EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
The best way to get past the lightning round is to use gifs. Everyone loves gifs. And when you post a gif everyone loves you by transitive property of insecurity!
Yeah, I can't control that shit either. Once had a friend tell me that sometimes I'm really good to talk to and other times I'm like a stone wall.
It's just sometimes I can't stop myself from existing solely in my thoughts. It's like highway hypnosis from when I wake up till somebody yells my name and waves their hands in front of me.
I'm actually pretty sociable for the most part. It's just I occasionally get these bouts of, I wouldn't call it depression, but more melancholy that last for a day or two. Three at the most. All I want to do is sit alone somewhere and sigh and I always come across as gruff and annoyed when I have to be around people at work or something because I just do not have anything to say to anybody.
Dunno what causes it. Maybe the moon or something.
I'm actually pretty sociable for the most part. It's just I occasionally get these bouts of, I wouldn't call it depression, but more melancholy that last for a day or two. Three at the most. All I want to do is sit alone somewhere and sigh and I always come across as gruff and annoyed when I have to be around people at work or something because I just do not have anything to say to anybody.
Dunno what causes it. Maybe the moon or something.
Yeah this is basically me as well, I'm pretty good at being social... or at least getting people to talk about what they're passionate about. But, I don't talk a whole heck of a lot very often. But yeah, I'll have a few days or so a week where I'm pretty depressed or just melancholy. I think that's just part of human nature though right? Can't be up ALL the time without having some downs.
I'm not sure, but sometimes I'll force myself to go out or at the very least stop making excuses why I can't go out and hang with some friends. Then, half the time I'm in my head thinking, "IM RUINING THIS AND EVERYTHING ALWAYS."
Last November I scripted a comic, but I did not manage to actually get around to it until like, now. I have a major project lined up, but I'd love to see the thread come up if a few people are going to try. Maybe I can think of something simple in style and actually do a page a day.
If you want to do it, though, I will incessantly try to cheer you on because fuck yeah! Make comics!
I'll probs be real busy with school. Currently working on getting two different comics done before school starts, but I'd love to see ya'll do more comics! I'll be cheering from the sideline.
happy birthday @bebarce !!!
edit: god damn it. I can't for the life of me find my favorite brush anywhere on the internet. All I know is that it's a spatter'y brush called "toothbrush1"... tried all of the brush packs I usually download and couldn't find it anywhere...
Guess I'll have to wait till we get back to school to use it again, and back it up somewhere.
Was thinking bout yall today. I constantly find myself explaining about this place to people, talking about, like, early formative moments in my creative shit. All the other boards I used to use are sad or defuct, good looking out hold this down.
i live in new york now, still painting- you know, tryna go pro. things are looking up on that end, constantly losing at dota though. New york is great for seeing art, so I do a lot of that. Saw this show yesterday which was phenom.
Over the weekend, the AC, WB, and the resource section are getting their own header (rather than On-topic, it'll be under creative) so that you can see if the resource section is updated, making it a lot more useful.
I'm giving ya'll a heads up because it'll be a small visual change. It should make it more plausible for us to have activities over there though, like a thread for sketch dailies, or themed challenges.
Red Raevynbecause I only take Bubble BathsRegistered Userregular
If you don't already have Manga Studio 5, I just got it (legally) for $28. I unsubscribed from the spam emails they were sending after I did the trial, and they said "aw shucks but we like you, have this coupon for 20% off a purchase of $50 or more." MS5 is only $48 so I stuck some $4 digital guide to rulers (?) in the cart. When I applied the UNSUBSAVE20 coupon the whole shebang was $28. Pretty good deal!
ps yep the guide is solely about the rulers in MS5: 155 pages! Wow.
i live in new york now, still painting- you know, tryna go pro. things are looking up on that end, constantly losing at dota though. New york is great for seeing art, so I do a lot of that. Saw this show yesterday which was phenom.
painting and losing dota have defined the better part of my life for awhile, now
we should queue together sometime~
Projeck on
+1
gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
So the picture I posted in my study thread failed the Watts assessment. (Why in the world is the TA guy grading at 10PM on a Saturday night?) Okay, well, that's depressing, I tried really hard on that. Well, let's go look on the Watts forum threads to see what a "pass" looks like.
Big mistake. Just holy crap. How are these people all so good at this? If Watts online had an expulsion mechanism, I'd be first in line against these guys. The TA is probably looking at my submissions the way a parent looks at their toddler: "Ah, that's cute. I suppose I'll pass you out of pity."
