How to Learn Anything! For Creatives & Self Learners—Whiteboard Session Homeschool Edition

what is up everybody i am super pumped to do this whiteboard session with you today the reason why is because these have been very effective at teaching you a concept now this was originally planned to happen pre-covet so i've been sitting on this idea for a little bit but i think it's now more relevant than ever and we're doing something radical and a little bit different i've asked my team and there's four future members here in studio with me to help me try to create a virtual workshop experience because you know why because i like seeing your faces i want to talk to you i want it to be interactive and doing these zoom calls hasn't been so so now we have all these cameras to try to help bring you the audience in here into the studio with us so you can learn from us at a safe distance and i think that's really critical so what are we going to talk about today we're going to talk about how to learn anything that sounds a little preposterous a little ambitious and i admit it is that's called a click bait how to learn anything but i was thinking about this and i was working with my son to get his portfolio ready for high school and he's going to go to a specialty art high school and he's been homeschooled with us now for two years and i needed him to learn how to create artwork that he liked liked he looked up to that he was inspired by so really the asterisk to this how to learn anything i'm going to put a little and say for creatives can we say that for creatives and i think we have a room full of creatives who are excited to learn now if you are a fan of the channel if you're part of our pro community first of all thank you welcome and some of you guys here are sustaining members there's this concept that i've been talking about i've just given it a label now so don't get caught up with it i want to introduce an idea to you called the five ingredients how if you look at any problem anything that you want to learn and you break it down into five discrete chunks five steps scaffolding five ways five ingredients there's a chance that you can start to decipher it and break it down and figure it out for yourself and that's what we're going to do today so how to learn anything for creatives the creative edition all right let's get into it so i i came upon this quote by alvin toffler and i'm just going to read it the way it is because there's something really important in here and he said that the illerit of the 21st century are not those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn unlearn and relearn so there's this beautiful harmony here i'm going to draw hopefully a triangle here so the illiterate of the 21st century is we must be able to learn and then we got to unlearn and i'm going to explain this in a second and then relearn there's a lot of learning going on in the 21st century ricky how do you feel about that we can tell how much you've learned since those dark days of the after hours right you've grown by leaps and bounds so what does this mean okay learn okay so there's a lot of information out there there's no shortage of information we live in a time in which we're information rich and time poor you've heard me say this before information rich so there's a lot of that's out there your ability to process gather and learn things is really going to determine how far up in the world you move and how close you are able to achieve your goals thankfully much of education information has been democratized and most of it is out there for free or nearly free this is incredible so you got to learn this is critical and then what's going to happen is you don't want to get stuck with the first piece of information that you learn so for example if you really like an idea about pricing where some fool some asian fool tells you you should say the price first you're like that sounds really good i'm going to do that and later that same person tells you you got to say it last then these are conflicting ideas so now we have to try we have to kind of resolve in our mind what is he talking about which one do i agree with and so the best thing that you can do while you're learning is to have an informed opinion that you're able to compare and contrast and so by doing so you form your own idea and then you relearn and you keep testing this hypothesis over and over again for everything that you do in the rest of your life so learning should never stop it should be kind of like this recycle symbol we kind of go in these circles right i know some of you guys are thinking i thought you're going gonna tell us how to learn anything and we're gonna get into this creative part which we are we're gonna get into it but you know i gotta go into a little theory a little philosophy first okay all right so for me my wife and i we have these discussions a lot because one son is going to a boarding school while the other one is homeschooled and we keep asking ourselves these questions you go on the internet you go into youtube and you tell people the traditional education brick and mortar four-year education may not be as important as we think it is now for some things that's essential but for a lot of things we need to rethink this so she asked me and she was so concerned she was getting nervous that we're being bad parents and that we were not raising one of our children or child well so what's going on there so i said you know what here's what's really important i think about this a lot and these are the three absolute essential skills based on what Alvin Toffler was just that i just mentioned earlier okay so let's get into what this is all right the three criticals for 21st century education is this one is you have to be able to self-learn this is the learning part and this is great for people who are auto-didatic meaning they're self-learners they can figure stuff out on their own and where do we go to learn stuff these days ricky school okay but if you're gonna learn on your own self-taught yes you can find it on a book in a book youtube is a great place and that's where a lot of our fans and friends are on in youtube what else can you do you can take a course excellent and those of you guys that are joining us live in the zoom you can unmute yourself if you're not in a noisy background only i can hear you though the rest of everybody can't hear you so it's okay you just shout out some answers how how are you learning where are you getting your information from social media groups social media groups like anyone in particular matthew i mean besides the future there's no life besides the future my friend it's theme dependent so their niche okay the niche don't don't unmute yourself so fast or meet yourself like i want to have a conversation with you okay let's stay insane yeah so i study wildlife one of them is plant identification okay and where did you find information about plant identification i try and find them from trusted sources so when we're having those conversations in that space i'm reaching out to particular websites that i know have you know enough information i know what you're talking about yeah so sometimes there's these blogs right like there's ones for typography for plants and for cooking and they're super hyper niched and focused on the things reddit oh reddit's another place well it's a dangerous place to learn but let's just put it up there good Reddit what else instagram david