How to Become Motivated as an Artist

hey guys heading immortan from flipping rolls and this video is gonna be a very interesting video we're gonna talk about motivation and it's it's a it's a question that we've been getting a lot both in our discord and our comments a personal email sent about this topic specifically so it's something we've been thinking about talking about for awhile I made a bunch of notes sort of try to distill our thoughts into a little document that and we're just gonna try and take you through the process of how we stay motivated sort of what we have been doing in order to keep on track throughout in our careers and the kind of work that we do and hopefully some of this can apply to you guys as well and help you along there it's been an incredibly hard video to actually get prepped for yeah this because it's it's kind of like when we started teaching sculpting as well you just been doing for ten years and now you got to actually find the way you were doing it yeah there isn't really a method to it you're just kind of doing it but now you've got to figure out a way to do it same one here with motivation it's just something we just kind of been doing yeah and I don't my biggest problem with let's say these kinds of videos is that I don't want it to turn into this pseudo inspirational [ __ ] about like oh you just gotta wake up at 5:00 a.m. in the morning and you just got to do this thing and blob like all these like things that I think I think a lot of the issues I have with all this is that people tend to look for a method and there's some like you look on LinkedIn there's like 10 supposedly CEOs in air quotation marks here they're saying that this is the road to success but they don't really have success at all it's like you have to surround yourself with failure all the time and like it I think there's a lot of misinformation out there from people that are just trying to sell you something this is a free video we have no agenda here as people will try to just distill the [ __ ] because I feel motivation might be probably the area with the biggest [ __ ] there possibly is there like it is is it is the whole LinkedIn or the CEO on Twitter which has all these like motivational stuff you definitely gotta wake up four five four five you gotta take a swim in the lake only berries yeah but you see it so often with the people where they have I think I think we talked about it it's the whole might offend a lot of people but well the the people on Facebook let's say Facebook we're linked in the post motivational like images with text or whatever are never the people who are successful themselves because why would I mean it's like has anyone ever read do they actually read the posts that they make themselves with it's like I can't even think of them because they're just so stupid most the time yeah this this video here is not going to be your aren't gonna be able to put this on a t-shirt no it's it's a complex issue which deals essentially with human psychology and how to trick your brain into doing something that it doesn't really want to your brain wants to just chill out and survive now you're gonna be like you got to work really hard and you and your brain is like but I don't want to do that it's like the whole universe thing is looking for equilibrium and everything in the universe just wants to be great no and then your brain is the same your brain doesn't want to do hard Oh what is that it spends more energy you're not designed to do complex things with your brain well maybe you are but it's like it's like your brain doesn't want to decide to the CG no so we before we really get into the Nitty Gritty of stuff here we're just going to define some terminology here because the terminology here is all over the place motivation what does that even mean yeah like so we we have three terms here which we are going to be which you might not agree with these terms but this what we're using so you have inspiration this is where you have a sudden burst of energy we want to do something you might be going to bed at 2:00 2:00 a.m. at night and you're like I'm gonna put change my life I'm gonna start going to gym how are you an art station and you're just looking at some awesome stuff I'm gonna start doing some painting right away yeah and that's awesome that's an awesome burst of inspiration to have and but it's not it's not enough by itself and then we have a discipline discipline is what I think is the most important thing here it is consistently doing the hard work it is doing the thing when you don't want to do the thing ya like cuz it's so it's easy to do something when you enjoy it you know like we were just talking about before like you know you're going to the gym and you wake up you're well-rested he's like man I just really want to do crunches today then you don't need discipline nothing you're like you you're automatically in there your mindset it's just let's do it mmm it is the days where you wake up and you go it's raining and there's a hurricane outside cars are crashing but dammit I just need to do some crunches you need to get thick and maybe you don't go to gym if there's a hurricane outside and then you have like motivation there's this word here is kind of like this is a bit hard to define but this is kind of like the reason you have discipline like you should just have discipline to have discipline you need to have like a goal with this this is this is the one which is a bit hard to find but it's kind of like the underlying feeling of wanting to do something it's kind of like long-term inspiration I guess stretch the the joy of really want to scope right now over to a feeling which is I don't want to sculpt right now but I really enjoyed the feeling of sculpt and you wanted to be become better at it it's kind of like having a long-term gold yeah that's a good way to put it motivation is I think motivation is the most evil thing in the world because it's the one that people try to exploit in other people like they try to take whatever goals that people have and then they try to sell them a program about motivation and then they get the program and then it's about how to sell the program about motivation to other people and so it's like yeah that's why this something is so tricky like we had a talk we're talking about this all morning hmm trying to sort of figure out the best way to approach this and for me personally the reason this subject is so hard to talk about is because I don't know like honestly like if it just on the spot and I had to come up with what's your motivation why are you doing this but like I don't know I've been doing this for the last ten years yes 15 oh yeah so it's just a thing that's just so engrained in me now that I can't remember a time where I didn't feel motivated to do the things that I do and then trying to come up with a want to call it a system but like a pieces of advice that could help other people reach that as well it's so tricky yeah this entire thing started when working got an email and it was like somebody asking you how do you stay motivated and we're like how do you stay motivated that's actually really tricky so we had to talk along and hard just to be able to get back to the email because we could write some pseudo is inspirational stuff like you know you gotta believe in yourself but that is that's not really that helpful I don't so incredibly tricky topic to defrost or actually talk about yeah so let's talk about it this time let's actually start to get into some stuff here so one of the things a lot of people ask us is how do you get started like they were like once you once your engine gets rolling then then you were fine once the wheels are going here how do you actually get started how do you form habits here we're not gonna start of talking about how do you get started with this specific personal piece so that can be it as well how do you get started with art and how do you just keep it going I think you just it's really it's really it's so stupid cuz this videos it can be boil down to some super simple things where instead of you go home you're like man I just want a Netflix and chill online but I also really want a career as a character artist then maybe don't go home and Netflix and chill all night yeah like today was that day where you could start it it's like every day that you postpone it it's just a longer that it just takes longer for you to get there I remember we talked about that with the it's like a couple years ago like someone who is 42 and I say there were 42 and I don't have an invitation but I really want to be an engineer mmm and so