I'm going to sit in this corner with my fuzzy lines and uneven shading now and think about the bleak inevitability of the end of all things.
So the picture I posted in my study thread failed the Watts assessment. (Why in the world is the TA guy grading at 10PM on a Saturday night?) Okay, well, that's depressing, I tried really hard on that. Well, let's go look on the Watts forum threads to see what a "pass" looks like.
Big mistake. Just holy crap. How are these people all so good at this? If Watts online had an expulsion mechanism, I'd be first in line against these guys. The TA is probably looking at my submissions the way a parent looks at their toddler: "Ah, that's cute. I suppose I'll pass you out of pity."
I'm going to sit in this corner with my fuzzy lines and uneven shading now and think about the bleak inevitability of the end of all things.
I wouldn't get too discouraged- everyone starts out a at a different point, which is why if you take classes in person at Watts, there aren't any grades or assessments like that. Some people go in having already been to art school, trying to round out their education, some people are bright-eyed straight out of high school budding artists with big dreams, some people are total never-held-a-pencil-before-but-I'm-looking-for-a-hobby types, some are diehard pros that just want to stay in practice. You're all mixed in with 18 year old prodigies, and guys in their 60's doing work that looks like a 5th grader did it.
A system that invites comparison between these is bound to be pretty useless. Unless everyone has posted a detailed biography that indicates they are in the exact same situation that you are- age, level of previous training, economic situation, same psychological quirks- I wouldn't get caught up in comparisons, of 'I should be as good as them'. That's hard to do (and I'll admit I'm being hypocritical because I do that ALL THE TIME even knowing how terrible it is for me, psychologically speaking), but the only things you should be looking at the work for is, 'what I'm seeing in their work, the things I like about it, how do I do that, how do I use it for my own work?', in the same way you would look at a master study. Those guys should be taken as an asset, that you can use to your advantage.
I'm kinda surprised they bothered to use a grading system for the online school, but I suspect dealing with so many people makes it an unfortunate necessity to be less personal.
These things take time, and some people are going to need more time than others, just based on previous levels of experience. Luckily, the sort of pay-as-you-go-for-what-you-want system allows you to actually take the time that you need.
I don't know if you've ever read any Malcolm Gladwell books, but he describes a 'snowball' effect when if comes to how we treat grades in regular school. Someone starts out in grade school a little younger than their peers. Their brain is a little less developed, they have a little less experience with the world. Consequently, they do a little less well in school, their older peers do a little better. Soon those older peers are lauded for doing better- they get more encouragement and support in their studies. They become all A students. The younger student- who had all the biological ability to be as smart, as talented- does not get that same support- may be punished for their grades, or torn down, and soon their identity is that of a "C" student. And because school does not pause to allow a C student to catch up, or divvy up classes in to age ranges of a few months rather than by year, a "C" student generally continues to be a "C" student throughout their life, every year being forced into the next grade level working from a disadvantage. Not even their fault, they just got screwed by pure random chance. (Well I suppose their parents could have had the foresight to work out their banging schedule better for maximum advantage, but without time travel technology there's little to be done about that retrospectively.)
So here, where you're paying the bills, you're not being forced anywhere- so you can spend the time you need, because the only remedy is practice. You don't need special talent, you don't need to be a prodigy or a genius- you just need to put in the dedicated time applying the knowledge, that the great artists out there have. This lets you spend whatever time you need to become an A student, and stay an A student.
If you need to spend more time with fundamentals, cool. Do that. Even the experienced guys might go back and brush up with a fundamentals class every so often. Some guys may have taken the same class 16, 20 times, because it's the practice that's important. If you are honestly practicing to the best of your ability, practicing as taught, understanding and applying what you learn- and not lazing out and underestimating what the 'best of your ability' is- then you are succeeding. If you're walking somewhere, and you take a step in the right direction- do you look down at your foot and get mad that the act of taking that step has not teleported you instantaneously to your destination? Probably not, because that would be absurd- you know the only thing to do, is to keep going.
The AAaR section is out of the dark, If anyone has some things they'd like to see in there/activities they'd like to consider, I'm all ears for suggestions. Pretty much everything about the AC will remain the same, but I'd like to phase out the questions/tutorial threads in favor of getting that information into more dedicated threads in the resource section.
