yeah so when i was 16 i was kind of interested in sales but i wasn't sure but and then you just close the door in their face right you you have to think about the person you're emailing and what do they want right which in this case they wanna they want you to cut to the chase okay so say hi big fan but i know your time is valuable so i'll cut to the chase now give some context okay context i've been using blender or learning drawing or painting for x number of years that's all you need to say here is my latest artwork okay now that's actually a really key thing here is my latest artwork and link to uh preferably an art station uh link to show that you're part of the community you're not in the offshoots of deviantart um right and wrong with deviantart there is something wrong with deviantart um but anyways it has to be a link to a website don't embed it attach it to a thing because a lot of email servers will like not deliver it if there's an attachment so just don't do that it has to be one artwork as well now this is the key thing because a lot of people think i'll send them my portfolio okay now when you do that it's loads of artworks right and there could be anything wrong with any number of them but they're always different reasons okay and it's it's again coming back to the homework thing you don't want to give them homework you want to say this is my one piece that i did recently and that also is important because it kind of says to them that you've been doing lots of them and they can look at you they know how to go back to your page like your full artwork list if they wanted to but you're just asking them look at this one piece that's all i ask of you and then say here's my latest artwork piece i think i need to improve my lighting or texturing but i'm not sure what do you think question mark now that's also a really important thing because if you just said what should i do it's too open-ended and it shows that you haven't actually thought through what might be wrong with it you're just kind of tossing it out there and going i don't know man you're the genius you tell me right so by saying i think i need to work on lighting or the texturing um it shows you've given it some thought and it also gives an opportunity to the artist to give a quick answer and to agree or disagree with you because here's the other thing they'll say lighting or texturing and then they'll look at the art piece and then they'll go yes or no but also i think it might be these other reasons and so the response you wanted you'll get by asking this yes or no question so if you say i think i don't know lighting or texting what do you think they'll be like well yeah the lighting's not great but i actually think you could really improve in framing composition or learning materials or something like that and so you'll end up with like the paragraph answer that you hoped for by asking this yes or no question so that's that's my advice don't feel down if you don't get a response i would guess if you sent out 10 emails to your 10 favorite artists you might get a response from one of them okay um that sounds rough but especially if you're going after like some of these top guys on art station like i've emailed them in the past to like be on podcasts and you know i've got a big channel and like i don't get responses right so just understand that their inbox is just flooded with just people saying i don't know what to do right they can't answer everyone so a lot of them just have a simple rule a hard filter of just no i do not answer questions from people and you have to respect that right unless you're paying them they don't owe you anything right if you really do want to get mentorship there are services available so actually a lot of independent artists actually now through the internet are doing like deals of mentorship so they'll you know you pay pal them 400 and then they'll do a month of mentorships like four calls you can email them your work sit down have a call one on one ask them as many questions as you want and it's so much cheaper than going to school and it's a far better experience in my opinion so um mentor coalition is one of them by josh lynch and he's got a bunch of artists that have joined him but there's also i've just seen people on their websites or even in like the bio of art station or whatever so take advantage of that um cool yeah uh before we get to the next question a little advert are two adverts one of them you can already guess because uh i do it all the time polygon so um the latest things that we have uploaded to polygon have been uh new photo scan ground materials which are like three meters by three meters large captures and they are ultra high resolution using like the highest uh quality standards so they're sharp they've got loads of photo coverage like 500 to 1000 photos per photo scan they're available in up to 8k resolution and because it's uh three by three meters it means that you can tile it across the terrain and you'll see less tiling um to put it in perspective if you had a one by one meter texture and you had to tile it across a hundred meters that would be a hundred times but a three by three meter one only has to be 33 times so that's a 67 reduction right 66 point whatever uh so so those are really cool and then we also just released a new marble generator as well and some marble static assets so this is if you're doing arc fez if you're doing anything that involves a marble object we found them to be very hard to find high quality marble and especially of the different types of marble that are out there there's so many different types and a lot of them aren't even named correctly on texture sites and it's hard to find ones that are tiled it's hard to find ones that are slabs so we built a generator that i i'm gonna reveal something here i was looking at how much it cost to build i don't want to see it i was looking at the stats of how much