talent's coming in with instagram carousels i love it i love it self-serving for both of us thank you david for saying that okay and somebody else had said something i heard you say something what mentor mentors well a mentor i would say is not now self-learning because somebody else is giving you the information they're working with you okay so yes you learn from mentors but i'm gonna say not for the sake of what we're talking about because not all of us have access to mentor not all of us can afford a mentor i'm just talking about what where what what are the other places that we can podcast podcasts beautiful they're passive so you can do other things while you're learning yes so so matthew's saying you can multitask for sure i think that's a lot of how people consume podcasts you could work out you can do the dishes mow the lawn or something like that and you can learn from podcasts okay trial and error is a big one trial and error most definitely here so you're getting ahead of me there but that's very good alec what's up we have a couple answers in the chat also you can okay who can read that oh i oh there we are torrance wait wait wait wait torrence i don't like that who said that you wanna how dare you you want what are you doing to me torrence suggests certain uh illegal activities that i can't condone because people are torrenting our content but yes i guess you're right you can learn from torrents please but please pay pay for the content if you like it otherwise people like us go out of business all right someone mentioned the library as well the good old-fashioned library and millennials are like what what is that alec tell us what a library is i don't know if we're allowed to go to the library right now that's unusual right so we can do quarantine edition and only underline the things that are uh approved in terms of us learning okay so these are all very good things if we just take the idea of a library or youtube or google vast amounts of information out there we need something we need certain skills to be able to extract this knowledge because why is it that people always ask the same questions over and over but they don't go on to these sources and figure it out okay so let's let's see what we need as human beings we need a couple things we need curiosity because i'm curious about this thing that starts there so we just need to be curious about it like i wonder why this guy is blue what happens is after we die these are like questions and so we have to get really good at asking and phrasing questions in the search age here because that's the age that we're living in and it's a little different because the computer to date can't fully totally not yet it's getting pretty close to interpreting what your intention is if you ask a human being how much money does this person make they can start to figure out your intention and give you the piece of information that you're really looking for but the internet it's it depends on algorithms and what a lot of people are typing in and what they're looking for so you have to just learn how to ask the right question because asking the right question is 90 of the work wrong question wrong answers wrong answers wrong conclusion it messes up this whole part okay so we got to learn how to ask really good questions that give us the results that we want so this is really important all right now we're going to move on to critical thinking critical thinking to me is uh this concept called centopical like the way that people read it's a topical i hope i'm saying that right because i'm also learning this while i'm doing this it's in topical reading which is you compare compare and contrast different sources to find what you think is true and what you're looking for truth truth is kind of tricky is what we would consider like objective truth one that can be verified and studied and measured so we're searching for that objective truth so compare and contrast we have to be able to do that we have to be able to debate and reason these are important parts okay like logically does this make sense is this is this consistent with the other things that i've learned because we're building upon all these ideas that's what we're doing here and we're probably looking for evidence correlations correlations yes because intelligence i think that's matthew again i think i recognize your voice if not i apologize intelligence is pattern matching it's connecting dots okay so you're going to connect the dots so this is the beauty of centopical reading is because you're going to read many books on the same subject and you can compare and contrast and you can see what ideas stick with you what ideas that you first thought were true and then you're going to unlearn that because you have another source that states the opposite idea that makes a better argument that more aligns with the way that you think things work so connect yeah you need to connect things okay the last part of the 21st century education and this is pretty good if you have the ability to ask the questions based on curiosity starts there you can dive into any one of these very rich resources and figure out what's good you can compare and contrast you can debate and you can start to form your own opinion hopefully leading you to an objective truth and this word in itself is loaded but i'm going to leave it there objective truth the last thing that you need to be able to do in my opinion to get from a 21st century education is articulation now a lot of people think articulation it means it's something that you say like articulate your ideas but it doesn't need to be verbal it could be written it just needs to be expressed there's a quote and this is where the editing team will save me a quote from a famous well-known writer who says i write entirely to figure out what it is that i know and i have this backwards in my mind for many many years for most of my life actually that i thought you had to know something to be able to write but here's the thing it's like there's this soup that's in our head this brain of ours and we don't really know what we know until we say it out loud until we express it in some form so for some of you it might be through pottery through design through animation maybe performance you do interpretive dance some of you guys might sing so we're just looking for this abstract thing called an idea to take some kind of shape so the easiest one is through words spoken words the next easiest one is to write it down those are most natural to us and there's more complicated versions but this is it this is the trifecta if you can do this and you could do this today and you're quite good at any one of these things or all of them to combine you might want to start to rethink this education thing and considering like what's going on right now with schools this whole distance based learning a lot of people are taking a gap year i think that's what they call it so schools are having a hard time adapting to the new reality that we live in today so if you are relatively young in your career and i don't mean chronologically young but just young in your career look at these three things start to develop skill sets around this and dive deeper into this and you may not need that expensive tuition that you could barely afford to get the degree that's doubtful is what it actually does and if you're a parent and you have some young ones i would start to think about like how the schools