let's say the engineer thing it took four years I don't know how long it takes but let's say four years we're like okay I can either be 46 is math yes I can either be 46 and not being engineer or I can start my engineer degree and be 46 with an engineer degree that thinking changed my life this is a reddit post and it was talking about that it was it was but what most motivational thing they've heard and that is really it and and in this case nobody he doesn't wake up every day and be like man I really want to become an engineer and just doing like little bursts of motivation your inspiration it in this case it was hard work yeah but I really think that changed just changed the way I was thinking about it like I'm gonna be starting I'm gonna be starting like martial arts now further soon in micro few hours and then it's like in a few years I could become pretty proficient at it or it could not be it was same with CG as well I in when we start out is like furious I can become bringer the CG pretty good drawing sculpting or could not and the not part is wasn't an option for me then if you could replace with something else let's say it is I could become a really good sculptor or I mean whatever it is he could be drawing or the good of languages or whatnot if it is if it is between becoming a Buddhist cult or taking care of your family I mean then is a different thing here but if it's between becoming a good sculptor or nothing else I think I think that sort of the thing about age like you'll be thirty forty fifty at some point anyway hopefully hopefully do you want to get to that point and not have achieved what you wanted to achieve because you were just too lazy to started yeah I mean you might as well try yeah you know I mean maybe you find out it's not for you or you find out it's too hard you don't really feel like you're you have the skills for whatever but at least at least then you try then you figure out you didn't like it yeah that's fair enough it's funny with age because there are some people who is like you know 60s and they're like should I be trying it because maybe they have 10 years their professional life left and that is like art you do actually you are getting into a more advanced age here but most of the people ask me that there are 21 what are you talking about in the u.s. you've been able to drink for like a few months like if you I mean you can always start you can always do this but surely I knew most of our audience is in their 20s and 30s yeah at that point you are super young yeah you can do anything it takes it takes a few years of hard work to get up to a certain level but that means that in a few years you are at that level in order to go from zero to a level in particularly sculpting here where you can do something adequate maybe you're talking to years of determined sculpting if you're 21 you're 23 nobody cares you look to save you're the same person yeah it's insane to me just the whole thing of you are now 21 in four years you'll still you before years older but you can just have it skills or you cannot have the skills completely changed the way I've been thinking about stuff yeah message me the other day as well not not so much about motivation for just in terms of acquiring skills which i think is relatable hmm he was talking about you know applying for school and doing a course online and this course was like a drawing course advertised for beginners and he was like okay I'll sign up for that he has no drawing experience whatsoever as far as I could understand and then he realized he actually needed some sort of fundamentals for this drawing course and and message me is like okay so do you think it's feasible that I can learn the fundamentals of drawing if I do ten hours a day for a week no that's impossible I guess the thing about so especially it doesn't matter if it's art or if it's use engineering again and whatever it's there's so many there's so many concepts that you have to learn within a field or an industry or something that just it's repeated exposure over long periods of time like consistent exposure again and again and then you start to get like when he when he asked me you know there's nothing nothing bad about it's just like this is the example you know what what I started thinking about what our drawing fundamentals like I did I don't know like I've been drawing for for many many years now and like I'm okay at drawing I mostly do 3d now but when I first start it was like the classical drawing like with charcoal and figure drawing that kind of stuff I I don't think about fundamentals anymore I don't think about weight consciously I don't consciously think about shadow perspective it's something that you learn over time it's not something you can learn in a week is the same thing with scope you can't learn the fundamentals of sculpting in a week it's just something that takes time and once you get to that point I think then it becomes more fun like that that's where you need discipline that the first year or two years however long it takes to get you up to speed with those fundamentals that's where you need discipline to keep you going because it's not you can totally enjoy what you're doing and enjoy the tasks and enjoy okay I want to get to that level but you might still be creating art that looks kind of like poop and that's gonna take some time to get out and you just I mean we still create stuff that looks like poop yeah in the beginning we are you yeah but even even the pieces that turn out well they have a poop stage yeah and you need to work through that that's where your discipline goes it doesn't matter if I feel like this it looks like a pile of trash right now but I need to get through this I think I think we're talking about in here would like a drawing fundamentals is so important because when I just really started to draw here though is I was during animation workshop I'm in rowing for years before that but I was trash at it I can draw portraits of celebrities and they were pretty decent portraits but that's just monkey-see monkey-do he's popping yeah truly learning drawing fundamentals to me wasn't so much understand a two point perspective or like specifically how to like render with a pencil or supply it was understanding volume like intuitively understanding volume where you can just put down some pencil marks on a piece of paper and you understood the volume you can handle like you got the perspective kind of free and I'm not really talking about the perspective lines it was just understanding intuitively the volume and that is that is what takes time you can't just brute force that that took me eight months I think - doing - it would understand and I was doing that every single day for hours this is something you can't just do a sprint on they can't just go I'm just gonna be crunching this for like ten hours and then you it's your mind takes time to develop these things here yeah it's not just so much talking about specifically the hours you put in like a whole 10,000 hours thing I think is complete [ __ ] M has eyes absolutely faces in science but it's just you just gotta spend time to learn these things here learning fundamentals here it's not just so much about the hours but it's also just so much about how much linear time has passed here maybe you need like I think maybe two three hours a day over like every single day over over like a week two weeks might be better than like I don't know like what would I be like to 20 hours or so in a single day yeah you got on you got to space it out because it takes time for your mind to learn this it's kind of like would work out as well you can't use work out for 10 hours a day no you got to be two hours for five days here because your mind has to recover your body has to recover from learning you got to sleep you got to put it into from your short-term memory to your long-term memory and this takes a lot of time that's really something that I started taking more and more seriously when I got back into language learning so currently currently Henning is learning Chinese and I'm learning Japanese fun I extremely I actually started learning Japanese the first time when it's around 16 that's where my inner we've sort of peaked out but you know listen Susan Japanese music tried to watch some animate and wasn't ready for me then I began when I was around 20 I think that's when I really started to because the reason it failed when I was 16 was because I had literally no goal or motivation with learning Japanese like this was kind of cool I guess when I was 20 my girlfriend at the time she she had worked in Japan for for