How to Stay Motivated While Failing at Art - The Andrew Price Podcast

how do you stay motivated inspired encouraged when it feels like everyone else is so much better than me how do you stay motivated to keep practicing sculpting in my case when days go by and i'm unhappy with the results how to keep up with making art when feeling burned out of border but you get the picture these are the top questions that i was asked on twitter when i asked i'm doing a video on art habits improving what questions do you have for me and it became very clear to me that a lot of you are struggling with motivation or lack of motivation i should say and it makes perfect sense i'm really not surprised at all i mean if you were to look at like a pool of a thousand people who started learning art and they wanted to get good at art and then tracked it like 10 years into the future where there's like maybe two or three of those people remaining and then you went back and surveyed the 997 people who quit and asked them why i'm sure that most of them would say it was because i just couldn't stay motivated i couldn't learn it was difficult it was a struggle it was painful i didn't know what was going wrong it's a mental game it's not like this this motivation question isn't something that is like good to know like oh i gotta learn my art skills and technical stuff it's also good to know about motivation at the start it is the most important thing especially if you are self-learning at home if you're in a classroom where you have a curriculum and you've got three years ahead of you and you've got students around you that are also failing and you're drawing and you whatever and you look over and you go oh wow they also suck just like me it can feel good right or at least it feels better than sitting and suffering in silence by yourself at home but when you're self-learning it is the most important thing like they say if you listen to any of those motivational gurus or whatever like if you want to lose weight right the first thing you should do is just focus on developing the habit of going to the gym and it's going to the gym and enjoying it so that you keep going back again and again and again that is the that is the only focus at the front in fact they actually say you should start by saying like if you can't go to the gym you want to but you just can't bring yourself to do it they they say force yourself to go to the gym for a week for two minutes each day right you go to two minutes it's like yeah two minutes that's all you have to do get out of the car go to the gym clock in clock out come back home if you can develop that it'll feel painful because you're like well i'm going all the way there i might as well work out but like no just focus on that you will develop a habit of like yeah this isn't so bad like putting on the clothing getting the gym bag getting the water getting the phone everything that i need to get to the gym driving down there going here it's not it's not so bad i can do that it's it's when you try to punish yourself by going like i'm gonna start working out today and you go down there for three hours and you push weight that you've never pushed before you burn yourself way out and then the next morning you go my muscles are so sore i cannot do that again right and then you just end up not developing the habit so and then you end up fat and you can't not hitting your fitness goals etc and you end up quitting right so the exact same thing is true with art um you you want to start you want to focus at the start on just trying to enjoy it and you know you'll learn learn some techniques and things along the way but don't go in too deep it's tempting like you're motivated like yes let's do it let's do it i'm gonna go waiting hard that is that is a big problem because you will end up wiping yourself out like the person laying in bed not wanting to work out so anyways motivation i hear you and you're not alone a lot of people struggle with it every artist i'm sure struggles with it i know that i personally have i've talked about it before in my last episode of the podcast talked about my habits of effective arts work i deliberately wanted to learn 2d art one because i wanted to learn that skill but also because i think it's good to just go back to something that i don't know because i teach 3d and like the methodology of 3d and how to learn and everything it's hard to remember what it's like to start learning uh a new skill and um that was very eye-opening to me because yeah motivation was the like the biggest thing that was like an alarm bell to me it was like the crushing despair of failure um was what sucked right so anyways in this video i'm going to give you five ways to stay motivated while failing to learn art i say that as a joke failing to learn art learning art but let's be honest you're setting yourself up for failure right you have to fail to get good at something you have to fail so how do you stay motivated through that um but to the people to those questions the burnout questions i'm feeling depressed i feel like i i can't get anywhere i feel like blah blah blah something that you could do just to start with it's the same thing that you would do if you went to a psychologist a good psychologist or a psychiatrist i can never get those two terms right i don't know which one's which but if you went to one of those psychiatrists sat in a chair and said i'm depressed a good psychiatrist would not go here's some pills a lot of them would obviously but a good one would not would not say that they would say you're feeling depressed tell me more and you get out of his little notepad and and they go well you know i'm feeling at work i'm just like i don't know i'm just like not getting anywhere like no one seems to like me and then like the stress of like being at home with the kids and the wife and there's a lot of stuff going on i feel like i just can't relax and and you go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper in it and then eventually you find out