money we've spent per release and the marble generator i don't know if people have been incorrectly logging their time but i believe we have spent over a hundred thousand dollars on it oh but i think it was also for multiple releases there was static assets and i think there was also i included terrazzo so it's two releases but then i think there was some tile stuff in there that we can use for other stuff but i was like oh my god but anyways we put everything into this one generator and uh it's got all the different types of marble you'd ever want like 24 different types of tile herringbone square rectangular mosaic uh basket weave any type of tiling you could imagine you've got all the properties and you just hit export and it loads into blender so um that's available at polygon.com polygon.com p-o-l-i-i-g-o-n.com create better renders faster and the second advert is for my email newsletter list there is so much going on in the 3d world every week that you can't keep up on it right you know like you'll be thinking you're doing something cool and then somebody will say oh you know there's a software that'll do that it came out two years ago and you're like how did i not know that this software that generates terrain or whatever does this thing right there's so much coming out all these updates companies getting acquired there's also tutorials on how to do this new technique that somebody's created workflows or like color theory things like that that i find that come across my table and um i really like i i post them occasionally on twitter but like i wanna i wanna spread the stuff that i find which is really interesting so it's once a week that's all it is um and i include three to five of the best stories from that week in an email and i send it out um it's got 300 000 people on the list um who evidently like it um and you can join that at uh the link in the description i don't have an easy url to access that so maybe i should create one but it's in the description so you can check that out if you were so uh interested all right on to the next question this one is from noah noah gamp noah gamp hey andrew my name is noah and i'll get right down to it i have no experience in art whatsoever i've never studied it i can't draw i can kind of do some photography but nothing serious uh i found blender through your donut tutorial that was my first experience with 3d ever and i found that i've become utterly engrossed by blender and 3d animation and art and modeling and all that you fell in love so much to the point where i think i should change careers or it might be like a calling for me to change careers and so i was wondering what kind of steps can a person like me take to prepare themselves for a potential career change and as a tie-in question that if i choose to do like some freelance work how can i tell when i'm good enough to start monetizing my services or how much how do i know when i'm good enough to start selling my work so those questions have been really giving me a lot of anxiety and holding me back from pulling the trigger on this so i'd really love to hear what you think and if you're ever in seoul korea because that's where i currently live let me know and i'll happily buy you a beer for taking your time to answer these questions all right cool cheers thanks that is wild noah that you live in seoul korea because i lived there for three years believe it or not my wife is korean and we met when she was studying in australia and then had to fly home to continue her studies and because i can work from anywhere i just lived in korea for three years i spent a year in non-sun which is where the the uh big army like where most people do their army training their the what's it called basic training yep and then uh two years in buchan which is like half an hour by train out of sub uh out of seoul so that's wild anyways i'm not there anymore but maybe i will again um anyways your question was kind of two questions it said um any advice for transitioning to out of one career into 3d and how do you know when you are ready to monetize your services when you can actually be paid for what you're doing good questions um it goes without saying that you shouldn't do anything stupid if you if you've got regular income at the moment and you have just started learning 3d um do not quit your job do not quit your full-time job stick with it because you need to yeah you've got to build up right um it's like if i wanted to become a programmer and i quit what i was doing today i would probably have to sell the house because my mortgage would collapse because i'm not going to be able to be at a level that somebody would need my services to pay for it um for a long time so um so take that into consideration right like i see there's a great book originals i think it's by adam someone um but yeah it talks about how like the the myths of this sort of genius people we imagine right like we imagine like a lot of entrepreneurs like take these big risks right but actually if you look at what a lot of successful entrepreneurs and business owners have done they're actually risk-averse um like richard branson the virgin airlines guy always confused him with russell brand that's the comedian different one richard branson virgin airlines before he started the company he made a deal with boeing whereby if the business failed he could give the planes back to boeing um so basically removing the risk of starting the business so um i think steve wozniak and steve jobs they were um they had full-time jobs before they actually went full-time at apple right like as they were building the company getting it to a point that it could actually you know work um yeah they had full-time jobs um those wabi what's the name there's like eyeglass startup company that kind of like disrupted the um eyeglass industry lobby what's it called i don't know what their name is anyways they did the exact same thing they