a couple months and we started talking about like that sounds really cool I didn't even know anything about Japan and I started looking into it I was like kind you looks pretty pretty pretty badass and like I would like to learn to write that looks cool I learned I started learning more about the language I thought the language sounds pretty nice looked at more enemy still couldn't get into anime but you know as a as I get into that as a proficient weep nowadays I have to watch out so but it's like the cramming is is really what I started taking seriously like the or than not cramming I say where if I sit and I just rip out kanji and vocab for eight hours a day I my brain is dead after I know personally that I can do it for about an hour and a half to two hours of intense study then I need to take a break and maybe that is all I do that day or maybe if I take a break of an hour or so maybe for five hours then I come back to it again and I do another hour or two that works for me personally we talk hunting and I talked about this I I don't know if this is the correct term for the method we're calling it the 3030 method I think the 3030 methods this little extreme it's where you do something that you that you want to do it like the that you're working toward becoming carrot artist so you sculpt a foot for 30 minutes then you reward yourself for 30 minutes like now you watch whatever you watch youtube videos of cats because that's really what you enjoy and then you like that's what I you go back and you work for 30 minutes then you it's like work play work goodness I think 30 30 might be a little extreme I want to say more like maybe you work 40 minutes and then you take a 10-minute break or something where you do something you enjoy or maybe go for a walk yeah but the whole cramming personally I don't think it's good for learning whether you're learning you know language you know again becoming an engineer or a character artist whatever it is I think your brain has like this it means to internalize a lot of the things that you've just learned and if you're trying to cram in a lot in a day unless you have some sort of Rain Man memory I think your brain is naturally just gonna latch onto the things that it thinks is most important yeah and you and you go to sleep you actually just gotta sleep between the sessions like I can't stress how important that is so a lot of research coming out and I just have on the importance of sleep and we actually were talking about doing a separate episode on that just on because that that topic is just so important but when you are learning you just gotta rest in between that proper 8rs asleep there I absolutely despise this thing we're seeing a liner where you're like guys I didn't sleep I got like three hours and it was it worked so hard yeah cool you're not just not now gonna be inefficient for next week it's actually just as a quake not to talk too much about the Japanese stuff because motivation maybe we can we can get in there yeah we with the sleep specifically I noticed that so I'm using a museum application called Anki for for my kanji and when I when I sleep properly eight hours like uninterrupted sleep my retention rate for remembering things in the past week or month is around 90 to 95 percent when I don't sleep that drops by 10 percent consistently you know consistent that's one night but one night basically will get maybe six hours and now imagine if you have consistent six hours like you were just not functional it's like being drunk and how much fun that might be I mean it's not really a good long-term strategy for Less yeah I think that is hard so if you if you're consistently seeing that it's hard for you to stay motivated because you don't feel like you're learning the things you can't remember where the bridge button and Maya is or whatever maybe it's because you need to also face your sleep I've seen it so many times where you were you're playing a game and you just can't get this bloody thing where I was playing the Nuvi danke con game on this way and it's a stupid example and it was a bolster I just couldn't get it right and drive tried for like delayed two hours I'm so frustrated wake up next morning first try yeah and like nothing changed there but your your mind just kind of like cemented what has happened there it put all the knowledge from short-term memory into long-term memory and just kind of just kind of stored it in a more efficient way it processed it I think that's where it's interesting I think that's a good example of of getting an intuitive understanding of something you know something silly as it's just a video game as Donkey Kong I've had that with Dark Souls as well where I go to sleep and the next day I do it first try yeah because every time every time because all of a sudden instead of first of all now you're not filled with rage anymore kind of is annoying but your brain has sort of figured out the patterns after you've been sleeping that's now stored in your long-term memory and then once you start doing it again you're like okay that's just that's how I do it yeah same wind same with 3d as well it's really interesting how how it works and how it's how you can take Donkey Kong knowledge yeah I think it's also interesting with the whole like discipline as well and language learning because I mean we can't just talk about 3d here because this is there are parallels here yeah and also with 3d it's so we it's so long this is we actually learned this you don't remember anymore it's actually really hard and it's been like such a long process here but like specifically for me learning Chinese which is so ridiculously hard thing to do might be one of the hardest things if I just if I only did that when I felt super inspired I would never do it I would have failed a long time ago I've been doing it for a year and a half now and it's like if you can just keep let's say you're doing like one word a day then you were up to like 365 a year if your two words a day you double that three words a day and you're like like almost 2,000 words in a year I mean that's pretty cool that's only three words a day and then you have 2,000 a year then you have so 2,000 a year and then you do this for five years suddenly you know up to ten thousand words and that's just by doing three words a day yeah like that is not that hard it's like if you would do the same thing with sculpting as well during my last year of uni last couple years there I just hoped it every single day and that stuff matters like this kind of stuff accumulates if you're in order to learn sculpting specifically or anything family just got to do it a lot there isn't like the one sculpt where you know fluent in sculpting or fluent in language it takes maybe like 500 sculpts to do it just got to get through them you just got to have the discipline to get through them even if you aren't feeling it even if you aren't feeling in that day you got to spend hour hour two hours to sculpt in this thing here and let's say you have a day where you're really not feeling it do you a simpler study take a study off just eyes do a monster I do like a tiger whatever it might be just do one specific part and just focus not something we just not super are we had that now we flip normals as well we have days were you just not feeling it and you just gotta go alright today is a sin 3 it's not a non zero day oh the writer is sort of Ciro day will you get nothing done it's it's just a day where you you just do something simpler yes still productive but it doesn't break your brain yeah we have that the other day where I like the the heat in the UK has been intense and we have no infrastructure for that whatsoever no air conditioning no cooling and not anything no so a shirtless recording but he really got to me but still need to get some work done yeah so it was just okay delegate out plip tasks to me where I just go monkey see monkey do yeah and then I do that for a couple hours and then I finished because that's what I could do that day but it's still about just getting the work done of course I think it's important to mention that you will just have days where you feel like a potato yeah and that's you take a potato day yeah or maybe it's a potato week we just go you know I'm just gonna live in nature for a week now with the squirrels or something because it's like it's just it's also getting that break so it's like I feel like there are two kinds of breaks in order to stay motivated it's like one is you don't try to cram everything into an eight hour period and sit there and the other is you don't try to cram everything into a year you