that your kids are enrolled in the ones that you're also paying tuition for are they providing your children with this and if you're homeschooled this could be a blueprint for you and take it with a grain of salt this is just me reading thinking about what i want to have for my kids and i'm an educator and that's what i think about okay i'm going to take a brief moment here before i flip this thing um audience zoom audience is there anything that you want to ask or talk about before i move on relative to what we just discussed anybody happy to do that okay it looks like matthew's got a question okay matthew what's up yeah so i'm curious uh i feel like failure could fit into all three of those bubbles for whatever reason because the stepping stone for understanding those data points and making those correlations yes okay you want to talk about failure for a little bit look at your there's always got to be a dark voice in this audience isn't it it's not matthew oh no i mean so i've got a science background so i'm thinking in terms of you know these data points right we go out we do this creative play this testing and then we get all those data points and it's not always necessarily labeled as failure but it's just knowledge so when you said critical thinking i was thinking you know even in terms of covid right now without diving into the details it's this ever present knowledge that's changing the more that we learn about it so it's evolving shifting knowledge well i like what you just said there it's a little bit different than how i heard it originally and thank you for saying this what matthew is saying is that new information theoretically if you're learning if new information presents itself that supersedes what you learned before you have to realize you got to let go of the old idea this is what scientists do all the time we believe a theory we believe that the earth is flat until somebody says it's not flat we believe that the earth is the center of the universe until science tells us otherwise and we have to adopt this new idea scientists in particular are very good at this regular human folk we tend to hold on to some pretty ancient ideas and this is really important but you also did prompt me to talk about one other thing and i think it's aristotle that said wisdom wisdom which is what we all want we want to be wise wisdom right is equal parts experience equal parts experience and reflection i read this in the power of self-confidence by brian tracy it's aristotle i believe they will fix this if i'm wrong don't seem like a genius no matter what so we say okay we want to be wiser we all i think would say like we want this experience that's the critical word here and reflection equal parts experience and reflection so if we don't try things what alex said earlier about trial and error we don't have an experience so it's gone we can't reflect on something we've never done we could only imagine it then and that's not really the same thing right so we need to try ideas out and then when we do it we have to reflect and ask ourselves what did i learn what can i avoid how did i grow what could i do better that's the reflection part so these two work together in beautiful harmony because the more you try the less you have to fear and the more you learn the more you try the less you have to fear so we're going to get into that all right but i want to show you guys some artwork okay so at the beginning of this broadcast i talked to you about my son who's 14 years old and he's applying into a specialty art high school here in los angeles and i want to help him learn how to make different kinds of art there's no teacher it's just him and art supplies and i want to show you some of his portfolio okay and he had to develop i think like 10 pieces or something around there and so this is a portrait of somebody that we know from taiwan and it has a certain look to it and if you guys see it and you can instantly recognize the influence there you may think that looks a lot like uh roy lichtenstein's work and it does because this is what he was referencing okay so look at the portrait there and he just did this on his ipad i want to show you the other two pieces i only brought three because i don't want this to be like a dad shows off his kids artwork right uh here's another one and we saw this painting in new york and i took a picture of it it was at a clothing shop and we liked it and the artist had imagined new york city as a bunch of different objects scaled up in space and my son thanks to my wife has been recently introduced to coffee for some reason the two of them are coffee friends i think she missed not having a coffee friend so he wanted to build like starbucks city so we went to starbucks reserve he took a bunch of photos and we brought some things home and then he started to design his own city and so this is just a pen and ink thing on cardboard okay and the last piece is this is the last piece and the piece that's relevant to our conversation today and so this is his um his painting of what was happening in australia when the fires were going crazy and this affected him emotionally so he wanted to make a piece about it and if you look at this you could say oh that reminds me of something chris and each and every one of these things probably will remind you of something and the reason why this reminds me of something is because we were looking at something together from jean-michel basquiat and he was looking at the pieces and it took him a little while to figure this one out this one was probably his most difficult art project so a kid on his own with a little bit of direction with enough tools and encouragement and the process that i'm going to teach you today will hopefully allow you to do something on your own and to be able to break down any kind of projects using any kind of project using the five ingredients okay back to the board so i i've been recently i had a lot of free time on my hands to watch videos on the internet i just don't know why but i have okay and so i always thought it's like really cool to learn lots of things and we we kind of put a premium on this and there's people who are academics who all they do is learn and they stay within the realm of universities and they research and they write papers and books and things like that we think that's really cool and i've come to realize that learning can be in its own way very addictive because it feels like we're growing and we are but that's only one small part of the puzzle that it's actually more important and we will consider learning the consumption or i'll write it up here consumption is good right but if i add the word consumption to it in this way you might not think it's not that good and it's really more about implementation which is turning something that you've consumed and making something out of it the articulation of something so we can reduce this further down so we can say above his head is what we would consider input and below the head is called output that the output is actually more important than the input this seems a little strange here and maybe it's a little self-serving i admit because i want you guys to put into motion the things that you're learning so that you can truly learn it and output has three components to it and they go deeper in terms of what you actually get out of it so the first part is if you learn something if you free if you read a book or watch the video or