This is why you WILL succeed as an artist

this video is sponsored by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace helps you build your write presence online you need to stop doubting your ability to make it as an artist the only difference between success and failure is perseverance and in this video i'm going to share the series of events that led to me deciding to become an artist at the age of 27 and to show you the difference between the first 3d character i ever made and a remake of this character that i did just last week eight years later it has been quite a bumpy ride and i don't intend to sugarcoat it but hopefully this will reassure some of you out there that you can do this it just takes a bit of tenacity and optimism so for me it actually all started when i was about 14. i'd gotten hold of the game final fantasy 8 and this is the earliest i remember wanting to create 3d characters myself in fact i got pretty obsessed with the idea of working for squaresoft who were the studio behind final fantasy at the time they're called square enix now so i was actually quite young when i knew that i wanted to get into this industry and so when i was given my options for my gcses which are your end-of-school exams in the uk i chose art and graphic design now in hindsight these were actually very wise choices which would have led me down a path that i believe could have defined my career but when i told my dad what i'd chosen i was scoffed at i can't remember exactly what he said but he strongly discouraged me from pursuing the idea and said something along the lines of mccabe's an artist we can't do art i think he expected that i'd be more into software development like he is if only i'd seen the pursuit of happiness don't ever let somebody tell you you can't do something not even me now i can't say for certain that it was this comment that derailed what was surely about to become my passion for art because it was around this time that i got into the habit of drinking cider down the park with my mates and to be honest it was probably a mixture of both but in any case i went on to finish school at 16 without much of a clue what i wanted to do i did go to college and by college i mean the uk's version of college being the school you go to in between high school and university typically between the ages of 16 and 18. i studied music and communication studies and probably one more that i can't even remember not that it matters because it didn't last very long a few months in i was called into the head teacher's office who showed me a spreadsheet on his computer showing me how many lessons i'd been absent from hey i was 16 and the bear up the road served as alcohol even though i'm pretty sure they knew we were underage and one of my teachers told me that college is a choice and i'm not legally required to turn up to lessons what did you expect would happen well i'll tell you what happened i got kicked out of college so now what do i do well i got myself a job in a factory where some of my friends worked it wasn't the most glamorous job in the world and the pair was minimum wage for a 16 year old which was 2.50 an hour but i was with my friends and we had a laugh and at the time that's all that really mattered to me at 18 i got a second job in a bar which was awesome and i met a lot of interesting people and witnessed a lot of cork fueled bare fights too then one day completely at random some marketing bump from a nearby college landed in the hallway and for whatever reason my interest was peaked i was going back i didn't choose art subjects though i chose money subjects maths business and i t i was going to be a stock broker now i don't know where my jordan belfort aspirations emerged from because i still hadn't seen the pursuit of happiness but it probably had something to do with my inclination towards gambling when it came to applying for university though my dreams of being a stockbroker had long since subsided i love maths and i enjoyed the extremely simple coding i'd done in i.t so naturally i went into computer science now i didn't feel like it at the time but i was still very much lost i wasn't thinking beyond university at all it was all pretty aimless and much like the first time i went to college it didn't last very long in fact life went south pretty rapidly during my first year of university on account of becoming addicted to putting white powder up my nose but before we get into the gritty stuff i want you to not scrub forwards for a moment while i talk about this video sponsor because i promise everything i'm about to say about them is real because i do actually believe in squarespace and when i was asked to work with the brand i was given some bullet points as potential talking points which you'll have heard me talk about in previous videos but in this video i'm just going to do away with them and tell you the real reason why i think squarespace is a good idea like we are and art is really hard we don't have time to be learning all of the working parts involved in putting a website together content management systems mysql databases html css trust me it goes deep and i know because i've spent countless hours learning this stuff myself but it really isn't necessary when squarespace literally does all of this for you don't get me wrong if you want to become a web designer or web developer then squarespace might not be what you're looking for but if you're an artist and you just want somewhere to put your portfolio or sell your brushes or whatever then i would honestly recommend squarespace the best part is you don't even have to take my word for it because you can try it for free for two weeks anyway but if you do decide