also you have to consider your life your hobbies family these are also things that like it might it might seem a little I guess counterproductive but you have the whole I want to be better at sculpting and I want to be really good at sculpting in five years so I just gotta sit there discipline do the work until I'm done mmm thing is you're never done but what you also have to consider what comes after what's in between because it's not just I think motivation could be more things than just let's say your goal was to become a character artist you want to work on me like big VFX films and stuff but you have you know you have your family that can help you stay motivated they're like oh this is really cool I mean your family's always going to love what you show them anyway you put it put your sculpt in the fridge exactly like on it so cool hopefully hopefully or find people not I wouldn't say to like it's not like fake don't see how fake motivation no it's not like you that's why we've raised a lot about the whole posting on Facebook because it's always just like oh this is great yeah this is the best thing I've ever seen even though it's none but you know that or seeking out people like-minded people that can help you stay more because you can motivate each other and then you think about okay what comes after this character artists life you know maybe it's family or maybe it you've destroyed your body by sitting in front of a computer for 12 hours a day that's gonna totally destroy your boy and you didn't do any fitness at all like I've had that issue I've had massive issues with my back because I chose to not do that I was just sitting grinding grinding grinding without any regard for my health and that that affects me now I was doing that during during uni I am III had I was wearing like gloves on both like arthritis gloves on both hand and arms and I was like 20 and I should have been fit I was fit I was doing a lot bunch of work out but I would I would work to like 2:00 3:00 a.m. and that was insane get 2 to 3 em and get 4 to 4 to 6 hours of sleep and sure I was I got a lot of stuff done by the what cost yeah I would much rather be no I wouldn't even say slower because yeah if I hadn't if you can't work 10 hours a day then you can work five hours but that might not be less productive no it just you probably you probably be more efficient doing less work yeah exactly what I mean what we're doing with almost none we've been going since 2013 we're going for almost five full years now Wow this this is this is a long project I know we only became super active here in in January but there's been a lot of stuff under the hood I'm building this up here they are YouTube isn't just the only part of that I'll flip normals is a huge part here so we have essentially been working like three to four hours every single day after after work and we've had full-time jobs effects as characters like this wasn't like we were not working like two hours spare time or something we had to provide for ourselves yeah and we had to build up our career same time and that has been really really hard but that's where you just I think you have to have that combination of like for me inspiration hasn't played a factor in that no but the combination of discipline motivation helps yes so like a standard day so here's a little thing that you might not notice we have flicked normals all right those have a secret company yeah more on that later more on that later so we have two companies and we've had those two companies so flip normals for five years five years and the other one for two years now and then there was a full-time job yes sir go to work comment at 9:00 leave at 6:00 you come home it's 7:00 you have to eat you and then it's just well we need to get this stuff out so you start working at 7:30 or 8:00 then you do that for a couple hours and three four hours and stuff and then you go to sleep and then you do that again so it's like it's kind of this thing over like it's not the most healthy thing no but that was our discipline just told us to keep going because we were so motivated to go full-time on flip normal yeah and we are yeah we've been full-time for almost off the last month and a half and it's fantastic yeah so I really can't stress how important the discipline part of that has been like when you've been working like essentially 10 12 hour days for like two years you're not like [ __ ] yeah let's do it this is awesome you are like this is not amazing but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel here and we could see that if we just keep pushing this then there is something greater but if we if that was my life doing three jobs at the same time for 12-hour days like that's not sustainable like that is there's also where we had time where we just like we took a week off each it's like no this is donkey kong time yeah this is bred for the wild and ass which were lying in bed as a potato and you're just kind trying to recover so I wouldn't I wouldn't real advise anyone to do three companies because that is that is just ludicrous while you're building a career we're trying to we try to give you all these tips and tricks but we do the reason is like we've fallen into so many of these pitfalls are so exactly so I think that's why it's it's it's actually really good to talk about because we been Terps about this as well sure like we've we've messed up things where it's like oh maybe we shouldn't have done this maybe we should approach it this way like like any say with said with you know now it's just video game time I had three weeks where I only played Zelda the hide when it came out for the switch and that's all I did and it was so nice to get that break and then then you come back to it that's what we talked about maybe take a week off yeah you come back to it now you feel refreshed maybe you've maybe you got a new perspective on something okay now I'm motivated you keep going this way maybe maybe your motivation changes because of it for sure one thing is well you're kind of alluding to here is that if you want to do if you want to do great things let's say you want to work and Blizzard at something or Pixar or whatever it might be that's hard to do like that is genuinely a really tricky thing to do every single person who is working at Blizzard doing like what you want to do they've had to sacrifice a lot of things that most likely they had to move from their hometown yeah that is like the first one which means that first off it's gotta be hard to see your friends and family I mean I'm not from London we had to move country we had to move country I'm Laden by the time I was 23 I lived in three countries like that is that is honestly hard to do but it's like if you if you gotta do it you gotta do it you gotta sacrifice certain things here and that's not to suck to sound depressing here it's just that there are just things you can't have it all you can't most likely you can't live with your friends and family have all this betterment world Netflix and chill every single day stay up to date on all the games and just really like you go to the beach and all these kind of crazy things while you are working at a major company it requires sacrifice here this is also where you've got to have you've got to have hobbies and you've got to have a life next to it because otherwise you you'll you're quick blizzard you know five years and you're like well that was that wasn't worth it he worked in a lot of cool stuff but I started talking with one of our last videos it does become a job so you gotta have a balance here but I just want to stressed is that you do have to sacrifice something at some point here pretty I mean I'm not saying that you got to just go crazy and sacrifice like like a ceremonial goat or something don't just do it for no no purpose here there is no God which requires the blood of the innocent here it's just that in order to learn this let's say you're a beginner and you want to I know we keep talking about sculpting cuz that's just that's our thing but he wanted to have a drawer you want to become an illustrator that takes time to learn more 10,000 hours thing is I mean is is [ __ ] cuz 10,000 hours but it just represents a buttload of time yeah you just gotta spend a crazy amount of time learning it and your competition will spend just as much time as you are yeah so in order to do that you can't play video games every single day maybe you can do it once you reach your goals then you can take a step back and play video games and and do all that starting stuff I hadn't really played video games in that years now the only reason I