listen to a podcast you should turn this into habit and reflect before you move on to the next thing that you have to do today before you consume another video in a long list of uh on your playlist of videos that you need to watch just stop and ask yourself one simple question what was most useful useful to me pause and think this is the wisdom part of this experience i need to think about what i just learned you could also ask yourself a question how might i apply this in my life and work how might i apply it's hard to talk and write at the same time to my life and work and write this down this is critical because if we just do this this becomes a little bit of like intellectual i hate to say this if there's children around here be careful i won't say it i'll find another word to say it it becomes intellectually self-gratifying there i found a way to say it ricky thanks for not helping me there he becomes intellectually self-gratifying you guys know what i mean you know where this is going right you just know okay intellectually self-gratifying because it's not really doing anything with it you're only kind of uh it's the illusion of knowledge right it's the illusion of knowledge it's not until you actually apply something let me tell you what i really mean by this let's say you read a book on a like survival guide but you actually never apply it then one day you go on a trip car turns over and you stand out in the middle of nowhere it's not until that moment that you take an input and you create an output out of it that you're actually able to implement it do we know you've learned anything i watch a ton of cooking shows hence the five ingredients i've yet to make a single dish i can't cook word squat i can tell you the theory behind it i could tell you what is missing i can tell you that it needs a little heat or acid i could tell you that but i can't really make it so all of that is just here and it hasn't become anything so this is really important so first we're going to learn this is important so the quality quality of the input really matters because from that we build the output and what do i mean by quality input i was watching this video talked about this and it's really important quality of input is when you're reading a book how many other things are you doing are you listening to music are you watching the real housewives of orange county at the same time how many books are you reading the same time and how many conversations are you having is your phone on is it notifying you of every tweet and everything so this diminishes our ability to focus here so the quality of input at this point is going to be diminished now some people work better multitasking but for the most part we should be single tasking if we want to be better learners let's try to single task and focus there are exceptions of course please take take it uh no this is just broad-based things i'm sharing with you so the quality of input has to be high the higher the better then we have to reflect we have to ask ourselves these kinds of questions what was most useful to me how might i apply this in my life and work where else have i seen this idea these are the kinds of things that you want to ask yourself and then we want to begin implementation and this is really important this means you have to turn it thought into action you have to make something so if you watch a video from george pakula or somebody about how to design and do grid logos you got to go out there and you got to sketch and you got to make stuff because we know we can't just learn by watching as much as i like to say that i can i cannot so this is how we cement it how we fortified our mind so that we truly extract the maximum knowledge and turn it into something and the last one is really important the last one is you need to share it this seems a little bit like huh is this about social media why do i need to share well because when you're forced to articulate see that word when you're forced to articulate this to someone else why this is good or what you learn or what you got from it it goes deep down the learning pyramid so teaching and teaching is a scary word it's full of preconceived ideas about pretentiousness like who am i to be a teacher so i just remove the word teaching and i want to put the word share you just have to share it you can share it and tweet you know i watch this video i learned this one thing or if you read this book and you drew a diagram like this that's how you share it because all of what i'm sharing with you is me articulating what i've learned previously from books and videos and this is how i do it i see something popping up there mark are you trying to show me a question or comment the group chat break yeah we got two questions we have two questions already okay fantastic go ahead okay so first one is from adelie hanson she's asking how many different resources for one topic do you recommend before you reach the objective truth okay okay very good question emily of course she's going to ask this question it's very good very smart and it's like okay objective truth is the goal but i don't think it has to be goal the goal on day one because it can be overwhelming it could be like this 800 pound rock that you have to carry with you that i'm not allowed to entertain an idea until i reach an objective truth and back to alvin toffler it's like we're going gonna learn so this is good you've learned something this is fantastic and when you hit another resource and it challenges that initial idea you have to make a decision now this is fantastic this is what i would consider good news because it shows like you're the super curious person you've learned and you're looking for multiple sources to compare and contrast then you decide i want to unlearn this piece and i want to relearn this new piece and that's totally okay and you're going to keep doing that until you feel like i think i've exhausted it but i don't want you to stop sharing and reflecting all the way through this is critical okay and i love to be wrong i love to be wrong gary vaynerchuk says this in a really much harsher way it's like you have to fall in love with sucking like effing up because that means that each time you do that that's a time stamp in your life about what you knew at that point and so many people fear that oh i don't want to put that out because people are going to know that i was dumb then and i'm smart now i don't look at it like that yeah i'm dumb now but you know i'm really smart now and that's the critical part so so many creative people in in our circle for sure are so afraid to just let's try it just put something out there i learned this and it's okay okay all we want to do is go at least deep enough on on one source and we can feel like okay i did it i mean i'm not talking about like just reading the cover in the table of contents that's not enough read read the book watch the full video make some notes and then reflect so when we share where can we share how do we share and we're going to go back to the other chart i'm not going to flip it over i might get a paper cut okay how do we share well the easiest way to share something is just write a tweet there's something really challenging for me personally in writing a tweet because you're forced to condense everything down to so few characters you start eliminating all kinds of extra words and it's going to challenge you do you really know what you're saying because