I've made a tech thread for wacom tablet, photoshop advice, and that sort of thing. I think we also want to make a how to get started with drawing for absolute beginners thread, to accumulate that shit that gets dumped in beginner artists threads
We could also have a more permanent inspiration thread.
@gavindel I remember my grade 9 art class (which was like, half of my life ago, ugh...) and the teacher actually was teaching us proper drawing fundamentals. As long as we did our work we were pretty much guaranteed to get a solid 70% pass, and if it was obvious a lot of love and extra effort went into it it was an 80-90. She wasn't so much awarding being really awesome or docking you for being shitty as she was marking work ethic, since that is the biggest thing that will lead to success and growth. Being naturally good at something is, I believe, bullshit. Hard work leads to being skilled. You aren't born being an awesome pianist or amazing artist or world class athlete. You may have grown up in conditions that have allowed those skills to flourish, but that has nothing to do with you. That's just the luck of being born in the right place with the right environment and family/peers.
i live in new york now, still painting- you know, tryna go pro. things are looking up on that end, constantly losing at dota though. New york is great for seeing art, so I do a lot of that. Saw this show yesterday which was phenom.
painting and losing dota have defined the better part of my life for awhile, now
we should queue together sometime~
31679087 8-)
0
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
@gavindel I remember my grade 9 art class (which was like, half of my life ago, ugh...) and the teacher actually was teaching us proper drawing fundamentals. As long as we did our work we were pretty much guaranteed to get a solid 70% pass, and if it was obvious a lot of love and extra effort went into it it was an 80-90. She wasn't so much awarding being really awesome or docking you for being shitty as she was marking work ethic, since that is the biggest thing that will lead to success and growth. Being naturally good at something is, I believe, bullshit. Hard work leads to being skilled. You aren't born being an awesome pianist or amazing artist or world class athlete. You may have grown up in conditions that have allowed those skills to flourish, but that has nothing to do with you. That's just the luck of being born in the right place with the right environment and family/peers.
Agreed. Rock Lee/Rudy is always the correct. Hard work beats "talent" every time. You just gotta stick with it.
I'm gunna wax hard here for a min, hardly a well formed position but just trying to get out a feeling that I've had for awhile:
This thing about talent vs time as the source of skill in image making is kind of a dangerous false dichotomy. I've noticed that even considering the two as opposing poles is a habit of people going after a specific kind of image making, the comic artist, the concept artist, the neo-classical painter-- and critically here, coming from a working class background. As a member of the working class, where we sell our time for money, its very easy to let the twisted logic of that exchange enter into other parts of our lives. I don't think its unrelated that these three categories of image making are also very standard heroic middle class positions.
Most of us who got into image making through those paths (comics and games) buy into a very un-articulated distant fantasy that one day we could be our own bosses and engage with this fun activity for a living. So when you double down on this idea, you end up at the doorsteps of learning traditional academic image making techniques because that is a very clear cut way to "earn" this. We engage in this practice and if our interests stay focused we start to get better. It's from that position that we can say with confidence that talent is a myth and that labor is the key, because there is no better affirmation of this practice than all the examples of it that one sees when your in the trenches, working academically for years.
It seems so obvious, as you make landscape after landscape, and fantasy battle after fantasy battle, power armor after power armor, model after model, portrait after portrait, spaceship after spaceship, that you are improving. The images that we make start looking more and more like the images that other people make who get to make them for a living. And when you started, they didn't look at all alike. On the very basic level of visual similarity, it's working.
From here, I blow up the scale and go back to the that distant fantasy that we all bought into on the onset. Sure we may have told people on forums all different kinds of rational as to why we were pursuing the skills, but deep down, I think that we are motivated by a heroic legend of class mobility that we have been fed our entire lives-- however faint that impression was left on us consciously, we are socialized from 1st grade into that kind of system of values. Labor is really weird part of the human experience, a necessary one, but our relationship to it socially is coded to revere it in such a way that we can be willingly exploited. We are emotionally damaged with our relationship to the idea of labor.
In the very same twisted way the logic plays out in class identity politics, where your value is your willingness to trade your time for money, the only real answer to why someone cannot have the heroic legend play out for them on an individual level in their lives is because they didn't work hard enough. Reading that probably makes a lot of sense still though, like, it doesn't sound wrong in your head. Of course not working hard enough is why we wouldn't achieve what we wanted in this pursuit, or in life.
