SELF TAUGHT ARTIST SECRETS AND STRATEGIES

this was my artwork at age 12 to 13. I would draw the turtles constantly until I got better and better over that summer and this is how I draw Ninja Turtles today I firmly believe that anybody can learn to draw on their own but there are a few caveats to that I want to talk about those in this video but when I was just getting started I got myself a VHS that taught me some Basics some fundamentals of how to draw and I taught myself this was relatively inexpensive and over the course of a few Summers I was able to teach myself how to draw and then I became a professional comic book artist at the age of 16 and you can too today it's easier than it was even then and a lot of people think oh well no I needed somebody to hold my hand I need somebody to tell me what I'm doing wrong and to to fix my mistakes and dislodge myself from my own habits that I've developed and maybe to some degree that's true but you know I had an art community that helped me to do that at a young age you don't need somebody who's necessarily better than you at everything you don't need a pro to take you by the little hand and just show you everything no no no sometimes you just need somebody who has a critical eye maybe they're good at something that you're not good at and they can point that out to you and say hey maybe you should work on this part or maybe you should work on that part or maybe sometimes what you need is just a guided tutorial a video like what I had when I was a teenager that can dislodge you from those habits of the things that you guys so used to doing that maybe maybe they're bad mistakes or their their bad habits that you developed in your art and a lot of artists can develop these bad habits that get them stuck and then it's hard for them to get out of the mental hurdle of doing the same thing that they've kind of been doing uh when I was in high school I hung out with this small group of comic book fans they were comic book artists you know they weren't Pros none of us were Pro we were 14 13 14 years old and we were just drawing our fan drawings and fan pages and we would start by doing these little three or four page sequences of events for a scene and just a scene something small and then we would show it to each other you know we might work on it over the weekend or over the course of a week and then we'd show it to each other with that kind of goal in mind and then the other person might say something like oh well what if you put the camera over here what if you redraw this panel to really show like the character's expression or emotion that kind of interaction and feedback from somebody who also just loves the same thing that you're trying to achieve can be super helpful and that's part of why I started a Discord community and that whole Discord Community is really tuned towards like a lot of people there are tuned towards helping each other out helping each other achieve their their art goals and network and connect to Opportunities and jobs and even so it ranges everywhere from you know the basic fundamentals and just getting your feet wet and maybe working on some of the challenges that we do over there every month you know all the way up to finding work or even connecting to indie game developers you know a lot of these things are really Community Based you can't really do that in a vacuum and so you know one of the questions that I get asked a lot especially recently is you know should I pay a professional to review my portfolio and certainly like if you're at the level where you're starting to look for work yeah but if you're really still just getting the fundamentals down and if you don't even know what the fundamentals are then no absolutely not what you should be doing is just doing workshops and tutorials or even easier is watch some of my beginner videos I have tons of beginner art videos here on my YouTube channel and I also have my easy art lessons which dig really deep into it that is a kind of step-by-step hey here are the fundamentals and you'll be drawing cool stuff like treasure chests and guns and houses and characters within a matter of you know 20 days you'll be able to master these things if you practice consistently and at least gives you the thing you should be filling up your sketchbooks with I've spent the last 10 years making specialized workshops for exactly you I'd say about 99 of the reason why artists stop growing is that they neglect to focus on their fundamentals the core Foundation of drawing like construction perspective I'm talking about color understanding color theory at least on a fundamental level I'm talking about Anatomy there's also separate from that category is tools understanding the tools that you're using so if you're working in clip Studio paint it's like you maybe you want to tune into a few videos that actually walk you through some things about clip Studio paint that you didn't know before or photoshop that maybe you didn't know before and maybe understanding how to get what's in your head into the the canvas so to speak and that's not necessarily something that's this in the same category as learning to draw these are really two totally different things it's like understanding you know how to fix a car versus how to drive a car they're very different things another thing that I would recommend is that you make sure that you set aside a chunk of time every single day to practice if you're a beginner and you're trying to teach yourself set aside time every single day even if that's just 15 to 20 minutes and I know for a lot of people out there they're like well I got a job or or I got school or I got you know my my social night with my buddies or something you'll have to make some sacrifices and sometimes you really have to prioritize this and I sacrificed a lot of my social life as a teenager when I was teaching myself to draw because what was most important to me was developing my art skill and maybe you can combine these things so I remember earlier I was talking about Community well maybe your community has a scheduled thing you know maybe your art your art buddies have