The drawing advice that changed my life

thanks for tuning and again this video will be covering the best piece of advice that I ever got about drawing in fact the advice that changed my life holy freaking click babe I'm making this video cause the top comment on the last video I made the AMA was about the advice that I shared right at the end and I think I want this channel to have a little bit of that element where there's a bit of utility for other creative people or just other people in general so hope you'll like it buckle-up apologies about the background and handheld mic I'm still in Sri Lanka so we've still got the newsreader in the middle of nowhere vibe for heck let's go in 2016 I was a totally different guy I was still what I'll call creative but I was very very scattered about it and at the time I was working for a guy called Mark Shatner who was an eccentric artist him and his wife Julie would make these dog and rabbit people's sculptures you might have seen them they're pretty stunning and what they do is just that all they do is make these dog and rabbits cultures sometimes they're on a moped they make his paintings homewares you name it now I really liked mark Shatner I really liked what he was about and I was really impressed with the fact that he managed to make art his full-time gig one time I said how many days a week do you make art and he responded without even thinking it was weird he goes all of them and I was like seven and he goes yeah all seven why at the time that blew my mind it wouldn't blow my mind now cuz now I know what it's like to find something that you love enough to do seven days a week where it doesn't even feel like work it feels like a day's wasted if you haven't done it but at the time I was like dude what anyway his passion was super contagious very fun wacky creative guy me though I was kind of young and angsty and I did what young angsty people do best I complained I'd be like mark I didn't get it you're an artist you make all this stuff you've kind of got this whole world this whole stuff that you can just milk and do all the time I feel creative why can't I do that just nice when G language and one day I guess the complaining had got to an all-time high and he gave me a bit of tough love he said Campbell you know what your problem is one day you write a song the next day you write a poem and then the third day you do a drawing and none of it adds up to anything all you're doing is laying a single brick of a million different houses and expecting that one day it'll magically become a mansion it's not gonna happen it hit me like a ton of miss laid bricks man he'd identified the problem perfectly I was scattered Casey Neistat has a little bit about this as well where he says you can do 10 things to like the first degree like this right here and that's how well you'll do all 10 things or you can do one thing to the 10th degree right there and look how much better you do that naturally my next question was all right mark we know what's wrong with me how do I fix it and this is where the advice came in he just said draw the same thing every single day he's like you've got so many mediums I'll pick one for you it's gonna be drawing and what you're gonna do is just draw the exact same thing every single day just try it for a year and then we'll reassess I don't have anything to lose and this guy knew a lot more about Hart than I did so I took his advice the only problem left to solve was what I was gonna draw and as Mark's advice was marinating in my head as I walked home from work I walked through the park but I always walked through and it was full of this one particular bird called the itis you might know the Ibis is the Egyptian god Thoth or if you're from Australia you'll know them as the bin chicken they're a big white bird with a black head who hangs around rubbish bins and eats trash for me they just seemed like the perfect metaphor for humanity we could fly we could do anything we want and yet we roll around and bin juice I loved it once known as the white ibis the species has evolved into a superior scavenger from the city's rooftops the bin chicken has spotted something bins so I went to the pub and I drew this then I drew this then I drew this I ended up drawing nine of irises that night and I posted them to Instagram and I started to going to get a sense that I was building something I started to get a sense that I was laying bricks of the same house that was only the first day the second day rolls around and I drew another Ibis there's not a brick in my house third day another Ibis fourth fifth tens twenty or thirty eighth day I just keep drawing these ibises like mark said and you know what happened I got really bored of drawing ibises but I still wanted to commit to the advice so I was like well shoot if I'm going to draw irises I may as well make them interesting screwed I'm gonna add chokes so I start adding jokes to the irises just little comments about my city little bits of social commentary and I get really into that I get really into the social commentary that comes along with the irises to the point where the irises by the hundredth iris just starts to take a bit of a backseat to said social commentary and it's at this point that I realized the brilliance of Mark Shatner's advice he wasn't telling me to draw an iris he was just telling me to start because once I start only then will I find the thing that I'm looking for but I would never have got there if I hadn't drawn the eye this every single day and this is true for