All we have to do though, is go back to the beginning and look at the people who are on the top of the game. It is indisputable that most of them put in a lot of time and energy. And I'm also rejecting talent. So whats the rest of it? Unreliably, meaning without their control, I think there's a large part of it that is life circumstance and privileges. Reliably though, so more like, the other things that I would compare to labor, is that most of the real top dog image makers have interesting personalities and perspectives on the world.
So I guess what I'm saying is that talent vs labor is a false dichotomy because it should be something like talent vs. labor vs. read a fucking book vs. connect with your neighbors and grandparents vs. considering abstract thought a fun and useful way to spend your time vs. learning about other art forms vs. hating other art forms vs. surfing vs. stealing vs. hating the man vs. making yourself vulnerable to people who you are close with. Just like, all the stuff that makes cool people cool, usually, are the same things that make someone good at making images. And you can still be an asshole too, interesting people come in all stripes, just like interesting images. Wake up sheeple lol.
Greatnation on
+1
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
edited August 2015
I'm hardly the best case here, as my desire was really never to sell my stuff rather than just to make fun tools/toys, but I just don't entirely buy a classist view of art production. I'm sure that's true for a lot of people, but I don't see that as a defining quality or motivation for creating art.
When I don't make things for a week or more I start getting antsy and frustrated. If I don't make things for a month or more I'm typically an angry, frustrating person to be around. When I'm making things every other day I'm typically a very relaxed and happy person. For me it is entirely a way to de-stress and have fun. When I'm pouring over a map or story outline or a set of dialogue or even my crude and rather horrible character illustrations I'm just gone from this world and having a ton of fun getting what is in my brain in a format other people can see and that I can use to share with my players or just to post here. If people see it and like it, or even if it is actually used in game, that's secondary. I've made probably over 100 maps to date over the last few years, maybe a third made it to actually being used. A lot of them were just "can I make a Karst? is that even possible?" and then I set about trying it out. A lot of time I failed, but I had fun in the failings.
I think the concept of making things to sell and make money is sort of a putting the cart before the horse, personally. If that's the image of long-term success you hold I can see that being a huge liability over time as you will only see success in the act of selling your materials, rather than in the simple act of making them.
For me, long term success would be still being happy and maybe making things better than I can now. The idea of looking back and remaking what I am working on today ten years from now is something that does make me excited, because I wonder just how much better I can improve it. How awesome will the same locations and characters look then compared to now? How will they have grown? How will my story have grown?
If someone wanted to buy my campaign in a paizo third party thing by then, that would be cool! But that's not really why I art.
Enc on
+4
MetalbourneInside a cluster b personalityRegistered Userregular
I showed my therapist a picture of the sculpture I had been working on and he said I had talent. I almost punched him.
For me it is entirely a way to de-stress and have fun. When I'm pouring over a map or story outline or a set of dialogue or even my crude and rather horrible character illustrations I'm just gone from this world and having a ton of fun getting what is in my brain in a format other people can see and that I can use to share with my players or just to post here.
That's what I'm saying man, you're doing it right because your relationship to art production isn't rooted in a duty to the labor of it, nor is it motivated by pure mythic godlike talent, it falls outside that dichotomy.
Edit: so I wrote out a whole, long discourse on the whole talent vs hard work thing but the more I thought about the more I kept coming up with conflicting arguments so I just deleted it and have decided that there are way too many variables for me to actually come up with a semi decent answer.
So I guess what I'm saying is that talent vs labor is a false dichotomy because it should be something like talent vs. labor vs. read a fucking book vs. connect with your neighbors and grandparents vs. considering abstract thought a fun and useful way to spend your time vs. learning about other art forms vs. hating other art forms vs. surfing vs. stealing vs. hating the man vs. making yourself vulnerable to people who you are close with. Just like, all the stuff that makes cool people cool, usually, are the same things that make someone good at making images. And you can still be an asshole too, interesting people come in all stripes, just like interesting images.