if you can't explain it simply you just don't know it and a tweet is one way and you can do a much longer tweet and you can write a blog post you can share it on something like medium you can write an article i forget what they're called on linkedin but you could do it on linkedin and so we're taking words and we're just going from a few words to an unlimited amount of words if you want and some version of this is you're going to write an ebook you're going to write a real book not to say ebooks are not real you're going to publish right and then if you wanted to you could write an encyclopedia on this if you wanted to it just goes on and on and on that's one way you can do what i'm doing right now if you if you have camera equipment and if you like speaking if you want to develop that skill set you could share by producing videos and they could be short one minute videos it could have your voice only with graphics with words and images or any combination of those things what we have to do is get into this process of sharing and that's what i'm doing with you right now okay that's critical okay because the best way to learn is to teach because when one teaches to learn you the teacher learns and the student learns that's really cool it's good huh it's not even mine i love it so one teaches to learn ooh i just barely made that guy okay one teachers you the teacher and at the minimum is two people learn the obvious one is the student learns or your audience or your community people just like you show up or you learn because in articulation we gain clarity okay i have to figure out what the heck i'm doing i have to figure out how many ingredients should it be should it be ingredients should it be something else the five phases the five scaffolding steps whatever it is okay so now we're gonna get into the art part the part that i promise you how to learn anything and we're gonna apply it to art and remember this painting okay the painting is here right there it is it's my son's painting and we're going to pull up some artwork that we prepared in advance and i'm going to look at it with you and then i'm going to give you guys something to do and it's right here and it had a near panic attack and eric and eric's playing it real cool like yeah it's there it's there but i will tell you i won't spring into action okay so what i did was i asked my son to pull up some references from jean-michel basquiat and to kind of just look at him for a minute and what we want to do is we want to observe because when we can become an observer of the world the world becomes our school and everything becomes our teacher and we become the greatest student the world has ever seen and i think that's a noble thing to have all right so here are three pieces and i've just put them up here so you guys that are joined in this live discussion here you also have a piece so i'm going to instruct you now like get your piece ready because i'm going to send you into a room in a little bit okay what i want to do is to start to look at this and really look at it and i'm going to butcher this part but nils lindstrom in his lettering class with us he says you can't draw what you don't know you don't know what you can't or what you haven't seen so it's the act of learning how to see and this applies to way more than just art because if you're talking about user experience design this is what this is totally relevant to user experience design you can't design something for somebody if you don't know who they are what they do what their jobs are the gaps in their lives and what they're trying to accomplish so you need to learn to see seth godin writes it in his book this is marketing that in order to be seen you must first learn to see okay so here we are so i'm going to do this exercise with you guys for a little bit and explain what i'm trying to do here so when we look at this i asked my son and he has a little notebook i asked him identify five things that make a basket piece of basquiat piece he goes well dad okay well let me see here well there's a skull and weird-looking eyes and horns okay i see that there's like little scribbles there's words and a skeleton and a bone and some character like maybe that's an ape we can't tell some abstract things the problem with the way that he described it is he's literally just seeing exactly what's in front of him and he's not able to abstract it one layer so let me go back to the board here okay sometimes your observation is too specific so if he said i see dad i see a skull with horns and if you say that that's too specific because if you want to do something the subject isn't a skull with horns that's not very helpful to you okay on the other side he said well dad they have words okay this is pretty important because a lot of basquiat's work has words written all over it but if you add any kind of word like this has theoretically not a word but characters in it does this feel like a basquiat piece and the answer is no because his description his observation was too generic it was too broad so we kind of have to find this balance between overly specific and too broad and the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle here okay so what i'm gonna ask you to do i'm gonna give you a little bit of time to do this i'm gonna ask you to go into groups of four or five some people can't participate with you that are in your group i'm just gonna warn you ahead of time because they're in rooms and spaces where they can't talk it's for whatever reason they can't talk i'ma send you off to your room what i want you to do is to start to make some observations of what you see and unlike this basquiat example i only want you to look at one reference so when i send you off to your room i want you to generate a list of of words or ideas that you see and i don't want you to judges write down as many words as you want okay and and just take like a minute or two to do that and then i want you to share with each other this is the thing that i was looking at and hear the words and hopefully your partners in that room will guide you and say hey we think that's too specific or maybe that's too broad how else might you apply this okay and then you guys are going to come back and we're going to talk a bit a little bit about that i'm going to go a little deeper i want you first to try and embrace the fact that you may get this wrong that you may suck and you might not know what you're doing it's totally okay if we embrace that and give our ourselves permission to fail everything will be fine okay so i'm gonna send you off and remember you all are working quietly independently nobody's talking just looking at your stuff and you're gonna write down what it is that you see and then mark is gonna send you a little text message to say go ahead and discuss and we'll give you approximately five minutes since there's four of you just take about a minute to discuss here are some things that i see and then let people react and the ones that they all think that that's pretty good put a circle around it and hopefully you come back with five things but be okay if it's not because i'm gonna give you more instruction a little bit okay everybody mark's gonna send you off and we'll see you oh they have questions okay go ahead are we doing this with whatever we're bringing like our own work that we're curious about yeah or we are you signing it okay so it's whatever we were told to bring beforehand yeah