like the problem is like you're not getting enough sleep right and so you're like over caffeinated and and because of that you're jittery and you're anxious and that feeds off onto other people and blah blah blah and the reason you're over caffeinated and you're not getting enough sleep is because you're drinking alcohol before bed and so the solution isn't medicine it's to stop the alcohol because that is the root of the problem that causes everything else and then maybe the reason you drink alcohol was because of something else right you wanted to relax when there's other ways you could do it healthy blah blah blah anyways point is root cause of the problem so i can't do that with you but you can do it with yourself um and uh yeah often asking yourself questions is just as effective as going to a professional get them to ask the why question so i think they call it the three wise right if you feel stuck if you feel like you're not getting anywhere ask yourself three why's so i'm feeling burned out and i'm feeling burned out learning art why well it feels like i'm not getting anywhere why well when i look online i can see everybody else is doing great and i feel like my art isn't improving why well that's annoying three wise in a row um but you get the point you end up getting to more of a more of a um what might be the root cause of the problem because who knows i mean if you're if you don't have energy and motivation to do anything not just art but even like clean up the house or i don't know do things you know you need to do i mean it might not be just an art thing it might be a depression thing it might be something that you need professional help with who knows i'm going to assume for the sake of this video this podcast that um that you all that you're all pretty well off like you're fine your life is going okay it's just the art thing that needs help with so five ways let's get into it number one reduce the difficulty so i'll start with a little anecdote little story um you know everyone is like nostalgic for the old arcade games like the old video games the 80s and 90s like i figured there must be something special about them because i'd never played them and then a couple of years ago i got a chance to play them right it was actually at siggraph the 3d conference um in la and one of the after parties because there's all these after parties at siggraph was um yeah it was hosted at an arcade bar so it was like a i guess it was an la thing but it was like a bar with a free arcade and it was just like all these old games from the 80s and 90s that they'd you know put there and you just all the games were free you just had to buy drinks and whatever it was a cool concept i really it was fun to go out and talk to people but i i was like excited because i'm like oh my goodness like it's it's the donkey kong game i've never played donkey kong let's give it a shot and you hit the go button and your character goes and it would like hit an enemy or something like that and you go what and you go hang on what am i even doing game over and i was like huh i'm like all right maybe it was just one game go to the next game same thing every single game was so punishingly hot like unnecessarily punishing um it really blew my mind because that's the opposite of today if you open up just download any game from the ios apple store they've figured it out like graphics have evolved over the years that's obvious but also the game user experience has improved and i don't think it gets nearly enough attention it starts if you start out any game on your your iphone it'll go you'll see like a character running and then it'll go like this is you and you're like oh it's me and then it goes like swipe up to jump over the log and you swipe up and he goes and then it goes great job and it goes swipe left to avoid the obstacle and you swipe left and then it goes great job and then it goes like these are the apples that give you the power collect the output and then he goes like click here to put the thing and you do the thing and then within like a few steps you've figured out the whole mechanics of the game and then it's fun and i actually read a book on it it was like gamification there was a couple of books on gamification and game design because like i don't know seven ish years ago i was going to build like a gamification thing to the blender guru website i thought that might be fun so i was reading all these books on it never went with that idea but it was actually really interesting learning that i've applied to learning actually today basically the best games uh find a delicate balance between i'm bored this is too easy and i hate this this is too hard and there's a sliver between those if that was a graph there's a there's a tiny sliver where it's fun right it's just challenging enough that it's not too easy but it's not so challenging that you want to quit and it's finding that perfect middle spot that games like they iterate over years and years and years of user testing before they end up at this final thing they they do so much data analysis on where people quit in games and then they go that there must be something about that level that experience that makes people want to quit let's move it back let's let's make that level 50 instead of level 35 or whatever it is apparently angry birds is very good at this the original one i don't know how many 35 spin-offs or whatever they've got at the moment but um yeah uh what was the other one plants vs zombies that's another one that was like an example on gamification but anyways the whole reason i'm telling you this is that uh point number one is reduce the difficulty when you are starting out just like a video game you do not want to start with the boss level before you've done the tutorial level this is above all else when people tell me they're demotivated or i don't know i'm stuck i don't know what's going on they've started with something that is simply too hard now for a while i didn't understand why that was a problem like