10 habits to improve your art
Andre Castro - Character and Concept Artist
Gabriel Bona - 3D Character Artist
3D character artists André Castro & Gabriel Bona take an in-depth look at 10 habits to implement in your life to improve your art...
1. Exercise (mental and physical)
When we talk about exercise you almost instantly imagine someone doing something physical, right? But physical exercise means nothing if you have a weak mind; having a strong mind is the foundation for having a stronger body. Physical activities will help you forget about daily problems, it reduces muscle tension and stimulates the production of endorphin. It will improve your life quality overall, giving more energy and resistance for doing daily tasks, but only working on your body can be tough and it might be not as efficient as it should be if you are not constantly exercising the most important part of yourself, the mind.
Just like the body, the mind suffers from problems and it has its limits. The more you train it the more this limit increases. If you observe your peers, friends, and family, it is not uncommon to see people with psychological problems why is that? It is because we are born in a modern age where there is so much information and pressure around us all the time from many different things like society and family, but this is not a physical pressure, the pressure is mental. If you dont get your mind strong, it will collapse.
What would happen to you if at your first day at the gym you had to lift 100kg on the bench press? Impossible, right? But with physical activities you can control how much pressure you want so you can start small to get big. With psychological pressure you cant choose this, you can only accept what life gave you and do your best to get stronger so you can endure it. Sometimes a harder life can make you stronger than everyone, but often it will keep you down because you cant rise above it. Same thing happens with an easy life; it can make you complacent and never actually get strong and you eventually crumble when the pressure appears, because it will, eventually, if not from life itself, than from within you. So why dont people exercise their mind just like their body? Well because most people dont see their mind like their body, they dont even acknowledge the potential for growth their mind has.
Self Affirmation
Like Will Smith once said, He who says he can and he who says he can't are both usually right. If you tell yourself 1,000 times that you are weak, guess what? You become weak. Now you are thinking, Oh my, here comes the dude about positive thoughts. If you thought that, keep reading, because this is especially for you. It is easy to become weak when you tell that to yourself, why? Because to be weak you just have to do nothing, and doing nothing is the easiest thing on earth, so you are at the same time doing and believing, mind and body working together to achieve what your mind started.
Now try doing that again but do it positively; say to yourself 1,000 times in front of a mirror Im strong. Sounds stupid, right? Just like it is stupid to believe that by doing 1,000 reps on a biceps exercise will get you as big as a bodybuilder. But what if you PERSIST and keep doing that for months? Years? Every day you go to that mirror and you repeat Im strong before you go to bed, you repeat it, and that gets into your mind, your mind starts to believe it, and that is the time to take your body into action, you believe you are strong!
Just remember, never use negative words, only positive ones. For example, if you are lazy, dont tell yourself Im not lazy, instead tell yourself Im productive and active. The same concept works for getting that job you want. For example dont say I want to work for instead, be assertive about it I will work for
Flip the switch
One skill you can develop that will slowly make you unstoppable is the ability to take all the bad stuff that happens to you and turn to your advantage. You can see that in sports in a very clear form. Just like when Michael Jordan used to trash talk all his teammates in practice, he was the greatest player to ever set foot on court throwing a truck load of pressure on you, what do you do? You cry? Many have crumbled because of Michael; they couldnt take it, but what about those who could? And answered back to Michael giving their 100% every time? Those are the ones who became all star players and really thrived under pressure. They saw the insults and provocations as a challenge and had the mindset to prove Michael wrong by improving themselves, not by finding excuses or even talking back in an angered manner; he was testing everyone all the time to see who had the strength to overcome it.
Having a strong mind will allow you to see life barriers and problems only as what they really are, opportunities to make you stronger, it will be hard and it will be painful, but giving up will be much worse, because the wound of regret will never close until you take action. Take all that anger, sadness, and suffering and make them worth it; work harder, give it all you got.
The final obstacle, the voices inside your head
There will always be that voice in your head telling you, Hey man, good job, lets take a few days off, we deserve it. You are so tired, lets not work out today. Oh, it is just one hamburger, it is fine. Dont think that strong minded people dont have them, they all have, it is just a matter of telling those voices to shut the hell up and ignore them. Those voices are the worst thing to overcome because when you hear them inside your head you think that is you thinking, but it is not. It is your brain stopping you from doing what you have to do, because our brain has this tendency to make us avoid pain, suffering, and resilience. Guess what? Greatness resides beyond all these things, if you dont ignore those voices you wont be able to achieve your true potential.
Self affirmation is very important for shutting down the negative voices. Instead of ignoring them you can create a new voice with the self affirmation method that will act as a counterpoint, creating a balance and giving you the option, What voice should I listen? Having multiple voices in your head is great. If you are arrogant, create a voice telling you that you need to improve because you are not good enough. If you lack confidence, create a voice telling you that you have the potential to become great. This process takes time and the more you do it the faster youll be able to implement beliefs and voices. Everything that is worth it takes time.
2. Plan Ahead
As a 3D artist it is easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of topics you need to study; setting your focus, and planning which topics are you going to take head on, are essential for optimizing your study schedule. If your focus is on games you should plan your projects accordingly, set learning goals, and the quality standards you want to achieve. Planning will prevent you wasting time on unnecessary tasks and help you to keep track of what should be done and in which order. Many apps can help with planning, Trello is a very good example of that. It is a useful website where you can create folders for your projects with goals, descriptions, track progress, and it is super easy to use and can be shared between groups of people.