after that that you want to pay to keep the website running i would politely ask that you come back to this video and sign in using the link in the description squarespace.com forward slash dannymac 3d not only does this give you 10 off but it also gives squarespace a nudge in the end to let them know that i'm worth working with again which will really help towards the growth of this channel no the white powder so back in 2009 there was a sudden surge of a new drug called methadron not to be confused with methadone also called mcat miemio bubble and a few more the drug was so new that it wasn't even illegal yet and as a result people thought it was safe i remember going to a party where at least 90 of the students there were using this substance and i was one of them and i did it a bit too much too it took me to a very dark place and at this point in my life i was more lost than i've ever been and likely ever will be again first i quit my part-time job in a supermarket and then once again i fell out of education i moved into the box room at my dad's house and was so broken that i'd sometimes find myself crying for no apparent reason and to make things worse this was 2010 so there were no jobs going especially not for recovering addicts but believe it or not that's actually what got my life back on track employers everywhere were ignoring my cv and i started to wonder how i might get their attention so i had to think outside the box and the absolutely amazing idea that i had was to animate my cv and turn it into a sort of video because as everybody knows the key to a good cv is to make it move i started playing around with animating text in powerpoint and i must have googled animating text or something because i then discovered video copilot which included this incredible catalogue of after effects tutorials which andrew kramer had started making before youtube had even launched i started watching one tutorial then another and another and pretty soon i'd watch them all i was hooked and for the first time in my adult life i felt like i was doing what i was supposed to be now right at this point the government in this country announced that the fees for university were going up from three grand a year to nine grand a year so i decided that if i wanted to try and go back to university it would have to be that year to avoid that sort of debt so i applied to five different unis and ended up on a course called computer animation and digital special effects now the first time i went to uni i'd all but drop tate in the first semester but surely it was going to go more smoothly this time well as it goes in the first semester i ended up having my face stamped on breaking both my upper and lower jaws requiring surgery which was nice oh and i got a girl that i just met pregnant too so there's that we actually stayed for a couple for eight years though and now have two wonderful children together but that's a different story we were freshers with a baby on the way but there was absolutely no way i was letting my life get off track no i wasn't dropping out of uni so the following year i got a part-time job alongside my studies to help raise this baby girl with her mother needless to say this was probably the busiest i've ever been in my life but it's fine because it's not like my sleep was severely interrupted every single night the year after that was my sandwich here during which me and three of the students from my course set up an animation studio it might have gone well except it very quickly dawned on me that none of us had the slightest idea what we were doing the course we were on was a bsc which means bachelor of science which means we hadn't actually learned anything about art and yet here we were trying to be an art studio with absolutely no art skills but rather than get down about it i decided to do something about it and that's when i modeled my first character almost immediately i started posting my work online i remember one time posting it into a facebook group and asking how far from industry level my work was and somebody messaged me basically to tell me that i'm so far behind that i might as well give up but ha guess what i'd seen the pursuit of happiness by now and i was gonna get good at this no matter what some stranger on the internet told me if anything he fueled my passion even more and in a twisted way i'm kind of thankful to him for that i spent every minute that i could learning more and more i could not get enough information in at all it's almost like i was making up for the 13 years i'd been off track my work started to improve and i felt as though the hard work was one day bound to pay off that last sentence might seem insignificant but if there was one thing that put me ahead of my peers at this time it was the belief that i couldn't make it i knew people that had been drawing from a very young age and were much better than i were but are now doing something completely unrelated to art simply because they didn't believe they could make a living as an artist but believe me if you get good at anything there'll be somebody out there willing to pay you to do it especially now we have high-speed internet and location independence if you're pessimistic about the future sometimes disguised as being realistic then you simply won't put in the effort required to get you to where you need to be if you believe you'll get there you will you are an artist now go make some art [Music] [Music] like a truck me

Channel: Danny Mac 3D

Views: 141,554

Rating: 4.9621367 out of 5

Keywords: pixologic, zbrush, blender, sculpt, disney, dreamworks, pixar, stylized, b3d

Id: m67dIXqjcRE

Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021