when i was learning 2d drawing and like sculpting um learning sculpting and blender recently because i'm not really good at that but i wanted to learn to make faces so i started sculpting faces guess what really hard so ridiculously hard same with drawing i wanted to get good at drawing i started drawing faces that is the hardest thing to draw and i kind of knew that right yeah i'm not just been doing this a few years i know they talk about the uncanny valley and how we we are the most familiar with faces we've like biologically we're wired to know when you know a face looks off or wrong or something's not right about it um so we're going to notice subtle imperfections there but we're not going to notice you know subtle changes in like a shark right nobody knows really what sharks look like you could put the fin in the total wrong area and your eye is probably not going to notice so it's better off to start drawing a shark than it is to draw a human face but i thought i want to get good at human faces so why not start there like i have to get there eventually right i mean what's the problem in starting to learn through the face problem and figure that out as i'm learning drawing the problem is is uh is motivation right you can fail once you can fail twice you can fail three times and you can kind of shrug it off right like ah you know i'm learning i'm learning right do another face i'm learning i'm learning try and do that as i did for like 18 months it really wears you down really if i didn't have the daily habit thing that i talked about in the last episode of this i couldn't have done it it is so punishing you can do a few fails right don't get me wrong it's yeah challenge is challenge and i'm not saying if you're trying to sculpt a face and you're sculpting now and you should stop like well yeah i mean maybe you should but um what's that going with this the point is is that because motivation is the most important thing um you you will probably inevitably quit or you'll you'll have a break a long pause if you start doing things that are way too hard um like if you wanted to be a figure skater right like i'm a young teenager i'm gonna be a figure skater because i've seen them on tv and it looks like a fun thing to do you've never really hit the ice before but you go like i'm gonna start by trying to do the quadruple spin uh leap in in the air that they do in the olympics right the thing that it's like one of the hardest jumps or whatever right i'm going to start doing that because after all i have to get there eventually that's what i want to do so why don't i start with that first that would be insane nobody would say that that would succeed right and maybe one person could right just going out onto the ice every day and trying falling down smashing their chin into the eyes trying again breaking an arm coming back trying again and just doing that repeatedly there's a chance you might get it but there'll be millions who would have failed before you from that method right i think the exact same thing it's true for a lot of people they are trying to do things that are just really really hard here's a few things that are really hard to do um for three days i know a lot of you watching this are in 3d art right um animals right cats dogs um something about the eyes very hard too many creepy cats and dog models out there the fur as well fur is really hard one to get right obviously characters as i've mentioned uh realistic faces if you wanted to go down the face route start with like an orc or something with like like pointy ears or something unnatural there's a reason a lot of artists start with that it's not necessarily that they all like warhammer and lord of the rings it's also because it enables it gives you the sense that you're you're making the thing you want to make which is a face but it's not so punishing that it's a realistic face it's something that your mind sees as fantasy and therefore is forgiving when the nose isn't in the right place etc etc so that as you learn more and more you can eventually get to a realistic face if you get what i'm saying um anyways so this is something that yeah i mean i've really only just learned that that when you're starting out um you want to put things on like a scale right inanimate objects are generally a lot easier than animate objects um so yeah i mean i talked about this in the last episode but one of the best things you can do is like find a photo of something and try and replicate that photo and then put the photo over the top of your render or your painting or whatever it is at the end and see where it's off because the proportions might be off the texture might be off the lighting might be off anything else might be off and you don't need like an expert's opinion to tell you that something's off you can just get that from a photo so inanimate objects like that are really recommended um when you're just starting out so anyways that is point number one which is reduce the difficulty number two second way to stay motivated compare yourself to who you were yesterday not who someone else is today so a really common joke meme whatever in the art community is that art station is depressing right you hear it at like conferences and things people joking about like oh man i try and avoid art station it's so depressing seeing how good everyone is right um and it's it's it's palpable when you go there right it's just the best art from all of the best artists in the world with an algorithm to tell when something is popular meaning it's probably the best work maybe this artist has ever done therefore put it up in the trending thing so that it's at the front page and it is the it is the cream of the crop of the world of artists that are on earth today the absolute cream of the crop and you could know this and yet when you still look at your own artwork you are comparing it to what you're seeing on the screen right and behind that of course each one of those artists has different amount uh amounts of practice right like if