could is because I bought a switch yeah and I did I could it was portable so I think that I think that's important yeah I think I have a friend who sort of I think chose to balance his life in a unfortunate way when it came to sort of like the the sort of creative path you know where instead of splitting splitting his time between the creative stuff and trying to improve it gradually became more of more and more consuming media and playing games and you know he's quit now like he's done he doesn't want to do this anymore because he didn't I don't know maybe was like six or seven years of trying to do this and and repeatedly didn't really get that far skills kind of stayed the same and I think me I don't you know obviously I don't know maybe the motivation wasn't there from the beginning or maybe maybe he just didn't feel it but I've seen that a lot where people that end up in that position they then they they're the kind of people that start to gravitate towards finding methods to keep them motivated hmm and I think if you're trying to find methods to keep you motivated then maybe you have to rethink why you're doing this thing you're doing it's like maybe I'll piss more people off but I I hate it I hate when people making lists it's like it's no but it's more like you can totally keep a list but it's the whole list people mentality of like I have to have lists of my goals and so I need to know what my goals are I can't have any long-term goals because when I reach my long-term goal you know then I don't know what to do anymore and I think if you've reached the point where you trying to find a method to keep you motivated maybe either rethink why you're doing the thing you're doing maybe you can still you know find that motivation and find the original motivation to why you wanted to do this in the beginning maybe it was you want to become a game artist at a blazer or something but there is also a point where if you're latching on to things and desperately trying to figure out how to stay within the field and motivated maybe it's not for you yeah now to be clear on lists lists are awesome just use the right things yeah we had actually people here talking about specifically lists of kazaar us a bunch of people here and they were like lists are awesome if you wanna it is internally in a project one thing we can talk about here is like you have a huge project here and how do you how do you do it it might take like three months to do big projects are just time-consuming and if you're just going now oh boy that's a lot of work yeah and you're looking at the entire thing here that is crazy I mean you can't really you can't really perceive of all that maybe it takes like 300 hours to do that is a lot of stuff to have in your mind at any one point here yeah you need to break it down you've got to break it down here so we had some people who approached me personal Twitter saying that what they would do it make lists so this is not a [ __ ] on your point because that's totally valid it's just bad in this case they would just break the project down into smaller tasks that's something we keep doing this well yeah it's like you you're doing like this I mean we have a list right here exactly so if you if you have this massive project here let's say you're doing like are you doing a massive personal piece which has like 30 assets and these were written everything if you're going like whoo [ __ ] that's a lot of stuff you can't do that you've got to break it down into okay how many characters are there what props do they have let's say it so as one character and it has three props it's holding the gun and has a helmet then you've got to just figure out you know you're just gonna start with a model the character then model a proper that model helmet then a texture the thing and then light it and just be methodical about it you really need to break bigger projects down into smaller pieces you know and because it's like what we're talking about like if you can want to become fluent in a language or if you want to do if you want to learn the sculpting there isn't like the event where you learn it there is not like you wake up and you're like you see a light bulb ding and now you know sculpting it's a time process it it really just takes time to learn this kind of thing same with the produce while you know it just like well I guess you do have a point where the produce is done but it's not like you're just grinding and suddenly it becomes done it's an iterative process where it becomes 5% better for every single asset you're doing this one is done move on to the next asset then the next asset and then at the end of it you just have a finished product here yeah you really just gotta think of it as as a bunch of smaller steps and then like you can do anything if something is really hard let's say you have a really hard asset to model like you have a crazy hard gun to model well you're like oh [ __ ] that's pretty hard break it down into the individual pieces can you model each individual piece can you do that if you can then then you just assemble the gun from all these individual pieces and and again if something is too hard break them into smaller chunks yeah that has been maybe maybe the most helpful thing I've done when it comes to a protein bigger tasks here and this is that was a really big a really common question as well which we got when I approached this video here I think another way too this isn't it's not too it's not to say that if you don't feel like you have the motivation you should just quit no there's a point obviously where you might have to start rethinking that but you know there there are definitely steps that you can take to boost your motivation and you know we were talking about you can one of the things is is to keep track of your progress which i think is really cool obviously if you make a portfolio that's a surefire way to look back what you've done like I've always made it a point to never remove stuff from the internet you though even like it might be embarrassing or might be stupid but it's like at least then I know it's there you know I could just save it to a harddrive whatever but those might get lost I could upload to Dropbox blah blah blah but I think it's good to have a record of all the things that I've done it's just it's cool to look back and then you can also see okay this is where I was a year ago oh maybe I should do the same project and see how I've improved and but don't do the like silly Facebook ones where you actually make a worse one I see that a lot it's like oh yeah I started drawing ten years ago and now my drawing is actually worse yeah it's more comparing yourself to your former self is an interesting way to try to boost your motivation hopefully you've been proved in in that period otherwise I guess it could be deboarded too motivated you know you should have improved if you've just been keeping up consistently doing the work consistently that's so important the moment you start comparing yourself to people in art station and all these crazy places art station is center of our representation as a slice-of-life of the best artists in the world and they're all represented on the front page there in all the different categories where they are the expert on that now have the best sculptor right next to best illustrate an extra base concept art and extra base game artists the thing is there is always somebody better than you always just because if you are the badge of the best game artist whatever that might be you but you're a sculptor there was somebody who's better at sculpting a specific part or a different style than you or yeah or let's say you were to become the best objectively best alter impossible to do but let's for sake of argument say that then you have somebody who's better at character design there yeah there is always somebody who is better and you just gotta accept that and then stop comparing yourself to other people because it's just not gonna work it's the whole thing we talk about on the other videos like you feel the motivator because you compare your behind-the-scenes footage with their highlight reel like you don't know how much time we went into getting those pieces now but if you compare yourself to your former self then you have an affair the objective way of doing it like more like Morton I've kept all my stuff online I have a have a blog which goes back to 2000 aged I think it is and it's brutal I mean like the first off there like it's not great because it's like 10 years ago but it's fine who cares and the cool thing is you can see progress and then you can also see that