bring bring one thing and if you don't you can just find something on the internet and say this is what i got okay and if you don't have anything don't worry don't sweat it uh this is not like normal school nobody's gonna pick on you it's fine there's no grades no quizzes just enjoy the conversation with whoever's in your room all right everybody and if you have a problem just message mark he's moderating this whole thing and he may or may not jump into the room and help you out all right see you guys in a few so mark go ahead and sign them off okay so before i share with you what we came up with while you were away i want to ask you now hopefully you were given more time were you able to identify things more clearly the goal here is not for for perfection it's just progress so i see a bunch of you guys nodding your heads anybody notice the difference this time going back into the group and care to share maybe raise your hand or motion yeah anybody alec go ahead yeah i had i had like the most complex image pretty much ever it was a star destroyer by ash thorpe and uh it was pretty insane but we were able to go from like just like very once again vague like color palette stuff to like specific where the lighting like what the angle the lighting is coming from and how that causes the shadows and stuff like that is really cool yeah if you look at any kind of photography or 3d rendering more photography you can look at where the shadows are the shadows tell you a lot about where the light is and the light quality so if it's a very harsh hard edge shadow then you know it's a linear light like the sun and if it's nice and soft and diffused then you know it's a spotlight or an area light or something different if you see multiple shadows that tells you that there are multiple light sources and if you see color in the shadow it tells you that there's color in the light theoretically unless it's been heavily retouched in photoshop so very good all right so exactly what happened beautiful okay so those are the you guys that are aspiring photographers or want to do photo real cgi work this is what you do you start to stare at any photograph and you can almost draw a diagram from the photograph of where the lights are and what kind of lights there are once you train your eye and this is how you learn how to do anything that's how to learn anything somebody else please um maybe okay there we are uh what's her name kaya kara kara kara okay talk to me cara sorry um i picked also very complicated picture and people in my group were like yeah it's very complicated and i love the design group moxie sozo and they have this crazy awesome illustrator and he always i've always admired his work and there's a ton of cross-hatching like cross-hatching and everything's done in black and white so when i was actually seeing the depth and how he really uses solids in comparison to light and then the depth of each crosshatch and each stroke um it was interesting so i started to really zoom in on little teeny tiny pieces of it and and um it made sense of how he can put it together and how he probably has i could probably see the process going on in his head of how to get there that's an excellent tip actually uh thank you for reminding me to talk about this you're talking about the ability to zoom in so when we step back and we look at a piece like a piece like this one right here it could be actually quite complicated for us to process what's going on there's so much that's going on there's coins there's an outline there looks to be an ape a ladder maybe shackles a man a bunch of things and it's like it's too much my brain is like overwhelmed with what's there but if i just zoom in and keep zooming in until i can pick out one thing this is the beauty of the five ingredients just pick out one thing that you think is important study their part and deconstruct it into simple language that gives you a hint as to how to create something like that so you talking about zooming in on the cross hatching perfect great job okay and careful take moxi sozo someone's asking oh why don't we do this you could share your screen and share the piece of artwork so we can just take a look at it real quick because i'm i'm not familiar with who you're talking about sure hold on one second okay oh okay now we can see it yeah so yes it's and he does a lot of product packaging and he's done a ton of brands you'd be familiar with but i don't know who this illustrator is i think they try to keep him off their sites so no i'm just to grab them but uh it's okay so cara so i want to ask you what are the what are the five ingredients that you spotted just go down the list and tell me what they are um well one was the a part of his eye like mostly up to the eye and then another one was the kind of the front of the head of the snake and then i just used a tiny portion of one of the balls that's above his head yes and then one of zoomed in of the if you see it's two alligators eating each other but i just zoomed in on a couple of the teeth okay so that's kind of how i dismantle those are your ingredients those were the ingredients that i okay i'd like to take a stab at this okay so here's here's one ingredient from a composition point of view everything is super symmetrical so symmetry is a big part of this person's work i could tell that right now you already mentioned the line quality this feels like cross-hatched it might be digital the way i'm looking it could just be low-res it does feel digital versus a scratch board illustration and i'm going to explain that in a little bit in terms of how i look at it because the tools that you use influence the marks that you can make so if you can identify the tool you're a little step closer to being able to do work like this the other thing i see is this idea of like the image being made up of smaller images so using animals and animal parts and things like that he's able to reconstruct a human face so we know that if your your project ultimately doesn't have parts of other animals kind of building a bigger composite then it's probably not it right and and then what else can we say about this uh in terms of like time period do you get a sense of like when what when what era or what kind of when did this person exist in the world what do you think well the fleur de lis is kind of interesting so that's probably more you know maybe 20s to me you know it could be kind of like steampunk earth what is it called uh it's steampunk or what is that word i'm drawing a blank steampunk is a word yeah but you also see the the fleur-de-lis is actually the you know the tongue of a frog so yes yeah so there's something here that says like it's probably not contemporary that it's at least maybe 100 years old maybe more we don't know and and we'd have to like know a little bit more about art history to kind of place this person or this the costume the it looks like he has sideburns there's a certain kind of styling to this that tells me it's it needs to feel retro or vintage or something a little older and this the style of illustration the scratch board was of a certain era so if we look that up we might be getting a little bit closer so these things are kind of important for us to take note of okay all right excellent good job okay so what we probably should do mark is to maybe talk to one more person and then i'll tell you what we wrote down and then we'll wrap this thing up so one other person anybody else