art station had a counter of like the accrued lifetime hours of practice that each artist has had had which of course is impossible but if it did that would be a lot more helpful right because you would look at an artwork and you would see like oh wow yeah this artist has got 23 000 hours of of practice behind them they've been working professionally for two decades now obviously i'm not going to be at that level but it doesn't have that and so um it's really hard it's really hard to look at the world i mean not just art station i mean twitter youtube any place that is a platform that prioritizes good content is gonna show you the absolute cream of the crop instagram uh pinterest anything it's not gonna show you all the drudge all the stuff down there that people go not clicking on that it doesn't like the old internet used to do that right like you go to like deviantart or um uh i don't know any art forum it was like a mixed bag because it was whoever just posted recently you would see their stuff and so you kind of got a better feel for what what was normal right for people like you but now everything is yeah it's an algorithm it's gamified and i mean that's good it creates a better user experience i mean you don't really when you go to an art form you don't go i hope i can see some shite right you go like i hope i can see some really good artwork so it does do a better job of that i wouldn't want to go back to an old art form but there is the problem that now it is it's really eating away at your motivation because you are comparing yourself to them and you shouldn't okay you need to keep this firmly in the back of your mind it's uh believe it or not it's actually one of the the 12 rules of life on the poster that's right behind me um by jordan peterson who twitter was very quick to tell me was a nazi um which i mean i'd never heard that one before but uh they explained why and i disagree um it's a great book um it's actually one of the chapters in it compare yourself to who you are um today not who you were um not who someone else is today so sorry compare yourself to who you are yes and not to who somebody else is is today it's it's yeah it's just good solid advice um there's oh somebody else said it was a really great quote it was like if you were just learning the violin you wouldn't book yourself at like the grand theater of the world or something to do a performance right you don't do that we know instinctively that practice hours of practice thousands of hours probably is of practice is required before you can go and do the thing that the masters the professionals the guys on the stage are doing we know that instinctively and yet we still compare ourselves to them in the art world right and i think it's i think it's because of the it's i mean there's probably a word for it but it's like the culture of just seeing everyone's best life the best moments of their life making you feel sadder um anyway i don't think that the internet is necessarily bad or nefarious for this reason but it is something to be aware of and it's sort of increasing that feeling of not feeling good so look back on just the artwork that came before you um and compare yourself to yeah where you started from like compare yourself to where you were a month ago i talked about this in the last episode something you should do is review your work for the last month if you're doing like an hour a day once a month is fine go back and review it spend one of your learning practice sessions just doing that and seeing if there's any any lessons there because it'll become pretty clear that like some of them were good some of them were bad and you'll be able to see what went well about one and what went wrong about another and it's really eye-opening but that's what you should be doing not going to art station and go oh i'm so depressed um something is to just sort by new sort by latest in any of these platforms like art station and yeah that's a nice reminder right same with like reddit go on the the blender subreddit and just sort by new and then you can go like ah yes i'm not alone what i'm saying is is it shite right as it should be everyone's gonna produce some um so you might as well just accept it all right hours number two now we're getting into the fun stuff i don't know if it is actually fun let's find out one for learning one for fun that's what number three is so there's a back and forth uh relationship to when you're learning a new skill to needing new information and needing practical practice right if you only had one like if you were only looking at new information then you would be like theoretically things but have no idea how to apply it and you would not be getting anywhere as an artist because you would never take your first step however if you were all practice and no information you would just be like flailing around in the dark doing sloppy mistake after sloppy mistake never like trying to reinvent the wheel in a painfully long process when somebody's already got tutorials or training that would have saved you hundreds of hours of time before it so it's there's a balance it's a balancing act of knowing when you need new information knowing when you should stop and go like i feel like and this is why one of that review session can be really helpful looking back on your volume of work the last month um because yeah you can see where it is that you've been making the same mistakes again and again and again um in my 2d learnings it became clear to me that yeah like my proportions were wrong i mean that's just like a common problem i think a lot of 2d artists have they just get the put the line in the wrong place and you keep making the same mistake again and again and again and again and again and again eventually like when you if you look back on the review stage um yeah you should be able to point to that and go maybe i've learned something wrong like i talked about it in my my presentation but yeah i was making the same mistake over and over again and i went back to watch the