at this point in this year something changed yeah like you can see you can see these leaps of improvement here yeah I have that way there was a Danish 3d form that is unfortunately not online anymore so I have salvaged those pictures where I went back and I actually checked it out and man I was just a douche like there was this one I was trying to do a self-portrait in 3d and easy easy I didn't know anything about 3d at this point I probably done it for maybe three months for something and so I posted this picture of Alva let's call it a head I guess it had the silhouette of a head a potato a potato with no assembly potato the problem is I didn't know anything about topology I didn't know anything about the flow of the face how how things were supposed to sit on the face so I'll post this in the forum and one guy kept acting like yeah a great start obviously you know he thought oh [ __ ] but it's like maybe you want to look into you know topology and like try to fix like you know get some get some topology flow around the eyes and the mouth and my stupid 17 year old self or however it was it's like yeah you know I thought apology was pretty hard so I'll just I'll do that next time like you but these are the kind of things where you look bagging anything man that was pretty stupid yeah let me not do that yeah yeah that's a good way of doing it at all no just looking back on to act the actual art but also just significant by how it was a person in this case that both are valid hopefully your bit better than that Boris both areas hopefully a little bit one thing else won't talk about as well is I think it's really valuable to not do easy things but to do hard things mmm it's kind of like the whole thing I think it's a JFK speech when he's talking about like we do we go to the moon not because easy but because it's hard because you're conquering a thing here yeah this is something that we listen to some of Jordan Peterson's rants he he's a very angry man sometimes but he has some he hasn't pretty he hasn't pretty important tidbits here wolf whistle might say one of the things he's been talking about which I totally agree with is you really get satisfaction and deep joy in life from doing hard things it's kind of like what everyone keeps saying about oh if I win the lottery I'm just gonna go to the beach and drink my margarita you're like all right cool how many margaritas like are you gonna have you're gonna be sitting here for 12 hours a day you're gonna have six murder here so seven margaritas and you're gonna be just be doing this forever yes that's an easy thing to do that is the easiest thing in the world you can become fat and you're just gonna be drinking margaritas and should be super drunk intent and super tan you get skin cancer like nobody's business or you can do something which is actually tricky to do like maybe you want to learn a new skill maybe you can go down to the beach it's like and you find somewhere in Mexico where you can manufacture your own tequila set up your own tequila company so you can drink I don't know like that would be hard right fine you find a lot of joy in that like I find a lot of joy in in doing what we do here like getting to the level we were in in our career was really hard to do it required a lot of work there doing character arts for movies there aren't that many positions there and that was that was really fun to do and it gave me like a look at deeper sense off I wouldn't necessarily say purpose but it just gave me like a deep joy knowing I'd achieved something really hard yeah flip normals has been incredibly hard because it's been such a marathon it's like it's like it's kind of stupid you know we give up our career to sit here and talk about YouTube videos yeah it's it's kind of the thing where we've now switched out something I'm not gonna say that doing the effects and doing creatures isn't hard but it became less hard yes you know because you get used to the work of it yeah and you come used to how to work with in working with people in a company we switch that out now for being full-time with our own thing now it's certainly really hard again it is and you know I guess I get an immense joy out of it like I don't know my motivation is just to keep this growing and you know get this out to as many people as I can I can see that we're helping people you know we're getting a we're getting a lot of feedback from everyone now that you know they really enjoying the content and maybe people learn something someone recently got in touch with that about us about oh yeah I wasn't gonna apply for this internship thing but now I applied and I got it thanks to you guys so it's like oh that's super cool so my motivation there is just to help people improve and learn and that's really hard I mean it's really hard to essentially motivate people to get an internship at a certain place and that gift that gives me a lot of joy yeah and doing Chinese is incredibly tricky if you know any good resource for any Chinese please let me know there is I can't find any it's so tricky but the moment you like listen to a song or you listen to a podcast reply and you just cache a sentence and you're like I get this now that that level of satisfaction is insanely rewarding yeah it's so it's so good but that's because it's time doing something hard if I was just drinking margaritas all that would be like cool another margarita no awesome so it's the same thing as well when you're doing fitness as well which is hard we were both doing fitness for like the last many years just staying in shape at the moment you can see real improvement maybe you haven't liked taking out that super douchey selfie in a while and you have like seen progress but then the moment you do actually see progress I become so hyped in a whole different level and the reason I think is because because it's hard not a little people can do it now because if it was you know by definition it's hard so it just kind of means that you can now do something that not a lot of people can do yeah are from the tar country of China I mean like the reason I can talk about sort of Japanese and motivation is because it's still a fairly fresh thing yeah you know compared to 3d which I've been doing for so long that's kind of hard to think back to or when it started and stuff is I've been doing 3d for long I haven't now pretty much that's oh that's insane but like with Japanese it's when I when I was around yeah that when I started the second time when I was around 20 I started because I got like an internship job thing in Japan and this was during school and I was gonna go down there for the summer and just work for a little bit so I thought you know be super cool if I could speak the language and this is like I don't know with six or seven months of prep or something and it's kind of back to the drawing guy you know can I learn a language you know you cannot know it's just this too little time and I didn't really my motivation wasn't really all there I think it was just more of a this would be kind of cool yeah so let me try so obviously I failed horribly it was hard to keep myself motivated but like reading textbooks and doing kinda was like why do I need this if I think to speak I don't need to read um whereas where's with this time obviously now I have more time because we quit our jobs but also after working there and being there I just found out that I really enjoy the country I really enjoy being there I just enjoy exploring the country is such a huge country with crazy nature crazy culture and there's so many fun things to do so that really motivated me to pick it up again and and really go go ham on on studying the language so I think finding that one thing that can motivate you and obviously that that thing can change like that changes all the time for us with with 3d then you go like now I just want to be the best person at sculpting a face yeah and then you go like okay I think I think I'm decent now and then you develop a new kind of motivation where maybe I can apply this to the entire body yeah maybe I want to learn texturing now so I can become a better artist in general so it's like it's trying to shift those goals to sort of keep ahead of them all the time I think I think so this is something which we have a point which is gonna live this it's like make a list of surface of self your weaknesses there's something I did with during art school as well just what is my biggest weakness cannot be a mental list yeah you don't have to actually write down but like just figure out yeah just figure out what what is your weakness and if you keep always