just uh even when they got funding like they were still go like full time at another job or something um but anyways point is is don't don't take a big risk stick with what you're doing i assume you're a teacher in seoul because why else would you be there i know from experience that because you're white um just everyone assumes that that you're a teacher even within your white group of friends in korea it's like they'll just be going around talking or whatever and they'll be like so what what level do you teach and i'm like i do not i'm one of the few people who do not teach um i came here for love and ladies and gentlemen let me tell you i sealed the deal we got married in our final year of career but anyways your second part of your question was um how do you know when you're ready to monetize your services uh the answer to that is you'll know because someone will pay you so um there's obviously different tiers right there's top tier of like the ultra top professionals on art station which are getting job offers from all the biggest baddest game companies in the world and then there is the lowest tier which i believe is actually kind of like freelance gigs for people who aren't in the 3d industry so fiverr.com um freelancer.com i believe but basically like there's people out there who need stuff done for 3d and they don't have high expectations or high quality standards because they don't know what good 3d is they just need something like um you go on fiverr.com and there are people that will create like um 3d figurines for cake toppers so for like weddings they do these little figurines um and they'll do that for you right and they're not particularly good but they don't have to be you just have to know how to use the software enough to create a convincing cartoonish face that resembles somewhat of the people that your client would send in a photo of this is the the bride in the groom and my baby's crying so give me one second while i dampen that the wonders of working from home huh as i said a little frustrating but anyways um so you'll know you'll basically know because somebody will will pay you for work um so i would start in one of those places like literally go to google and just type in like 3d artist higher or 3d higher or something like that like put your mind in somebody who's not in the 3d industry who needs a job done like 3d printed cake toppers or um i don't know little knickknacks little 3d printed things for custom camera equipment or or i don't know like a 3d logo right what would they type into google in order to get it and then just go to those sites and just become one of the people on the sites and then you'll also probably want to learn like sales and marketing to figure out what to put on your page to a point that people would want to pay you um but do that and yeah it's not the highest paid work but you've got to start somewhere and that'll give you some skills and you can eventually work your way up and maybe a reach a point where you're you can be full-time doing that and you can actually start to um yeah improve your work to a point that you can work your way up and work at a company one day or something else that really in that you enjoy so that would be my advice to you noah all right next question hey you're on here twice how are you in here twice this is unacceptable noah is on twice all right um this next question is from alan plains hi andrew i tried recording one i don't know if it uploaded so i'm just going to do it real quick again my name is alan plains and my question is other than a 3d skill what other skill has had the most impact in your career that um i know you uh you took a business course i think some time ago you said it cost around two thousand dollars so i'm curious what other skill in 3d has had a huge impact on your career that you think wow thank goodness i learned that outside of the world of 3d thank you for everything hope this is an interesting question it is alan good question and very well asked that guys is the quintessential how to ask a video question short and to the point this is my question bam um and also vertical as well i like that because i can put it like next to the screen it doesn't have to be wide screens one of the one cases you can go vertical guys um actually vocals not so bad nowadays is it like five years ago it was all like never use vertical when you're filming something but now most of the apps we use we watch it like vertical so like instagram and everything is vertical it's not so bad anyways um okay good question alan um so the good thing about the art world is that they're all interconnected right all the art mediums if you learn one thing it'll be applicable to another like if you learned how to sculpt in clay would probably be applicable to painting right you'd learn volumes and that would help you with the shading of this uh if you learned like color grading for video that would help you with grading in 3d and likewise if you learn 3d that would be applicable to drawing because you'd already know something about perspective etc etc so pretty much any hobby within the art field will will help you so i know myself that that drawing has helped me to understand proportions better than i think a lot of 3d artists i've seen that actually just do really good sculpts but they don't realize that the eyes are just slightly off or the head is too big or the ears are just slightly in the wrong position because and i think it's a constraint thing right like a like a limitation when you're just drawing with like a pencil and a paper that's all you have so when the ears are in the wrong place or the eyes are in the wrong place you feel it because there's nothing else to distract you but when you're sculpting you have all this extra detail you've got layers you've got topology you've got the the light from the 3d view you've got all these things that can kind of distract it and hide problems