tutorial like the theory lesson that explained the human head scale like where the lines go and everything i went back and looked at that and i had completely misremembered one of the measurements right like i got the supposed to be like that side of the head is like three quarters two-thirds of the whole i don't know what it was i was doing it one-half or something like that and because of that it was totally off so if i had just kept practicing and trying to do that volume of work um i wouldn't have got anywhere it was only by that balancing act of recognizing that i needed new information and going back and doing that so when i say number three is uh one for learning one for fun it's a terrible title maybe i should call it one for me one for learning does that is that better okay what i mean by that is do one tutorial and then do one by yourself one tutorial one by yourself and what this will do um is a couple of things two two benefits one is it will force you when you're actually watching a tutorial or you're reading a book or you're doing theory lesson or something like that it lets you force your brain to start processing the information and trying to truly understand it and remember it because you know that your next project you're going to be going at solo so that's one part of it but it's also the inspiration thing when you're doing a tutorial it's usually not the thing you want to do right like when you watched my donut tutorial on how to learn blender you didn't chances are you were not a donut fanatic prior to that and you were like whoa boy i want to watch a video on how to make a 3d donut right nobody has that goal it was you had to learn the donut thing in order to learn the software so that you could do what you really want to do which is make like i don't know the power glove from the avengers or something right the thing you actually started for so something all tutors get people who make tutorials they just get requests of tutorials for the most obscure thing like oh can you make a tutorial on how to make a bird house or oh can you make a tutorial on how to make a like a fortress but from lord of the rings or something like that and it's like the most specific thing and i i never do i don't reply to them but i just want to say to them like you are never going to get a tutorial on that thing or you might if you're lucky somebody out there might just have the exact same interest as you and do that one thing that's not what tutorials are for tutorials aren't yeah to show you how to do the exact things some of them are i mean yes i know like there's documents there's tutorials on how to use microsoft word in order to save and print a file that's pretty specific and literal that's what you want to do right but when it comes to art and it comes to complex things tutorials are generally not what you want to do so you are doing a tutorial in order so that the thing you can do at the end is what you actually want to do so that's why i think doing one tutorial to learn the thing that you need to do get the new information and then do something solo by yourself that you actually enjoy so you watch the donut tutorial and then you go how do i make a power glove right how do i do the avengers power glove thing that's a lot more modeling that was covered in the tutorial oh boy this is hard i guess i gotta get new information so then you go out and you maybe watch a couple of short videos on like the modeling thing and you start modeling it yourself and you're like i don't know about this and you start anyways that process you'll probably fail by the way if you went from donut to power glove um you probably would probably go something a little a little uh easier than that you should probably pick something by the way that is related to what you just learned right um like i would watch a tutorial on how to do shading like shading a you know 2d shading with a pencil or whatever and then straight from that shade a character or shade whatever and that's that's the focus for the next piece is the shading thing so um anyways one tutorial and then one for you maybe that's what i should call that one tutorial one for you yeah one for learning one for fun no that's that's a mouthful we're not going with that okay um oh you know what polygon advert let me ask you something you want to die alone do you want to die in your bed by yourself no one around you no one loves you well that's going to be a problem if you've spent too long on the computer is that too much of a stretch uh a polygon saves you time saves you the artist time so that you can focus on what matters might not necessarily be spending time with your family so that they're there at your deathbed when you finally die one day but it could be or it could be so that you get to focus on what matters in the scene that you're creating the artistic expression the aesthetics and not capturing your own textures with your own camera and trying to extrapolate the normal maps or displacement or downloading a free texture right and then it's not good because most free textures are not good and then of course you have to fix it and do a whole bunch of other stuff to make it look cover it with bushes and terrible things like a lot of shortcuts by the way end up not being shortcuts in the end you ended up spending more time trying to fix the thing that came for free and i think most experienced artists have it i mean i know i have experience with this i'm like i need a tree i don't want to pay for a tree i'm going to get a freak tree type in free tree and then you find some free trees and you put them in there and they're you know the normals are just all shot to hell and like it's way too many pollies in the leave not enough in the trunks you send up like adding detail to the trunk to make it what and you end up trying to fix this thing that came for free and spending a couple of hours on that rather than spending a couple of bucks on an actual tree that somebody made properly so i mean i've i've drilled on a lot so