improving weakness and you just kind of generally become hopefully a fairly adequate person a fairly ok decent yeah most ways yes and then of course the it is kind of like the debate between should you make this strongest stuff that strong or should you make the weakest stuff and stronger I heard I heard a podcast were talking about like football versus or soccer if you're from across the pond and you were silly and like footballers basketball here and in basketball it was about making the strongest player stronger but a foot play was about making the weakest player stronger because then in there are so many goals in basketball where you just you just gotta get those through but in football it's like it can be 1 0 yeah and you just got to make sure that if you have one week one week linked here then you might the other one might get a goal in so it's kind of like do you want to do you want to become an expert sculptor and only become good at sculpting that is taking your strongest thing and making that stronger yeah or do you want to take a weakest thing and make that stronger that could be like oh maybe your maybe your affects work is really bad or your lighting what and use that that wasn't just depends on what you want to become if you want to become the most hotshots culture out there maybe you want to only make the strong and stuff stronger but if you want to become more generalist or have overall sense of what get a good art foundation maybe you want to take the weakest things that's kind of what I was - I was I was I improved the base thing so I could do most things but then I just I I took my sculpting and made that stronger stronger but then he let's see do you want to want to become a sculptor only a hotshot sculptor you've still got to do the whole what is my weakness here and that's like well almost we're good at sculpting ears scope ears this drew a bunch of them sculpting nose there's all these kind of things here and then you can expand from there and you just general just refine your skill set to a point where you'll become awesome more than adequate I think I think that's a good point also - staying motivated throughout your say throughout your career is that when you this is back to sculpting like we're tending we're talking about the ears like you wanted to do hard things not easy things if you if you get to a point where you're comfortable and you're truly comfortable and you feel good about what you do you know you you actually feel like this is some good stuff I'm producing good quality work and get word you're hired all that stuff then I think it's time to like you know introspect look in and figure out what is what are the areas that you're maybe not so good at and then go back and reevaluate that and do that that's gonna be uncomfortable again and then so you'll be in this cycle of I'm not good ears or feet or ISO whatever then you get that up to a certain level and now you're good at two things and so you can keep improving this all the time I think I think we're kind of hinting it here is the t-shirt which says get out of your comfort zone yeah that is important like and by doing this you will just it will just feel uncomfortable yeah and that is kinda comfort zone I just don't want to say get out of a corner so to leave them that because that's like all right cool now I'm not a member so like what does that even mean you know what someone should do they should transcribe this entire thing and put it on the longest picture in the world and then post it on Facebook if you do that that would be awesome I wonder if you could do like a cuz I call you to pass those automatic captions there's a way to export all the captions paste them into a picture so if someone from the discord is listening this is now a job for you yeah that would be fun going back to me lucky yeah it really is about like not about slogans it's about like the true meaning of like like what I was saying here if you if you if you are really good at sculpting the face and then you could do sculpted ear it's gonna be uncomfortable and that is what going out of comfort zone means it means that what you're doing something and it just kind of you kind of feel bad about it you feel insecure yeah you're and one of the things I think is so important here this is something which has helped me so much is becoming comfortable with the notion of being uncomfortable yeah it kind of sounds like an oxymoron here but essentially this means that you were accepting that there's gonna be a period here where you are not comfortable of discomfort I really I really learned this when I was a few years ago starting Krav Maga in London and this is crazy martial art and the first lesson there I'd never done martial art before and I was just thinking that this is terrible I'm getting beaten up or left right and center and it feels really uncomfortable because I didn't know how to punch for strike or block or any of those things I I literally had no idea what I was doing and everyone else did mmm everyone else there was better than me and I I just realized that this is good just gonna suck quite some time and it took a few months but then after a few months you get the basics in there you can start playing around with it you can turn and jump and block and all these kind of things here yeah and that was just from doing something unrelated to see G this is improve my CD a lot because whenever I'm doing let's say I'm sculpting an ear or foot or whatnot something which is kind of hard and it does feel uncomfortable I'm not like all right screw it let's just pack it up here boys and let's just leave it it's more about all right this feels pretty bad yeah let's just keep doing it I mean that's that's that's what I have with Japanese as well it's the thing the thing that got me sort of into Japanese I guess a lot again I was I've been doing I've been back in Japanese for about two or three months now and and about a month ago my approach to Japanese changed I was doing that this the standard stuff of textbook which I hate I guess actually I hate it with a passion because I think learning language that way just sucks I guess not fun like I'm not having fun doing it and when you're not having fun doing something it can be really hard to motivate yourself I guess I've gotten to the point now versus like well I just suck it up just watch out I'm a movie but then I found I found a channel here on YouTube called Matt versus Japan and Matt was talking about you know things of keeping he was talking about keeping yourself modak I would really anyone who's interested in motivation I would actually consider going to Matt versus Japan's channel checking it out regardless of your interest in Japanese or not because he talks about a lot of really good things and one of the things we talked about was um he was talking about grinding which I like it just clicked with me instantly where if we if we change out the fact that we're learning a language or you're learning a software or skill any skill and you go think of it like a video game like I think most people here can relate to playing video games whether it's World of Warcraft or Pokemon and this example were going Pokemon hmm so this is me I'm stupid when I play pokemon I get you know a couple Pokemon then I go into the grass and I just I just decimate piggies for a couple of hours but that's grinding that the buff is Rosset ah in the war and then your little rat attack can just destroy awnings but that that's the hole that that's sort of I think shifted my mindset alone on it where it's when I'm doing Japanese now it's I just view it as grinding like it's not that I enjoy per se learning I'm learning what it's like 3,000 kanji yeah and it's not that I'm a Savoy you know some parts of it I find it really fun you know learning maybe I look up that homology of a word and figure out why is this kind you like this but it's the grind I just know that if I do this I will level up yeah then you know in October I'm going to Japan for a week with my girlfriend like okay that's kind of like me going to the gym yeah I'm like the Pokemon gym and I'm challenging Gym Leader and you know on Wednesdays I have a tutor that I try to speak Japanese with I see that as like a mini challenge as well so I thought is like a trainer trainer I meet a trainer along the way it's uncomfortable I don't really want to have the battle but now I've been walking in the Pidgey grass for a few hours and hopefully it's a little bit better and I don't know like having that mind set on things really changed a lot for me that made it a lot more enjoyable at the same time I also