The best skill to learn is reverse engineering.
The ability to look at something that has already been created and figure out how it was made is one of the keys to true mastery.
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Tentsmuir Forest is located in Fife, Scotland near St Andrews
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Often I reach a point in a project where I don’t feel like I have a lot of energy. At this point there are usually many elements to complete and I have to make a decision about what to do next. Every task, it seems, relies upon already having completed another task… I have found a way to get past this point with ease.
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It may feel as though buying something new will inspire you to become a better artist, but something more likely to get you to another level with your work is to set yourself goals based on using up art supplies. With something new, it’s too easy to get discouraged and think that whatever you decide to make won’t be good enough. “i’ll use that when I get better” are the words the doom countless tubes of paint, rolls of film, and boxes of pencils to an undisturbed existence in storage.
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Mostly it depends on how good you are in the first place. If you are already amazing at something, It takes a long time to get better. If you move outside of your comfort zone and learn something where you have little expertise you can learn a lot in a surprisingly short time.
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If you haven’t been reading my blog, here are 71 thoughts from the last 99 days of posting every day
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The best part about a commitment to a challenge is that it gives you a reason to do it anyway.
Blogging every day is an easier habit to stick to than blogging once a week because you can’t say “i’ll do it tomorrow” over and over until the last day and then miss your target. You simply do it anyway.
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I often struggle to answer the question “what do you do?”
It’s a simple question but like the innocuous enough seeming “where are you from?” for many people there isn’t a single concise answer.
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Most great artists are prolific. If you make one thing and then try to figure out how good it is instead of just making more work, you are probably holding yourself back.
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Not letting yourself feel like a success might seem like a good idea. You might feel that you don’t want to let yourself get complacent. You might have heard not to let yourself be satisfied with an achievement but to always set your sights higher.
There are three huge problems with not allowing yourself the satisfaction of feeling like a success.
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So you start with an idea, and you think it might be a great idea. Maybe it’s the idea for your bestselling novel that you haven’t written or for the app that you haven’t made that will change the world. You build on this idea in your head and it becomes more and more complex. Soon you are sure It’s your best ever idea idea, but you realize that any work that you do to try to get it out into the real world cannot possibly live up to the idea in your head.
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The most important thing a student can do is find and learn from great teachers. A great teacher is like finding a shortcut. They can tell you what to read, they can help you work through the most difficult areas of a subject and make it seem easy.
The second most important, and makes a person a truly great student is
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The most important thing you can do as a teacher, is to inspire your students to want to learn for themselves.
This is not as simple as it sounds. The most effective way to do that varies dramatically from student to student. Something that would inspire one student would be enough to make another completely give up.
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Blogging every day has been easier and more worthwhile than I thought it would be.
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A good pedigree can have a lot of value.
Who are your parents, who were your teachers, where did you go to school? People might want your work because of this, but what if you can’t do anything to change it?
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The feeling that you get by putting your work out there and getting a positive response, especially on social media, is a perfect example of the idea of the hedonic treadmill. According to this idea, you will adapt to whatever level of wealth, status, and positive (or even negative) changes to your life.
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When creating photographs, you begin with the ability to create something photo-realistic with virtually no effort. This reveals an aspect of an underlying challenge in art work and in how we see reality.
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