that's what polygon is we came with the uh with the goal of helping you make better renders faster so uh so that's what we do so we've released a brand new collection of photo scans high quality photo scans large captured photo scans of three by three meters which is very important when you are scaling a terrain if you ever tried to make an environment and then like you can see the same grass patch repeating again and again and again across it right how do you do well it's often because it was like a one by one meter scan right because that's easier for the photographer to do we went the hard way and went three by three meters large section of ground it's like available in 8k it's sharper we took like sometimes thousands of photos per scan anyways it was a lot of work a lot of money goes into each one of the assets um so that you can get them at a very very very low price by the way um compared to the competition and um they're super high quality and it's great hopefully that was a better advert than um last episodes advert maybe i'll get better or worse you can look forward to that okay number four here we go back into it how to stay motivated reframe the hardship so obviously you don't want to call yourself a failure when you're failing right you don't want to look at the work that you've just done and gone oh god i suck right you want to feel that way but you don't want to do that right the hardship the the the pains that you feel when things are just not working or you've tried it three times in a row and it's just still not working that can eat away at you if you frame it wrongly in your mind i like to learn let me get a quick drink here something that was really helpful in my um business career actually was it was one of the gurus that i was um reading or listening to at the time who mentioned that when you're starting a business right in a new space and you're being like the niche whatever space you're in in my case it was blended tutorials believe it or not and you're doing something that's really hard and you've failed at it a couple of times now and you can't figure it out and you feel like quitting that's a point that you should realize that this is an opportunity to get one ahead on any competitors that might come behind you because if you were to quit at this point the chances are a lot of other people are also hitting these same problems and they're likely to quit as well if you push through it and you succeed you are going to be one of the few people that get ahead you that make it to a point um yeah that make it right it's like if you were to like look at like a race track right and there's like all these hair pins going down a mountain and then like at each hairpin there's like the wreckages of cars right of the cars that came before you right if you were to give up at the hairpin because it looks too hard and you can't figure it out it's gonna be like all the other wreckages there right but chances are if you were to just keep going on and keep trying to get around these difficult things right down to the end of the track chances are there's not gonna be other competitors around you so you've got a good chance of of doing better now i mean i guess this works if you're a competitively minded person um which i was more so back then i think i was like super competitive um but it can be it can be you know if you're the sort of person that as an artist you are like that um but yeah you know um the the the sort of the mental voices in your head um every psychologist buddhist monk or anyone focused on the enlightenment of the mind they talk about the the inner voice in your head and getting a handle on it right um something that coming back to that book 12 rules to live your life talks about the um treat yourself as somebody what is it it's like treat you let me just read it goodness sake it's right behind play the me set your house in order oh yes treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping um and in the book he um he talks about in that chapter uh that like he was a clinical psychologist for 20 years and met you know thousands of clients over the years and he would prescribe the medicine that they needed because he could see that this person was not going to get through it and able to do the mental work in order to get to a place where they're okay without the medication without the medication today and these people were not taking it a lot of people were not taking it and he thought what was interesting was that when you go to the vet with your dog and the vet says you need to give this medicine to the dog everyone gives the medicine to the dog right so we treat our dog better than we treat ourselves right which was an interesting framing of things i never thought of it that way and it is totally true right often we are nicer to other people more forgiving of other people's failures especially when they're friends of ours and family members people that we actually support when it's somebody you don't support you obviously laugh and short and freud as everybody does um but yeah we we we are generally nice to people and the inner voice in our yeah our inner critic is just punishing right and so um i mean i don't know getting kind of deep here but i i'm it's something i'm still trying to figure out right the re reframing of um of the voice in your head that says that you're not good enough um really i was just trying to say um the hairpin analogy talking about the race cargo and the track and reframing the failure to be like this is an opportunity to win out the competitor but it really is you know it's about um yeah it's about about changing the way you interpret um an outcome in your life right um and if you are punishing yourself if you're killing yourself over over things that you wouldn't you wouldn't say that to like if you've got a little brother or a little sister that you like and you support like imagine that they came to you with the problem that you have today that you feel i'm not getting anywhere i'm stuck what should i do