feel like they have something that is different than what is already shared and want to talk about i just have a brief notion when i teach my students for macro photography i often have them describe things as if they were visually blind expand on that please yeah so if we were looking at the image we were just looking at if i said you know can you describe that to me if i couldn't see they might start to pick apart those five ingredients whatever those happen to be that kind of come up to the tip of their mind's tongue if you will very good okay so here we go now for the unveiling of what we were able to do together as a group so hopefully this will give you a little bit more of a clue and my intention today was to show you this process applying it to something very specific allowing you to taste a little bit of that and hopefully putting you off or setting you off in a direction where you can then start to look at images and things in life and video and cinema and everything else even in music and start to break it down like what are the instruments you're hearing what kind of tempo are you observing etc so let's get back to this the first thing that i drew was a little bit of fragment of the horn right here the skull the horn okay just a little bit of it just for comparison there okay not a totally faithful rendering but that's okay and there was something about the line quality because there are a lot of lines on all of his paintings so i wanted to dive deeper so the words that we came up with it's irregular it's inconsistent it's rough looks like it's drawn with a non-dominant hand it's very expressive and feels spontaneous like there isn't a lot of premeditation it's just go and i think when you become a master painter you just do it and you don't need to really build it up when we looked at the figure itself the subject matter we started to notice things like the proportions seem a little bit distorted that they don't necessarily reflect correct human anatomy and that's okay that they seem to lack emotion and that the drawings are very flat the subject faces camera we're not seeing three-quarter profile at least not in these drawings and they seem very square to the picture plane which is kind of important so just keep that in mind the colors initially when we had made our first pass at describing the colors we thought it was very colorful but maybe that wasn't super helpful and if we examine a little closer we actually start to see with the exception of a couple of pieces it's actually not as colorful as you think that it's minimal amount of colors black and red black red and orange and the only other piece that has more colors than that is actually the one with pink green and like a light powder blue so it's really nice colorful but the colors look dirty and now this assigns a value to it so if our colors are too bright and too shiny and not dirty enough we have some problems there that there seems to be a lot of black in the frame there's a good liberal use of black and that when things are colored in they're incomplete you can see that not everything is filled in perfectly basquiat is not coloring within the lines so i'll add that to this not colored in the lines so there's an imperfect quality to it that actually makes it a basquiat piece then we started examining what tools what tools did he use to make this we can make some educated guesses if we know a little bit about art and art making that he's probably using an oil pastel or something like a crown or a grease pencil or a stick or something like that because of the way the marks look to us and then there is also brush strokes in here that we can see so probably some paint and paint brushes but the the brushes are thick they're not fine exact strokes very broad strokes here and some of it looks like there's paint and then it's dry brushed here and there so we get to see that now i'm sure at some point an art historian is going to call me personally and say you got this all wrong but to the untrained eye and i think this is important for parents for people who are trying to learn a different art form that what you see is good enough for now we're just trying to approach the master we're not saying like we are the master at this point and lastly the thing that really makes a basket piece is his use of words phrases and there's misspelling things that are crossed out when he messes up he scribbles over it and they're little short phrases and they're incomplete and it feels like the words are just whatever's pops in his mind so it's a stream of consciousness whatever he sees he feels that he just writes it down and that starts to give us an idea of what makes a basket piece of basket piece now i did not do this for my son he did his own version and he has five ingredients for everything that he does this is how i teach him to teach himself because his tendency is dad dad tell me what it is what am i supposed to be doing i'm like no go back do your five ingredients and he would do this many many times because each time he was stuck i said let me see your five ingredients and he would either say something that's too specific or too broad it would reflect in the work that he was doing so i knew that if he couldn't see this you couldn't make it so what niels lindstrom my former lettering teacher said about you can't draw what you don't know and what you don't know what you haven't seen so that's really critical so we kind of rush and say i got it i got it i figured it out dad so that's when we need to take a step back and do our five ingredients now i'm gonna hold up this piece and i'm gonna say this not as a father i'm going to say this as a professor of design i'm going to say he missed a few things here you can see that the colors even though they're similar in hue the way that they blend together or don't blend together and they don't feel dirty to me so he got the colors correct but i think he was a little afraid to let the colors bleed together and drag his brush his subject matter here is not facing the camera it's actually quite even though it looks flat it's turned a little bit because of the position of the eyes so he still needs to get into this and i don't see him using the oil pastel i don't see that and i still see like he's obviously as a 14 year old boy he's not a master painter at this point in time so i give this a solid c minus now i'm just kidding son he's probably watching this yeah this is what he's talking about right they're gone and they're that's a koala and then there's this kangaroo that's been chopped in half it's gone it's kind of dark it's kind of dark he's yeah he just unsubscribed to my channel but that's all right okay all right yes let's do the questions i'm gonna wrap up okay question raising your hand you could just go off mute and talk okay there's another person here let's get um there we go austin austin you haven't seen anything talk to us man yeah i would like to just share uh just kind of what my group uh kind of figured out on the five ingredients we all kind of focused on just one uh picture and if i could just share that yeah share the screen please sweet there we go just wanna make sure everyone can see that and basically kind of what we broke down for five ingredients was futurism barren loneliness desaturated and seeking okay so yeah i know i'm gonna ask you this question this is really important if you had to guess the next scene in this film based on the five