3. Eat Healthy
Hard work, passion and commitment are keys to success, but without the proper attention to our health they can lead us to extreme bad habits. The key is to always think about it in the long run. It is hard to accept it, but taking the time to set a good diet and specific eating hours will not only prevent thousands of future problems but will save you money and time. Meal prepping is a good way to grind through the boring task of cooking food, cook it all in one day and put it in a freezer and youll have all the food you need for the week. It is important to have your cheat day as well, set a specific day of the week to eat as much junk food your belly can handle; this will be your prize for 6 days of clean eating. It will give you a good motivation to keep your diet going and it will boost your metabolism by increasing the leptin hormone levels back up, as they decrease when you lower your daily calories ingestion.
4. Lose balance to keep balance
As much as working long hours and grinding through bad days will get you results, too much of it will eventually break you, mentally and physically. Hard work doesnt always mean no sleep, no life, it means focus and smart strategies to really use your time the best way you can without jeopardizing your life. One key to have a balanced life is to sometimes go all nuts, it is important to learn our boundaries and to push them, but you cant grow if you dont suffer. Pain is necessary for personal growth, pushing too hard for too long can damage you, but testing yourself sporadically will give you the necessary self knowledge to keep a constant growth. Dont be afraid to go the extra miles to achieve your goals.
5. Get feedback
Each person has their own background, artist or not, with different point of views and different tastes. If you get too attached to your work you limit the possibility of its potential just to your own vision, but is your vision the best? Probably not. You are not your work. A critic of your work is an opportunity to learn something, and today what we see a lot is that people that get so easily offended by good feedback, those are the ones that will be stuck forever. The optimal way to get feedback would be to get feedback from various people, non-artists and artists, and compare and analyse them together, look at all the feedback gained, and learn to agree and disagree, and if you disagree with something, you must ask yourself two important questions and have a clear and honest answer for them. Why do I think that is wrong? and Is it really wrong or is that me trying to fool myself into thinking Im right?
That is one of the hardest things to do with your own art; being able to destroy what youve done to rebuild it all over again. Another extremely important exercise is to learn more about what you like and why you like it. Try to understand why do you like some works and dislike others. Take a deep look into the feedback you get by trying to identify them being applied to great artworks and real life. Observation of the world around us and the art from other artists will also help understand the mistakes and the choices youve made in your art. Remember these 4 words: Observe, Absorb, Understand, and the most important, Apply.
"Observe art, the world and how things work and what people do. Absorb the knowledge you gained from observation. Understand why people make certain choices and why things work the way they do. Apply what youve learned into your own life and work"
6. Organize yourself
An organized life is the reflection of an organized mind. Start each day by completing simple tasks like making your bed as soon as you wake up or stretching. Have a flexible, but well defined, schedule for the things you must do throughout your day. Set specific times for eating, working out, resting, and of course, working. Each time chunk must be taken seriously, but the duration of the time chunk will dictate the importance of each task. For example, you can set one hour to work out, one hour to read a book, and twelve hours to study/work. One simple trick you can use is to have a timer at hand, either a cellphone or your watch, to keep track of your actual work time and to not exceed the specific time chunk designated for each task. Do not trust your brain when it comes to productivity perception, numbers is where you want to be, just because you sat for 10 hours straight at your computer doesnt mean you have actually worked for that long. Having a clean and organized workspace will also help you with keeping everything on track.
7. Allow yourself to fail
Wake up willing to fail. It might sound strange at first but as soon as we see failure as a positive thing we take a lot of weight off our shoulders, relieving stress and anxiety, making us more open to taking risks and trying new things. It is normal for us humans to pursue success, when we should be seeking failure first and success second. There is no success without failure; looking past it will make it seemslike a bad thing when it is actually the only way to achieve something considerable.
8. Self criticism
Changing the world is always an immense task, so why not look in the mirror and change the person that stops you from being great? Being able to identify your mistakes and flaws early on is a common characteristic amongst the highest achievers; humble yourself, understand that there is no finish line for you to cross, art is evolving as we speak and the bar is always rising. Accept the fact that your work can always be improved, any work, from anyone and everyone. Perfectionism with the understanding that you cant achieve perfection is just for a few. Love the path, not the end the end is a lie. Being able to look at yourself, not only your work, and identify where you should improve will directly affect your performance and growth.
9. Persist
Life cant beat someone that never quits. Learn that persistence doesnt consist of big steps but constant small steps every day. As an artist there are many concerns when it comes to art itself; anatomy, building a portfolio, learning new software, and constantly learning and growing. If we only had art concerns it would be much easier, but life is not like that and theres going to be many life challenges youll have to overcome while you are also working on your art. Fear, anxiety, lack of time, lack of money, laziness, and so on. Those are just a few problems people usually have to overcome in their life, and just like Rocky said, it is not about how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Work on your mind and body strength so you can endure the challenges and persist on your dream. Pain and suffering are temporary, greatness and regret are forever, what do you want for yourself?
"Learn that persistence doesnt consist of big steps but constant small steps every day"
10. Surround yourself with likeminded people
Having a strong mindset and work ethic are super important for your personal growth, but as humans we must count on each other to endure the journey to greatness. You probably have heard the phrase Tell me who you walk with and Ill tell you who you are, and that is completely true. If you want positivity, hard work, dedication, and productivity, you should have friends that are no strangers to those words. It is hard to explain what you do to other people when they have never endured or done what you do every day. Having good friends that can understand and laugh with you is essential. One of the greatest pleasures in life is helping people and seeing them overcome difficulties and achieve their goals. There is no greatness with only one individual, we are all products of the people we hang with and the things we do.
Oneof the biggest mistakes you can make in life is to isolate yourself. Forget the myth of the lonely artist, such thing is a lie, take a look at grand masters like Leonardo da Vinci, most of his time he was working with students and masters, always surrounded by admirers and fellow artists, learning and teaching.
Related links
Check out Andre Castros ArtStation
Gabriel Bona on ArtStation
5 composition mistakes to avoid
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