as an artist what should i blah blah imagine that came from them the little sibling or a friend of yours who you you like what would you say to that friend what would you say to support them and it's often far more nicer and kinder than what you would say to yourself so yeah i don't know kind of got kind of got pretty deep there but that's um something everybody needs to uh everyone deals with i suppose i don't really know uh you know i i have a lot of negative voices in my own head of failures and things as a company that we could be doing better and you know if something's not right in the company people aren't happy or somebody didn't get a confirmation email that they should have got and they've it's been a week why didn't we crush that bug you know um it it's it definitely eats away at you and you gotta if you let it get out of hand it can definitely um undermine you anyways let's move along number five something lighter number five the final thing to do create an inspiration file so when it gets tough you will inevitably ask yourself why am i doing this right inevitably right you might at the start be wondering why do i need to i don't need to worry about that i'm really motivated i'm going to do it you humans are really bad at understanding what's going to come in the future how we're going to feel in certain ways how much failure how much pain there's going to be so when you're feeling motivated at the start and you want to like yes i'm going to learn i'm motivated you need to set yourself up for success by creating an inspiration file of things that are the reason that you are learning art so in my case the reason i was learning like 2d art was i really liked some of the drawings that i saw on art station they had this like flair and expression in the strokes and the the the the patterns and things that i just i didn't see in 3d i really liked it and so what i started doing was just saving i just like control c and control v in like an evernote file you could also use pinterest or pureref that reference board thing which is just kind of an open canvas you drop files and images in there um you can create one of those and you don't have to record even who the artist is you can just drop it in there and who cares it's just for your eyes only to keep you motivated because in the future it could be a week it could be three months from now you will reach a point to the depths the depths of your soul where you feel like boy god there's nothing less that i want to do than hurt myself by learning by getting back into art tonight and going through my one hour session of learning and um and you need to do that um sorry you need to do that you this inspiration file will be there for you in that moment and it's it's amazing how quickly you forget why it is that you're learning like why it is that you got into it in the first place when it's not top of mind because you get so into the weeds like especially with technical things like 3d software you get so into like all the little functions and there's there's other like a notification of youtube drop this new tutorial of like oh how to make mountains and so you're like oh maybe i should learn mountains and you're like oh how to make a tree in this software or maybe i should learn this and oh understanding engine optimization so that you can render faster i got to learn this and and then you're like you just reach a point of just like hitting a wall and you'll be like oh i don't want to do this anymore and then you go back to your inspiration file and you'll see that like it was full of life and and expression and exaggerated gesture and characters doing interesting things and it was like oh yeah that was why i started and it's yeah it gives you a little pap right better than anyone else could because it's you talking to your future self so i keep my inspiration file in evernote and i just open it up whenever i feel lost as to why um why i got started there's also art station collections i have a little collection in there an art station um but yeah it just needs to be personal just something for you to uh to keep you keep you motivated so those are the few of the ideas there guys i hope that was useful to you um in the next episode i don't know what we're going to talk about because i haven't received your videos yet so if you have a burning question for me blenderguru.com forward slash podcast question and there you'll get a dropbox folder and you can drop in your little video and i will uh i'll see it and i'll see your face and i'll go hey look at that guy look at his face no i don't know i'll be nice i promise and um yeah make it interesting don't make it specific like oh i'm making a i'm making a a tripod style robot from um that alien movie and i'm stuck with the leg ring could you figure out and show me a screenshot of the the screen or something i don't want that that's obviously not good for a podcast but something around art motivation habits i don't know success should you go to art school portfolios networking job interviews i don't know find something that's interesting to talk about and then i'll talk about it hope this podcast episode was interesting if it was give it a like on youtube or just share a podcast with a friend tell someone else and i will see you in the next episode bye and as a final note that i forgot to bring up uh this podcast is now available on other platforms so you can find it on spotify you can find it on anchor breaker google podcast pocket casts whatever that is radio public never heard of it uh not on apple itunes yet i don't know what i have to do to get it on there but uh evidently it's difficult but you can find it on other places as well so just type in andrew price podcast and you should see my little face right there that's it thanks

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 150,459

Keywords: art, artist, habits, motivation, blender guru, andrew price podcast

Id: 5E4Z44Y_kM4

Length: 44min 40sec (2680 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020