ingredients you've identified would you be able to describe it and draw it or paint it or photograph it this is really important so we have to test our observations and sometimes we we describe this exactly for what it is but we don't know how to extrapolate that and apply it to something else okay this is really critical so let's first try to go through the five ingredients again name them one at a time just go ahead one uh futurism futurism so if we said futurism to 14 different people do you think they would all come up with the same visual image in their mind no that's probably too broad then next one baron baron okay what is what do you see here that tells you it's barren uh the tree and the ground use more words please um you're telling me you're asking me what i see i see just lifeless colors i see okay okay so so no you said the tree in the ground yes stay with the tree in the ground what about the tree in the ground uh it's lifeless it's pretty much dead dead empty there you are so that's it we're going to have uh uh dead landscapes basically dead trees everything is dead so as long as we see nature is dead we can probably predict the next frame now so if you see like a bush a green bush or hey is that in the same movie are we in the same universe here so everything is dead all of nature is dead it's a wasteland okay perfect that that one i i think i now know how to predict next frame okay go on to ingredient three loneliness what signals to you that this is lonely the your reaction is i get a sense of loneliness and doom but what is it about it that's creating that feeling for you the silhouette the open space um just the one subject that's kind of in the frame okay now if i use those three things openness silhouette does that automatically communicate loneliness have you ever seen in your life a silhouette not right so we have to kind of dig into deeper deeper deeper so i know one thing from watching this film that there's a lot of atmospherics that there's a thickness to the air so then there's another thing that you can probably write down because the thickness of the air makes everything look overcast right it's like a heavy permanent fog so that tells us a lot about how the scene is going to look because there's light bouncing everywhere so that's going to tell you how to render everything from here on out so you know that now okay remember how we were talking about the shadows and the light quality well those are things that are repeatable so you just reminded me to talk about something what we're trying to do is identify something that's that's specific enough but that's repeatable is that we can apply to something else so maybe that's the filter we have to remember can this be applied to another frame where it's not literally the exact same frame but it lives in the same universe and if so then we have a very clear direction now here's the cool part i don't know what you do but if you're an art director or creative director trying to lead a team you might have to learn how to speak like this so that they can create a whole universe for you of costumes characters and scenes that isn't literally the same frame okay let's do one more ingredient we'll talk go ahead uh desaturated desaturated okay that is very that seems like what this is now beyond desaturation because if i take any image and i desaturate it sometimes it could look like pastelly it could still look like my little pony right so what is it about this that creates that extra like we're going to talk about the color let's stay in the the color let's talk about the colors what do you see in the colors um very again it's very de-saturated so the color is it's hinting it's like barely there okay here's what i'm going to do with you i'm going to give you a like a like a peek into my crazy mind all right so just a little peek because if it's if you stare into it too long your face will melt okay so we don't want to do that so here's a peek into my mind when i look at this and the way i would describe it to somebody is the frame is mostly monochromatic there is a little coloring a warm tint maybe a tobacco filter in the highlights and everything else in the mid-tones and the shadows i see a cooler tint maybe a cyan i'm not sure so it's got this like off-yellowish burnt umber you know something like that with a little blue in the cyan in the mid-tones and the shadows but otherwise it's very monochromatic and the mid-tones are really crushed there isn't a lot of mid-tone information it's either black or white and not a lot in between so if you describe that to a colorist they should be able to color correct like what matthew was saying kind of in the dark in the blind they just take a frame they can crush the mid-tones and they can pull most of the color out they can inject a little bit of yellow into the highlights a little cyan into the mids and the shadows and they're going to be able to get to something like this you see how precise that is so that's where i'm going to go with this beautiful exactly thank you very much thank you thank you all right are you pro member i am yeah i just joined yesterday actually oh beautiful welcome i don't recognize your face but i just i'll get 50 flip a coin you see the pro member i got it right this time sometime okay and mark are there any other questions before we get out of here nah no other questions people were just commenting and they're participating on that same image but i think you guys hit a lot of the same descriptions beautiful i see this in the descriptions here cool temperature see like the more we can describe it with a more precise language where we can use this as a filter to apply it to something else the better off we are and here's the interesting thing um if you're able to do this you can go into photoshop and literally color correct a frame that's normal exposure to normal color palette and you can save it as a preset and call the blade runner 2049 color preset and if you look at every single scene and you're able to do this you are well on your way to being a colorist that you can take any frame and turn it into a cinematic masterpiece that's a bold statement i went too far i just went a little too far there guys but you know that's the hype cut right ricky that's the hype cut right there and that's what i want to be able to teach you guys or actually for you to teach yourself okay i want to thank you guys for tuning in and participating in this kind of very experimental whiteboard session where i think we made a lot of progress today we will get better at doing this so that there's more interaction from you we're just getting the technology down here just probably like 40 000 worth of gear here just to do this with you guys so thank you thank you you guys from youtube for for joining us i hope to see you guys next time bye everybody

Channel: The Futur

Views: 296,800

Keywords: the futur, how to, design, learn anyting, alvin toffler, whiteboard session, whiteboard, home-school, five ingredients, 5 ingredients, 21st century learning, schools outdated, teach yourself, autodidactic, futur pro members, sustaining members, workshop, hyper learner, critical thinking, chunking, chris do, 21st century education, school cancelled, how to learn, learn on your own, what to do in your gap year, objective truth, seeking truth, sene suit, 白板講堂, 學習, 未來, 五大元素

Id: ujxvy5NjeRQ

Length: 58min 46sec (3526 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020