a scheduled time every day or every couple of days that you get together to talk about these things or even get it get together online these days you can like have a Discord or you can get together with a group of people virtually you don't even have to drive over to their house or anything like that like you can be available for this group for giving them feedback and then you receiving feedback on what you're doing and really challenging yourselves to grow and develop and that's that's a really key element of it by the way is that consistency and I'm not just talking about repeating the same mistakes over and over again talking about getting involved in a group that's going to be pushing each other you'll always have that interesting Dynamic of oh somebody's kind of a jerk about things or they're just real direct about their feedback and that can be a good thing too so keep that in mind sometimes it's not going to be what you want to hear but the one thing that you develop in yourself is that desire to show off when you do Master something or when you do pick up a new technique and then make it everybody's sort of responsibility in this group to go off and find other things hey man I was checking out this other artist and look at what they did look at what they showed how to do and then every now and then on my YouTube channel I'll do the same thing where I'll be like hey here's a lighting technique or here's a layer your trick trick or something that I do in Photoshop that'll help you to do something in a way that maybe you're not used to doing you hadn't done it that way before and it's worth tuning into those kind of videos even though they may not get you know millions of clicks or anything it's worth tuning into those things to maybe nudge Yourself Loose from your usual patterns and get you thinking about the tool in a more extensive or a different way than what you're used to right so that kind of a thing can be super valuable and super powerful because yeah it is you self-learning but it's also comparing and contrasting with other people who are also self learning and I'll be honest with you everybody from that group that I I used to hang out with got to be incredibly good artists you know you can learn from each other and pass along that information to help each other out to establish a a very successful creative career for not just yourself but your friends because one thing that happens is that when you do have a social group like this when one of you is a huge success the other started asking you well how did you do it man because I I want to get there too you should want your art crew to do better than you that means better opportunities for you because you will learn from them and how they did it I think another thing that's really valuable for self-development if you're going to become a self-taught artist is to also teach others and you may be thinking well I'm not good enough to teach anybody well did you figure out one of the fundamentals last weekend well maybe you can show that to somebody else maybe you could show that to another buddy and the more people you can show that to the better you get at understanding why something you did works because we can all accidentally you know do something great you know so we can all accidentally pull off a cool doodle or sketch that gets some attention online that's just an accident but if you can repeat those successes those results that were a success then you understand that you fully understand it and if you can teach it to somebody else then you truly understand it and that also helps you to develop the skill of the self-analytical skill that's going to help you to be able to identify what makes your work good and how you can help somebody else to make better work and that's an incredible value because if it's one thing that you should think that you're working on it's how to increase your value as a creative if you want to do this as a profession you're going to have to be valuable to other people I made several videos about this how to raise your value as a professional game artist every single day and if every day you're working on something that's raising your value or improving your skill set and lodging you loose from the things that are holding you back you're constantly evaluating that you will become a value now I'm not gonna lie here's a long hard Road it is going to take a lot of dedication it's going to take some sacrifice it's going to take a lot of self-assessment but I can almost say with certainty that if you're practicing fundamentals and you're having fun with those fundamentals and you're constantly developing on those core basics of drawing and if you're sharing that with a small community even two or three people who are also on the same Journey maybe one of them or two of them are at a higher level than you then you're going to develop value you're going to develop your skill set and as they develop then you too shall develop and then you start to integrate into a more advanced group and after a matter of a couple of years you may find yourself in a level where you're almost at a professional level but is that true for everybody no and that's why it's a special thing it's gonna take you know you going hey I am special and I do believe in myself and that's I suppose probably one of the biggest ingredients that you're gonna need is confidence you're going to need the confidence not necessarily that you're already good but you're going to need the confidence that you can get good and a lot of that comes from the psychology and I've talked about this in many videos in the past but if you're telling yourself no I can't do that well then you just might as well quit now but if you tell yourself well I can't do that yet you just put in that one simple that one little word can make such a big difference in your confidence in your ability to overcome I can't do that yet I'm not good at that part yet I'm not very good at lighting yet but if every time you say that you're thinking to yourself I bet I could get good at that and then you write it down you make a list of the things that you could