that are clearer in another medium so that's why i think learning different mediums um can help you like photography as an example that's a really good one because all you have is is what's there and you have to make do with the things that you have to photograph right if you're photographing a bride and a groom or something like that you have to make do with the lighting that you have and so it's all about like how can i use that what i have here to make it work whereas in 3d software you've got unlimited possibilities you could do whatever you want to make it look good so you would have to learn in photography like composition framing stand between a doorway so it cuts off the edges um uh tilt the light like make them face this way or something like that and then likewise in 3d i know that like i've learned that when you tip the light in just the right direction the light hits the back of the head and it creates like a rim light around it whereas i've seen a lot of photographers don't understand that and so they'll create a subject on a background that is of similar value to the subject and therefore the subject just blends into it right it's like a dark head against a dark background and they just disappear into it so learning one thing will help you across other fields right so um there's really no like you know like i recommend this um uh drawing i mean i could recommend drawing but that's a it's a really long process to learn drawing well it's definitely painful um it is helpful i think photography is a really easy one that will help you as i said with composition framing lighting you'll learn about focal length as well which is really handy um so that can be really good [Music] what else i mean you know the fundamentals of color theory and everything but that's just kind of like art theory in general um other skills because you mentioned skills right so um believe it or not marketing like sales and marketing i think is very underrated for an artist to learn and the reason i say this is uh as an example my my personal trainer said that when he went to do his personal training degree degree or course or whatever it was um he said like 80 of the course was sales and marketing and that was because the the teacher said then most of you will fail at this right like the number one reason most uh personal trainers drop out is that they can't find clients and they can't keep clients so it would be a disservice for me to just teach you about personal training because most of you won't ever get to practice those skills because you won't have clients you won't have a regular income in order to keep doing that so 80 of this course is going to be about those two things how to get a client and how to keep them so um and fair call that's a very good point and i think the same applies to being an artist if you have to sell your stuff you have to put your work out there and it's almost like an allergy to some artist the idea of sales and marketing is like that's dirty that's the opposite ends of what art is that's not what i'm doing it for and sure if you just want to do art as a hobby then yeah fair call to you um you don't have to learn that but if you want to be good at and this is something you want to do for a living you have to get people to pay you that's how the world works so it's a very good idea to learn um yeah to learn sales and marketing because it'll um it'll come in handy there um another one uh the art of learning like learning how to learn so every artist needs to self-teach whether you go to school or not it doesn't matter because once you get out of school it's not like your journey is over every artist keeps learning for the rest of their career so you have to know how to learn efficiently and there's one book there's really only one that i can recommend which was the four hour chef by tim ferriss which is a book about cooking but it's also a book about learning because he is not a chef his idea of cooking used to be throw some eggs into a pyrex jug chuck it in the microwave and then pour some salsa on top and then that was breakfast but then he became like a culinary chef and he talked about like how he did that and he talked about the dss which stood for like deconstructing deconstruct what it is you're trying to learn uh s was like segment segment those things into different pieces and then like struck it was like put them in the order in which um that they need to be learned and then stakes which was what stakes can i give myself to motivate myself to learn it so i actually use that what that was the inspiration for my six month challenge that i did in my my presentation so i gave myself the stake of if i lose i have to give my cousin a thousand dollars but i don't get anything in return so it was just a motivator for me to uh to do it so anyways that that's a really good book learning how to learn um graphic design that'll teach you about believe it or not design and what good design is the gestalt principles like spacing between elements and that can help you yeah just in your 3d work as well there was another one i think i had some notes let me check my notes here because i feel like there is one more that i'm missing out uh oh teaching okay so this is an interesting one that most of you probably won't do but when you're learning something and i guess this is kind of tied into the learning thing but like you know they say um like you might have heard it before but you you don't fully understand something until you understand it enough that you can explain it to somebody else um what i mean by this is like i i learned this the other day well not the other day a few years ago when i was doing that color space video i was called the um the secret ingredient to photorealism and i talked about yeah color space in blender and i realized when i was like talking to people on twitter and asking people questions through email and things like that most