switched out if you do go to met I'm not gonna go into detail but if you if you do go to Madras of Japan's channel you'll see sort of like the method that I'm using I think that's so important to hold a grinding cream there because that's applicable to everything one of the things we want to get across with this video here is that this is not just for CD or whatnot like when I'm starting to learning Chinese or programming or whatever it might be or starting a secret company or all these kind of things there is there is a method to it here it's not just going through it and just trying out random things here there is a clear method know like when when I'm gonna be starting starting Brazilian Jujitsu about a few hours first session yeah so whenever you guys listen to this I've probably beaten to a pulp yeah next next episode it'll probably just be me yeah then you know there's gonna be a there's gonna be an approach to it like specifically what you couldn't be doing I don't know but it's more about you got to be grinding got to be doing a lot yeah I'm gonna be beaten to a pulp it's gonna be really uncomfortable and so what so what if it's uncomfortable every single person there is gonna be better than me in a few hours yeah and I know about and this okay I'm not nervous about or anything because it's just that's just what's gonna happen mmm because we have an approach that this turns out start learning CD you can learn Brazilian Jujitsu with the same approach here like there is actually an underlying thing here to it through a discipline and through having a clear goal of why you're doing it so I think we're kind of reaching the end of this now yeah do you have any any crazy stuff you want to talk about any yeah I think I think we've covered a lot of things in it I mean I hope this is Jeff I hope this can help people then this has been exactly an hour right now so just to sum it up though for me when it comes to to discipline or to motivation and discipline all this it is really about discipline it's really about consistent work it doesn't have to be it's not a sprint it's not where you just running for like races learn whatever it is you're running it or doing it's not about skulking even see where fifteen hours a day it's about discipline and a slow but consistent effort here you have hopefully you have a resemblance of life outside yeah where you you should get enough sleep you always get enough sleep you never you never stop that because then everything goes off the rails you just keep being consistent with it and then get long-term goals as well like more I'm saying learning Japanese is one of reasons is going to Japan maybe living in Japan and a clear underlying thing here and then I'm also combine this with like bursts of energy as well the inspiration is important but the one of the key problems I keep seeing is that people rely on bursts for inspiration yeah burst of inspiration is a good architecture what's the show okay now motivated exactly you're like you're relying on you're relying on on this like this very fickle inspiration to be able to do a really hard task here most things you're doing is like a thousand step Jeremy like you just gotta take that exercises the celica very hard journey at all it's a million step 10,000 step into 10,000 hours yes with your lists would you t-shirt slogans yeah but most things just takes a lot of time to do they just they are incredible time-consuming and you just gotta accept that it's gonna take a long time it's gonna you can accept that it's gonna be really hard and and you're also gonna accept that once you do it it's gonna be awesome yeah once you can like play around with see brush or your Japanese or whatever it might be it's gonna be fantastic and it's a break big project into smaller into smaller chunks have clear milestones along the ways I think milestones are super important I something I think didn't maybe let's talk about work which didn't really touch upon but milestones is like it's a mini it's a mini golf yeah yeah I guess that it's a goalpost and it's like I want to work towards this thing once I reach this thing then I can start the next milestone that I have so I think planning out those milestones can be really important to keep keep ahead so you don't reach that's where you don't you don't reach one of your goals and think [ __ ] what what do I do now huh you know it's or you never reach your goal yeah yeah so it's like breaking that it's like breaking your your motivation into smaller the Arctic's as well can also really help you stay motivated yeah exactly it's like if I were to go to the gym across here now it's a Brazilian Jujitsu and try to fight the biggest baddest do there I would get you might I would die he would literally kill me and around four seconds like that's not a good way of doing or you were trying to lift weight or trying to lift you and or kill his first time you can't do it that might be your end goal to be the best at something but you gotta have miles comes along the way as well if you want if your goal is to become an art as a blizzard you can't just be art star now open Maya open ZBrush go you gotta have something like you did a great a cool piece you get maybe wonder goals as you get featured on on art station you can get a 3d to Al Excellence Award your mom put your sculpt in the fridge yeah buncha you get hundred likes on Facebook whatever might silly thinks it might be just have clear milestones because otherwise you are just gonna be grinding indefinitely yeah and I think the whole thing about being comfortable being uncomfortable and do the hard things do the things you suck at yeah and make sure to improve those along the way so that you don't like forget what it is to stay motivated and remember to take breaks guys yeah play some place in Pokemon but isn't poke actually take breaks go to nature we usually have like one walk a day just trying to go and get a little bit into a forest or like just getting some strike nature and we were doing that even when we were working in a studio I think it's important you know we'd go for a 20-minute walk or something just go outside and not look at your screen all day like don't look at nature on your screen no for example no so when everyone else has smoke breaks we took with your walk breaks I think it was a little bit weird because I feel some people were like are you taking a breaks no everyone else is doing down at cafe drinking coffee all time yeah we took a walk he just went outside the building yeah you walk outside the building turns out you yes you can what are we gonna do so I really hope this video hasn't turned into the thing I hate the most in the world which is like pseudo motivational stuff but I feel like we've tried to get our points across and I hope yeah I hope it's not pseudo motivational [ __ ] I mean it works for us at least yeah so it's we've been really trying this we've been really trying here to do the best job we can yeah I'll be very curious to hear if there's anything here in this video which has been particularly useful to you guys yeah if you are you are staying find that you stick and stay motivated other ways you know we can add to this we'd love to hear that because like Martin was saying I certainly there are things like sudden like the Pidgey grinding metaphor which is just like thing there might be and maybe this entire video there is one thing which is useful yeah that's often what I have when I'm growing through like all my business books and stuff there's one useful thing though buddy about the entire thing TLDR watch this entire video so thank you so much for for your attention for an hour I think this is a long video we've done yeah probably now go out in the sunlight and we're gonna go outside now and uh we're gonna die out there it's gonna be so warm oh yeah thank you guys so much for watching and if you want to see more content like this in the future we're gonna keep it maybe not this long in the future if I make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe and thanks this

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 78,134

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, twitch, mjthehunter, flippednormals, henning, morten, creature, character, texturing, sanden, jaeger, substance, painter, designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, cinema4d, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, drawing tutorials, motivation, how to become motivated, getting discipline, motivated, motivate artist

Id: SV60kFuLOwE

Length: 66min 44sec (4004 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 19 2018