I think you've created a strawman by reducing it to talent vs labor. When I talk or read about it, I've never understood it to be simply the act of grinding at practice. The argument is less about saying "you must grind to be good" than it is about saying "those people you see who are great weren't given that ability." Time, work, effort - whatever you want to call it - "not-talent" includes practice, studying, determination and also living to become a more interesting person with your own perspective. You say you reject talent, but I think shifting attribution to circumstance and privilege has the same problems. Whether it's art, insane skateboarding tricks, getting into the NFL or playing an instrument, it unfairly minimizes the incredible effort the creators have put in to get where they are by shifting the credit from their hussle to some cosmic mix of god's blessing, DNA and fate. In addition to slighting the artist (whatever their field), it also shifts the agency to become that good away from people who aren't there yet to something outside of their control. Not giving folks the credit they are due is a shame, but telling outsiders the greats are there because of something outside of their control (talent, circumstance, privilege, whatever) is the real problem imo. Yes, some people have advantages, but the spirit of the message is that non-talent is required regardless of your situation and with it you can overcome disadvantages and move towards your goal.
I bought a douchey razer thing and actually really like it. I'll continue to try and pile and organize resources over there, and probably pester you guys in the chat thread when I do.
Does anyone have an interest in more prompts for portfolio building type stuff?
Posts
Another weird example: I hate public speaking, but I love being off in front of a class and teaching when I know what I'm talking about.
It's just sometimes I can't stop myself from existing solely in my thoughts. It's like highway hypnosis from when I wake up till somebody yells my name and waves their hands in front of me.
Dunno what causes it. Maybe the moon or something.
I'm a monster.
My plan is working. Soon my master plan to... eh forget it I just don't feel like it anymore.
~orders in~
Seriously, though. I feel my antisocial tendencies got worse the moment I learned I could have non-pizza food delivered to my house.
Yeah this is basically me as well, I'm pretty good at being social... or at least getting people to talk about what they're passionate about. But, I don't talk a whole heck of a lot very often. But yeah, I'll have a few days or so a week where I'm pretty depressed or just melancholy. I think that's just part of human nature though right? Can't be up ALL the time without having some downs.
I'm not sure, but sometimes I'll force myself to go out or at the very least stop making excuses why I can't go out and hang with some friends. Then, half the time I'm in my head thinking, "IM RUINING THIS AND EVERYTHING ALWAYS."
My Portfolio Site
If you want to do it, though, I will incessantly try to cheer you on because fuck yeah! Make comics!
edit: god damn it. I can't for the life of me find my favorite brush anywhere on the internet. All I know is that it's a spatter'y brush called "toothbrush1"... tried all of the brush packs I usually download and couldn't find it anywhere...
Guess I'll have to wait till we get back to school to use it again, and back it up somewhere.
You realize I'm going to pressure you to post art, right
Over the weekend, the AC, WB, and the resource section are getting their own header (rather than On-topic, it'll be under creative) so that you can see if the resource section is updated, making it a lot more useful.
I'm giving ya'll a heads up because it'll be a small visual change. It should make it more plausible for us to have activities over there though, like a thread for sketch dailies, or themed challenges.
ps yep the guide is solely about the rulers in MS5: 155 pages! Wow.
painting and losing dota have defined the better part of my life for awhile, now
we should queue together sometime~
Big mistake. Just holy crap. How are these people all so good at this? If Watts online had an expulsion mechanism, I'd be first in line against these guys. The TA is probably looking at my submissions the way a parent looks at their toddler: "Ah, that's cute. I suppose I'll pass you out of pity."
I'm going to sit in this corner with my fuzzy lines and uneven shading now and think about the bleak inevitability of the end of all things.
I wouldn't get too discouraged- everyone starts out a at a different point, which is why if you take classes in person at Watts, there aren't any grades or assessments like that. Some people go in having already been to art school, trying to round out their education, some people are bright-eyed straight out of high school budding artists with big dreams, some people are total never-held-a-pencil-before-but-I'm-looking-for-a-hobby types, some are diehard pros that just want to stay in practice. You're all mixed in with 18 year old prodigies, and guys in their 60's doing work that looks like a 5th grader did it.
A system that invites comparison between these is bound to be pretty useless. Unless everyone has posted a detailed biography that indicates they are in the exact same situation that you are- age, level of previous training, economic situation, same psychological quirks- I wouldn't get caught up in comparisons, of 'I should be as good as them'. That's hard to do (and I'll admit I'm being hypocritical because I do that ALL THE TIME even knowing how terrible it is for me, psychologically speaking), but the only things you should be looking at the work for is, 'what I'm seeing in their work, the things I like about it, how do I do that, how do I use it for my own work?', in the same way you would look at a master study. Those guys should be taken as an asset, that you can use to your advantage.