people assumed they knew what color space was and color transforms and the difference between linear light and srgb and like for example what is gamma okay do you know what gamma is gamma it's a setting that you'll find on most monitors you'll see it in photo editing video editing software what is gamma if you're being honest you probably don't know and that's because it's a highly confusing term which is kind of outdated shouldn't really be used anymore um and it's it's it's something that sounds like if if you were too confident you'd be like i know what that is it's like a setting in your thing and you change it to 2.2 and you're good to go but what is it what are you actually doing with it so as another one like what is what's the difference between a 16-bit tiff and a 16-bit png or 16-bit exr right these are things that we think we know but then if you had to like talk through it like if you had to explain that to somebody else what would you say and that key thing like thinking you know something and then knowing it well enough to explain it to somebody else is very different and you realize immediately um how poorly you understand what you think you know um i think they say that for politics as well right like if you're um yeah like if you think you understand a point and you end up in a conversation with someone you're talking to them you can end up embarrassed because you don't understand you don't even understand the thing that you're arguing about and they can just be like that's not even how it works or something like that i don't know that's kind of a tangent but um anyways the the art of teaching is is really valuable so i've actually thought recently like with my 2d stuff i mean my channel is about 3d but it would actually be kind of cool for me just purely for me i don't care about anyone else if i made a tutorial on how to draw it would force me to understand it better and my artwork would improve through it so running blender guru has done that immensely for me because it's forced me to understand yeah what is composition what actually makes something work and break it down and you realize how deep it goes and some of the things you thought were true were false and you have conflicting information then you have to distill it into something that makes sense um yeah god there's so much bad information out there about composition the the rule of thirds i did a compositional video a long time ago like fourier-ish years ago i think i should do another one to just debunk so much of the composition stuff i think it's it's borderline like illuminati conspiracy drawing triangles over the images that's what people are doing they're going like and this picture looks amazing because if you draw a line from the arm that's facing like this and you draw it up and hits the bird and then the bird you draw a line from that and then look at this it creates a triangle and the triangle is good because of the design of a principal shape and was like what i could find an image that sucks that has the exact same triangle now what it doesn't make any sense i swear you're all talking bollocks anyways what went on a tangent there um so that's my hazard to that question um yeah just uh a whole bunch of hobbies out there so the the four skills that i mentioned so there was teaching there was marketing there was um the art of learning and there was oh like graphic design photography as well yeah anyways those things i hope that's helpful i think that was helpful all right the final question here comes from zee dain last name oh ahmed kerniatama i regret trying to pronounce that anyways hi andrew i just want to have a quick question uh so what do you think is the best way to learn blender if it's from scratch or if you want to learn something new so do you think it's best if you learn it on your own by experimenting and googling to see how things work or do you think it's better if it's with forums where you can ask and interact with people with posts or if it's better with videos where you watch a tutorial maybe from youtube or udemy or you think it's best if it's from hands-on experience with a mentor or a teacher may it be offline or online via video conference thank you good question um all of the above really um i think i talked about in the last episode right like if you were purely purely tutorials and all you looked at were tutorials um then you would never have you wouldn't be solidifying any of the learning that you've got to go out and create something yourself right if you were purely solo and thought i'm just gonna figure it out myself i don't need tutorials or whatever you would be flailing around in the dark trying to reinvent the wheel creating like doing so many mistakes that could have just been learned if you just watched a tutorial or read a book or something because they've figured it out you don't need to reinvent it right um it's the balance and it's knowing when you need to switch from one to the other and it's um it's an important thing right it it's not really talked about but that is a crucial thing is is learning when you need to switch gears um you also mentioned like do you need to go to forums um and be in a community uh should you talk to a mentor i think it'd be helpful to have like um if this then that statements uh i'm not a programmer but i'm familiar with what that means if this then that so coming up with kind of like this rule book for yourself um as an example so if if if this if i find myself um stuck because i'm trying to create something and i don't know what to do i don't know how to put the hole in the mesh um i don't know what the the lighting does whatever and i feel i feel lost and i feel like i'm not getting anywhere then find a relevant tutorial okay because it's clear i'm missing information maybe i need to learn some of the fundamentals of modeling and it's a completely separate thing to what i was learning but that will help