get better at right and then you start addressing each one of those individually and every single time when you're in in that 30-minute session that you're sitting down every single day 15 to 30 minutes every single day to practice something if every one of those times you're like well here's my list of things I'm working on and improving well then you're gonna you're going to be improving whether you're aware of it or not and then pull up something that you did a year ago or six months ago and see if you can do a better job at it paint over something that you did a little while ago like you saw in the beginning of this video with my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles drawings you know the first ones were pretty awful I was just copying something that I saw somebody else did but you know when I sit down to draw the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles now several years later you can see a visible difference because I've I've kept this mentality of self-learning of self-improving of making lists of things that I can work on to improve and you do that with everything from you know not just art but everything in your life and you will find yourself with a much better life than where you were a couple of years ago almost in everything and it's all that's almost a guaranteed path to growth and path to self-improvement whether you have a teacher or not whether you have somebody holding your hand or or helping you to do it for you you can't really count on people to do things for you you're really going to have to be self-driven if you're going to be a self-taught artist but you know from what I've seen the number one thing that holds people back from growing as as an artist or building a career as an artist or any of these things is the story that they tell themselves restrictive thinking and this what I'm talking about here when I'm talking about this and maybe you've you've seen this happen with some people where they might go like oh that's selling out or people defeat themselves before they begin by saying oh well uh it's all just Gatekeepers or oh you you can't get in unless you know somebody or oh it's it's um because of some other restriction people will make up things an excuse and that will that will hinder them their whole lives and the thing that I would suggest to you is like ask yourself if you're just creating an obstacle is the story that you're telling yourself going to give you an opportunity throw yourself a rope to like say I can pull myself out of whatever situation I'm in and into my ideal life and I know this I know this because I had a mental trap in my world and in my mind for probably the first 30 years of my life okay so I would suggest that you analyze that start picking up some books about neuro-linguistic programming the language that you use on yourself and about yourself dictates what you're capable of in your world we create our own prisons and the only thing we're slave to is the prison that we create for ourselves the story you tell yourself dictates your capability Your Capacity so you might as well tell yourself a story that will set you up for potential and then start acting on that story and that starts with language it starts with the what you're telling yourself now but it's not just that it's also following through that means making time to do studies it means putting in the hard work to do it and I know sometimes you look around and you're like oh well so-and-so didn't work hard or ah they make it look easy yeah you know and that's easy to fall into that trap but believe me you're gonna have to work hard and if you're not particularly naturally gifted you're gonna have to work even harder and I've done many of videos about that believe me I've been in that position I felt that way before in my past as well it's going to take a lot of hard work and dedication but I will say it does get easier in time there is a light at the end of that tunnel it does get easier and when you find that you're valued and you're valued long enough there's no greater reward than feeling that you've earned it think of it like a Dark Souls boss you know it's a pain in the ass but then once you conquer it it's like wow yeah that felt good because you know how hard it was and no you don't need to spend fifty thousand dollars a year on an art school to get some certification that some some guy or some lady says that you're good enough now no you can do that on your own actually you could do it for a fraction of the price you know and that's why I try to make all of my workshops available at a very very reasonable price right now I am running my uh my cool summer special over there on my gumro channel so check out some of my workshops for beginners and intermediate and then when you feel that you're ready to go pro but maybe you're just not getting opportunities maybe it's because there's some skill that you're not aware of and that should be present in your portfolio and check out some of my more advanced workshops like my facility Workshop or my character design workshops over there on my gumro channel this is the same uh process and pipeline that I use to develop care doctors and environments for some of the world's biggest selling video games if you want to communicate with me a little bit more directly and get access to my weekly Vlogs you can become a member here on my YouTube channel now yeah that's a thing it's super cheap and uh but it does help me out of course and keep me uh doing videos here on the YouTube and also any questions that you may have about being a pro artist I'd love to hear them and I will see you guys in the next video alright ciao foreign

Channel: Trent Kaniuga

Views: 12,926

Keywords: Trent Kaniuga, how to draw, photoshop tutorial, time lapse, art, sketchbook pro, art process, how to, sketchbook, fantasy, artist, art tutorial, digital art tutorial, speedpainting, drawing tutorial, Concept art, game artist, free brushes, beginner art, self taught, art school, learning to draw, learn to draw, art lesson, beginner

Id: GPbtq5ztbbw

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 09 2023