I'm kinda surprised they bothered to use a grading system for the online school, but I suspect dealing with so many people makes it an unfortunate necessity to be less personal.
These things take time, and some people are going to need more time than others, just based on previous levels of experience. Luckily, the sort of pay-as-you-go-for-what-you-want system allows you to actually take the time that you need.
I don't know if you've ever read any Malcolm Gladwell books, but he describes a 'snowball' effect when if comes to how we treat grades in regular school. Someone starts out in grade school a little younger than their peers. Their brain is a little less developed, they have a little less experience with the world. Consequently, they do a little less well in school, their older peers do a little better. Soon those older peers are lauded for doing better- they get more encouragement and support in their studies. They become all A students. The younger student- who had all the biological ability to be as smart, as talented- does not get that same support- may be punished for their grades, or torn down, and soon their identity is that of a "C" student. And because school does not pause to allow a C student to catch up, or divvy up classes in to age ranges of a few months rather than by year, a "C" student generally continues to be a "C" student throughout their life, every year being forced into the next grade level working from a disadvantage. Not even their fault, they just got screwed by pure random chance. (Well I suppose their parents could have had the foresight to work out their banging schedule better for maximum advantage, but without time travel technology there's little to be done about that retrospectively.)
So here, where you're paying the bills, you're not being forced anywhere- so you can spend the time you need, because the only remedy is practice. You don't need special talent, you don't need to be a prodigy or a genius- you just need to put in the dedicated time applying the knowledge, that the great artists out there have. This lets you spend whatever time you need to become an A student, and stay an A student.
If you need to spend more time with fundamentals, cool. Do that. Even the experienced guys might go back and brush up with a fundamentals class every so often. Some guys may have taken the same class 16, 20 times, because it's the practice that's important. If you are honestly practicing to the best of your ability, practicing as taught, understanding and applying what you learn- and not lazing out and underestimating what the 'best of your ability' is- then you are succeeding. If you're walking somewhere, and you take a step in the right direction- do you look down at your foot and get mad that the act of taking that step has not teleported you instantaneously to your destination? Probably not, because that would be absurd- you know the only thing to do, is to keep going.
So keep going.
Twitter
The AAaR section is out of the dark, If anyone has some things they'd like to see in there/activities they'd like to consider, I'm all ears for suggestions. Pretty much everything about the AC will remain the same, but I'd like to phase out the questions/tutorial threads in favor of getting that information into more dedicated threads in the resource section.
I've made a tech thread for wacom tablet, photoshop advice, and that sort of thing. I think we also want to make a how to get started with drawing for absolute beginners thread, to accumulate that shit that gets dumped in beginner artists threads
We could also have a more permanent inspiration thread.
31679087 8-)
Agreed. Rock Lee/Rudy is always the correct. Hard work beats "talent" every time. You just gotta stick with it.
This thing about talent vs time as the source of skill in image making is kind of a dangerous false dichotomy. I've noticed that even considering the two as opposing poles is a habit of people going after a specific kind of image making, the comic artist, the concept artist, the neo-classical painter-- and critically here, coming from a working class background. As a member of the working class, where we sell our time for money, its very easy to let the twisted logic of that exchange enter into other parts of our lives. I don't think its unrelated that these three categories of image making are also very standard heroic middle class positions.
Most of us who got into image making through those paths (comics and games) buy into a very un-articulated distant fantasy that one day we could be our own bosses and engage with this fun activity for a living. So when you double down on this idea, you end up at the doorsteps of learning traditional academic image making techniques because that is a very clear cut way to "earn" this. We engage in this practice and if our interests stay focused we start to get better. It's from that position that we can say with confidence that talent is a myth and that labor is the key, because there is no better affirmation of this practice than all the examples of it that one sees when your in the trenches, working academically for years.
It seems so obvious, as you make landscape after landscape, and fantasy battle after fantasy battle, power armor after power armor, model after model, portrait after portrait, spaceship after spaceship, that you are improving. The images that we make start looking more and more like the images that other people make who get to make them for a living. And when you started, they didn't look at all alike. On the very basic level of visual similarity, it's working.
From here, I blow up the scale and go back to the that distant fantasy that we all bought into on the onset. Sure we may have told people on forums all different kinds of rational as to why we were pursuing the skills, but deep down, I think that we are motivated by a heroic legend of class mobility that we have been fed our entire lives-- however faint that impression was left on us consciously, we are socialized from 1st grade into that kind of system of values. Labor is really weird part of the human experience, a necessary one, but our relationship to it socially is coded to revere it in such a way that we can be willingly exploited. We are emotionally damaged with our relationship to the idea of labor.