me related to that if i feel myself getting bored that following tutorials because i keep watching so many tutorials and they seem easy at this point and i feel like i'm not really learning then go out and create something myself so i i talked about in the last lesson like having like a one one to one sort of ratio like one tutorial and then one free solo project one tutorial three i mean you could switch it up i mean you could go two uh three to one or one to three depending on which how confident you are but having that balance i think is really helpful um going back to the other two you mentioned if i feel like i'm running into a problem and i'm just bashing my head against a wall because every time i hit render it comes out black and i don't know what to do and i can't find anything online then join a community and ask the question right blender dot stack exchange is a good one for questions um twitter believe it or not um it is a dumpster fire of course but the one very valuable thing about it and this is the only reason i still use twitter and have developed a following is because i know that if i ever have a question about anything i can ask it literally anywhere in the world and i'll get like 10 answers in the first couple of minutes and that is invaluable i couldn't really put a price on that like i i mean i ask everything on there like the other day i was trying to we were working on a material polygon which is like those wood uh angled wood planks that go on the exterior of houses and i'm like what do you call that and i put like a pole like cladding siding weatherboard clapboard and got like all these responses and it was just like now i know the answer um if the answer is siding by the way that was the top the top voted thing but it's different all around the world believe it or not but anyway so i just ask everything on this so if you if you build up uh if you're part of a community even if you it you don't you know you're giving a lot now maybe you're just part of it and you're replying or you're you know you're just you know putting your artwork there or something like that if if you're part of it you build a kind of a relationship to other people when it comes time to ask a question you'll have a venue in which you can do that so highly recommend being a part of something there and then if if this then that if i feel that i have reached a plateau in my career i follow tutorials i'm not really learning anything to get past this plateau um i don't know what to do next help then seek out a mentor okay seek out any site that offers a mentorship um yeah because you probably do need professional help you're at a level that you um probably at an intermediate to advanced level where having a mentor would really help you so um that those are kind of the statements that you would build in your head this kind of rule book for how how to know when you're at a stage when you need to flip the balance and switch to something else because that's kind of the um it's kind of the crucial bit of learning right you don't want to just be like making mistakes again and again and again um when there's tutorials and learning out there for free on youtube that you could be taking advantage of that would teach you how to avoid that and how to do it properly the first time so you don't have to you know make these make these mistakes so um but at the same time you also don't want to be flailing around in the i don't need a diagram and then just like you know spending five years learning something that could have been learned in a couple of months if you just follow tutorials at the start so i have seen that i have seen that do you see some people that are that have been part of a community or a forum and you've they've been posting there for years and i don't seem to really be getting anywhere um i don't know why but anyways so that's my answer to you zidane i hope that was uh i hope that was helpful and that concludes this podcast if you have questions for next episode go to blenderguru.com forward slash podcast question all you need to do is take out your phone like this you hit the camera button then you hit the selfie button and then you hit record preferably record it in under 30 seconds short and sweet and make sure the question is clear um the camera the microphone everything on your phone is good enough um yeah don't use your webcam it is very hard to hear so just use your phone everyone's got a phone just use that hit record um write out your question before you ask it if you haven't done it before but that'll really help you solidify what it is you're trying to ask before you start recording um because i don't want to include questions in the podcast where listeners are struggling to hear and understand what the question even is because that's just boring boring listening right nobody wants to hear that so i want to have the ideal one was like from the allen plains uh short and sweet vertical video um just do that so send it there blendyguru.com forward slash podcast question it's just a dropbox folder you drop in the file and away it goes and um the best questions will get answered on the next podcast um so stream this on spotify or wherever it is you get your podcast from just not from apple itunes because i don't know i just can't get it on there i'm using anchor.fm and it's supposed to like propagate it out there but it's not on itunes i don't know i don't know how many people that use itunes anymore either they use youtube and spotify seem to be the place to go so anyways you can find it there links are in the description and thank you for listening and i will see you in the next episode bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 54,524

Keywords: podcast, art style, artist, habits, workflow, technique, qa, Q&A, community, stylization, art, style

Id: kXtNeUUoN3Y

Length: 58min 23sec (3503 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020