lifehacks
Today, my Patreon goes live. Patreon is basically a crowd-funded, artist support site where fans can donate a dollar or so every time an artist puts up work, and cap it at $5 or $10 monthly just in case the artist accidentally has a really prolific month (one can dream). It’s making a lot of waves throughout the creative community as people abandon their Adsense accounts in favor of just making more art and putting it out there.
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Trying to shade from imagination just caused this creature to break the world's longest pencil.
Note: This is the first in a series of posts about learning how to shade. If you enjoy this one, follow me on Facebook and subscribe to my newsletter to get updates!
So you can draw. You can draw really well, actually. You can draw robots, superheroes, farm animals, landscapes of a dystopian future city, all kinds of stuff. And the line art looks totally badass. It’s just that…it’s only line art. You can’t take any of your drawings to the next level and make them look real. You can’t give them that presence that makes them seem like they’re actually realistic representations of things, ready to jump off the page, or send you on your way towards a lucrative illustration gig. In other words, you don’t know how to shade your drawings.
You see work by other artists, maybe industry professionals, or maybe just in someone’s Deviantart profile, that exhibits a firm understanding of shading and you feel the soul-crushing, existential agony of inadequacy. And the absolute worst part of it is, you want to get there, but you don’t know how. You’ve tried to get there. You’ve done your homework, looked around on the internet, consumed a lot of relevant material regarding shading, and light, and shadow, and tried to begin applying it to your own drawings. But it never looks believable, and it’s not getting better. You worry that some people just get it, and you’re not one of them. You’re starting to think about going to law school.
If anything in the above paragraph resonates with you, this is a post for you. I write this post in the hopes that it can be a beacon of light for those who, like I was, are completely at a loss as to how to move forward. I want this to be the post for others that I so desperately searched for myself.
I will be completely honest with you. What this post will do for you is shine a light on your path forward, show you what you need to do and more importantly make you believe that it’s in your capacity to do it. Self-confidence is a delicate thing, especially when it comes to art, and while reading this post may not solve your shading from imagination problems, I think it will go a long way towards boosting your faith in yourself and solidifying your resolve to push forward on your journey.
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"...I NEED SLEEP."
I ended the Great Polyphasic Sleeping Experiment a few weeks ago, around the end of June. Unlike the other attempts, this time I came out of the other side willfully and with no regrets.
So was it a success? It was, in so many ways. Why did I stop the polyphasic sleeping schedule? Quite a few reasons, some I anticipated, and some I didn’t. I’ll explain in detail shortly, but first I want to talk about the positive things I experienced.
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We were somewhere around dementia, near the edge of despair, when the naps…began, to take hold.
Of course, I’ve been up late before. I’ve been up at 4am before more times than I can count. Sometimes hurtling hysterically towards a morning deadline I’m not going to hit. Sometimes hanging out with friends doing hang out stuff. Or wallowing in discomfort on a red-eye flight. Or sometimes, just because I feel like being awake. But never have I been up in the witching hours for no other reason than that I’m running some half-baked sleeping experiment. It’s different. It’s weird.
I find myself desperately looking for things to do and coming up empty-handed. No, that list of things I’ve been putting off all day to take advantage of this precise moment doesn’t count. It’s too hard to actually do things. I end up out on the front porch, sipping on ice water and listening to the night sounds of exurban Ohio. They’re not very stimulating. Later, inexplicably, I’m staring at this haggard, ghoulish creature in my bathroom. Oh, that’s me. I traverse hither and yon across the interwebs, looking for something, anything. I laugh out loud at things that aren’t funny in a vain attempt to jolt some vitality into my upstairs enclosure.
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"My body...it's not listening!"
This morning I woke up at 9:23am to “Jarl Ballin’” playing a few inches away from my ear, an unfortunate and unrectified ringtone choice I made back when Skyrim Youtube videos were funny, which was at least a year ago. “Who’s calling me this early?” I wondered. And where am I? What’s my name? Slowly the pieces came together. My name is Brad, I’m lying on the bed in my brother’s ex-room which has since become my mad scientist laboratory/happy place/dark place, and the person calling me is the receptionist at my therapist’s office, wondering why I’m not at my 9am appointment.
Polyphasic sleeping is going…ok.
Is it Wednesday? I’m not sure. I’m in a serious brain fog here. This post will probably reflect that.
So the plan is/was to start with an all-nighter, then begin taking 20 minute naps every two hours, and reducing those by one nap a day until I’ve hit full-on Uberman. In practice, the week’s looked a little bit different so far.
Read MoreI’m about to convert to a controversial sleeping algorithm. Here’s a little background, some observations, a few bad jokes and a pie chart.
I’m a shameless whore for the latest personal improvement innovation. If it promises to revolutionize my life with minimal effort, I’ve already hyped it, tried it, tossed it aside with a growing sense of disillusionment and taken to Facebook to complain about it in the span of a week or two. That’s not to say I regret tirelessly throwing myself at every trending lifehack—there’s a fine line between gimmick and ingenuity, at least it’s there in my Thesaurus, and many things that entered my world on a bandwagon have catalyzed lasting, positive changes in my life. My point is that good and bad, be they juice cleanses, functional fitness home workout DVDs (I don’t care what anyone says, Tony Horton is the man), standing desks built out of random Ikea bookshelves drilled and cobbled together with Gorilla Glue—the get-rich-quick schemes of this century’s personal development world—I know them well. And they all provide the same insight—that they’re tools, blueprints into which you install your contribution—effort. The application of hard and consistent work turns the easy promise of the lifehack into real, earned growth, the potential into the actual. They just don’t market that part.
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