In the very same twisted way the logic plays out in class identity politics, where your value is your willingness to trade your time for money, the only real answer to why someone cannot have the heroic legend play out for them on an individual level in their lives is because they didn't work hard enough. Reading that probably makes a lot of sense still though, like, it doesn't sound wrong in your head. Of course not working hard enough is why we wouldn't achieve what we wanted in this pursuit, or in life.
All we have to do though, is go back to the beginning and look at the people who are on the top of the game. It is indisputable that most of them put in a lot of time and energy. And I'm also rejecting talent. So whats the rest of it? Unreliably, meaning without their control, I think there's a large part of it that is life circumstance and privileges. Reliably though, so more like, the other things that I would compare to labor, is that most of the real top dog image makers have interesting personalities and perspectives on the world.
So I guess what I'm saying is that talent vs labor is a false dichotomy because it should be something like talent vs. labor vs. read a fucking book vs. connect with your neighbors and grandparents vs. considering abstract thought a fun and useful way to spend your time vs. learning about other art forms vs. hating other art forms vs. surfing vs. stealing vs. hating the man vs. making yourself vulnerable to people who you are close with. Just like, all the stuff that makes cool people cool, usually, are the same things that make someone good at making images. And you can still be an asshole too, interesting people come in all stripes, just like interesting images. Wake up sheeple lol.
When I don't make things for a week or more I start getting antsy and frustrated. If I don't make things for a month or more I'm typically an angry, frustrating person to be around. When I'm making things every other day I'm typically a very relaxed and happy person. For me it is entirely a way to de-stress and have fun. When I'm pouring over a map or story outline or a set of dialogue or even my crude and rather horrible character illustrations I'm just gone from this world and having a ton of fun getting what is in my brain in a format other people can see and that I can use to share with my players or just to post here. If people see it and like it, or even if it is actually used in game, that's secondary. I've made probably over 100 maps to date over the last few years, maybe a third made it to actually being used. A lot of them were just "can I make a Karst? is that even possible?" and then I set about trying it out. A lot of time I failed, but I had fun in the failings.
I think the concept of making things to sell and make money is sort of a putting the cart before the horse, personally. If that's the image of long-term success you hold I can see that being a huge liability over time as you will only see success in the act of selling your materials, rather than in the simple act of making them.
For me, long term success would be still being happy and maybe making things better than I can now. The idea of looking back and remaking what I am working on today ten years from now is something that does make me excited, because I wonder just how much better I can improve it. How awesome will the same locations and characters look then compared to now? How will they have grown? How will my story have grown?
If someone wanted to buy my campaign in a paizo third party thing by then, that would be cool! But that's not really why I art.
That's what I'm saying man, you're doing it right because your relationship to art production isn't rooted in a duty to the labor of it, nor is it motivated by pure mythic godlike talent, it falls outside that dichotomy.
EDIT: I didn't even get you forum flowers
I think you've created a strawman by reducing it to talent vs labor. When I talk or read about it, I've never understood it to be simply the act of grinding at practice. The argument is less about saying "you must grind to be good" than it is about saying "those people you see who are great weren't given that ability." Time, work, effort - whatever you want to call it - "not-talent" includes practice, studying, determination and also living to become a more interesting person with your own perspective. You say you reject talent, but I think shifting attribution to circumstance and privilege has the same problems. Whether it's art, insane skateboarding tricks, getting into the NFL or playing an instrument, it unfairly minimizes the incredible effort the creators have put in to get where they are by shifting the credit from their hussle to some cosmic mix of god's blessing, DNA and fate. In addition to slighting the artist (whatever their field), it also shifts the agency to become that good away from people who aren't there yet to something outside of their control. Not giving folks the credit they are due is a shame, but telling outsiders the greats are there because of something outside of their control (talent, circumstance, privilege, whatever) is the real problem imo. Yes, some people have advantages, but the spirit of the message is that non-talent is required regardless of your situation and with it you can overcome disadvantages and move towards your goal.
I bought a douchey razer thing and actually really like it. I'll continue to try and pile and organize resources over there, and probably pester you guys in the chat thread when I do.
Does anyone have an interest in more prompts for portfolio building type stuff?