work this is true for like dating versus committing yourself to one person friendship everything like really focusing and investing yourself into something you're passionate about will always yield better results then scattering yourself around and spreading yourself thin so that's the best bit of advice that I've ever saved but why is it so good well I've put it down to four raisins the first quantity leads to quality I've said this before I mean it's the reason that my videos are now gonna be 70% instead of 100% perfect I just truly believe that and for me to approach quantity I had to take out the decision-making process of what to draw which mark Shanna did so eloquently so the second reason that I really like this advice is because it promotes constraints for creativity once again we'll look at the blank page the blank page is one of the most freakishly intimidating things we've all been there we've all stared at it we've all tapped it with our pens it's very very annoying but compare a blank page with a blank page that says draw an Ibis or a blank page that says draw a robot or a flying horse or any kind of tight brief immediately having a constraint lets you know exactly what you're going to be doing which leads me to the third reason action comes before motivation it's not the other way around I think there's this myth that motivation leads to action that you've gotta wait for some sort of moment of inspiration that strikes you like lightning from the gods but it's the other way around firstly you need to act and only then will you find your motivation so for me I needed to draw every single day and I needed to build up that habit before I could probably be motivated to draw what I actually felt like drawing now the fourth and final reason that this was incredible advice I was using thinking as a form of procrastination there's a story about a donkey who wants some hay and want some water but the donkey doesn't know which one to go to first so the donkey looks at the hay looks at the water looks at the hay looks at the water I'm a hungry and my thirsty and my hungry and my thirsty and eventually the donkey dies of dehydration what a dumb donkey I was the donkey I was dumb I was like should I make this should I make that should I make this and you know what I didn't start but I felt productive because I was thinking about it but thinking about stuff is not doing stuff it's the complete opposite of doing stuff and I was in a trap with this deliberation and this pondering and his questioning in this thinking the strategizing and debating all felt like they were moving me forward but they weren't and Mark Shatner's advice of just draw one thing every day got me out of that I think if you're only good at one thing that's what you do and with both of us it wasn't as though you know it had to be art it was that we were particularly good at anything else so there it is some advice I hope it resonates with you I hope particularly in this time of January when productivity is an all-time high we're all a little bit drunk off New Year's resolutions and the feeling of reinventing yourself in 2020 and all this new decade kind of hype I hope that the advice can help you um translate some of that into action let me know what you thought hope you liked the 70% video vibe once again stuck to the weekly upload gonna see if I can make a whole year of it I'm kind of excited by the challenge who knows who knows we'll see how we go until I'm back at home I can't really do any more drawing videos because I don't have all the equipment so hopefully you don't mind the talking to camera vibe hopefully there's still some value in it subscribe if you unless you didn't like it in which case go for a run gotcha you thought it was over but there's one last thing that I want to show you when I was drawing all those irises there was part of me that wanted to expect there was a part of me that wanted to bring the ibis drawings to life plus earlier I did say watch to the end so here it is the first ever animation I made of an Ibis hey what's up judges from Australian Ivers my name is Tosh I'm from Newcastle but now I live in Newtown so it's kind of like nuit de nuit snapchat hi Tasha and get her haha a little bit about me I play guitar I love music I love she gaze and mostly I play covers and mostly I play covers of no diggity so I think that I should be on Australian Ivor's because I really represent what's going on right now in second year psych students like this kind of like undercurrent of like you know ah you use it creative collective it's like I think that like my generation is kind of like on it and I feel like I'm really honest so I think that if Australian hiatus was like lentils anything in Dubai what do you think it's worth I would probably win but I know it's no no it's like a democracy and stuff because it's like whatever but anyway thanks for watching I hope you found something this video that makes me want to put me on the show love - snapchat - Caze love a vinyl instead of wood [Music] you

Channel: struthless

Views: 2,620,317

Keywords: habits of successful people, motivational video, inspirational video, motivational video 2020, drawing advice, artist advice, how to draw, procrastination, overcome procrastination, artists block, get out of a rut, drawing for beginners, draw with jazza advice, procrastination ted talks, procrastination motivation, procrastination monkey, new years resolutions 2020, drawing tips

Id: M6NsEDwHHiE

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 08 2020