Becoming An Artist: Take any Creative Project from Concept to Completion

1. Introduction: Welcome to becoming an artist. I'll be your instructor. Brent Evanston. Becoming an artist is the second course in my becoming a series. This series will teach you how to increase your creativity and how to get your creative projects completed and out into the world. Now I absolutely loved to draw. In fact, I've devoted my entire life to the study of drawing. Now, if you know me or my work at all, it's probably as the creator of the art and science of drawing series. To date, the art and science of drawing series has taught more than 100,000 people how to draw. Now of course, being a drawing instructor, I get asked a lot of questions about drawing. But one of the most common questions I get is from students wanting to know how they can use their drawing skills toward more creative projects. Some of these students want to create their own comic books. Some of them want to illustrate a book. Some of them want to be fashion designers or architects, others want to be painters or other kinds of fine artists. Now I absolutely loved to draw, but drawing is a creative skill. What you do with that skill is what matters. Many of my students have ideas for creative projects that they'd like to complete. But what they don't know is how to take their skills and apply them to a creative project. The students recognize the huge gap between skill development in bringing their creative projects into reality. This course bridges that gap. This course will teach you a practical process for bringing any creative project from conception to completion. So who is this course for? This course is for anybody who has an idea for a creative project in wants to bring that project into reality. This process will work for nearly any kind of creative project. Writing, painting, fashion design, theatrical set design, product design, graphic design, and nearly any other kind of creative project. With you have the inclination to take a creative project and make it a reality. This course is for you. Now some of my students have many project ideas and they're not sure which ones to select. This course will help you solve that problem too. If you have creative ideas for any kind of creative project, this course is for you. So how do you know if you're ready for this course? Well, there are some basic prerequisites you should meet before starting this course. First, you'll need some basic skills in a field that you're passionate about. E.g. if you want to illustrate your own comic book series, you'll want to have some drawing skills and a familiarity with the field of comics. If you wanna do a series of landscape or botanical paintings, you should have some painting skills already and a familiarity with the kinds of artists who have had success in the field that you're interested in. So before you begin this course, you should have some basic skills and a deep passion and familiarity with the field that you want to make contributions to. Next, you should have some ideas for projects that you want to create and a strong desire to bring those projects into reality. So to sum up, before you begin this course, you want to have some skills and you want to have some creative ideas. Your project ideas can be as small or as grand as you're comfortable with. This process will work both for smaller projects and for massive projects. Now, if you don't meet these basic criteria, that's okay. I highly recommend going back and taking my becoming creative course, the first course and that becoming series, becoming creative will teach you the essential tools and techniques to think and act creatively. Now, many of the strategies taught in this course rely on techniques that I've taught in depth and that becoming creative course. So I highly recommend you've already taken that course. Now in just a few minutes, I'm going to give you a detailed course overview. So you know exactly what you're going to learn in this course. But before I do that, I want to take a few minutes and go beyond the prerequisites for this course and give you some guidelines for awaited live your life that will give you a high likelihood of having creative project ideas. So before we jump into the main part of this course, I want to give you an idea of what a creative life looks like and how you should engage the world if you want to thrive in a creative field. First, you want to immerse yourself in the creative work of others. You should be hungry to consume work from any creative field you're even remotely interested in. This could be watching films as could be going to galleries or museum exhibitions. This could be perusing websites. This could be going through books. Don't just look at the field that you want to contribute, to. Look at other fields you're interested in as well. The more different kinds of creative work that you immerse yourself in, the better. I'm interested in nearly every kind of creative endeavor. Given week, I may look at theatrical set design, architecture, graphic design, poster design, film, fashion design, furniture design. I'm interested in anybody who's a master in their creative craft. I'm constantly on the hunt for new and different kinds of work that I've never seen before. And I'm always looking to expand my idea of what art and creativity can be. So be willing to immerse yourself in the creative work of others. As many different kinds of creative work is you're interested in. And hopefully as you do this, you'll become more interested in creative work that you didn't even know is out there. Next, you'll want to develop your skills. If you're interested in illustration of any kind, you want to be practicing drawing every day. If you're interested in fashion design, you should be sketching out clothing ideas every day. If you're interested in film or photography, you should always be pointing your camera and capturing images. Developing skills in a field that you want to make contributions to is essential. Remember, you can have great ideas for projects, but if you don't have the skills to bring them to fruition, then your project ideas don't really matter that much. You must have the skills necessary to get your project ideas out into reality. In speaking of skill development, I always recommend that everybody interested in art or creativity learn to draw. Remember, drawing is at the heart of nearly every other creative endeavor. Whether you're a fashion designer, a painter, and architect, a furniture designer, a set designer, you need to learn to draw. Drawing is one of the best ways to get your visual ideas out on paper where you can analyze and work with them. And finally, you want to have a consistent place to work. You need a space that is always set up for you to sit down and do creative work. Whatever that creative work, maybe. It doesn't have to be anything larger, dramatic. In fact, I've spent the early years in my creative career just keeping a quarter of a room as a studio space. But I always tried to keep it clean and ready for me to sit down and work. So when I had creative ideas or I had time to work on my skills, I always had a place to work. So these are the conditions for creativity. These guidelines will help make sure that you're always looking at new work. You're developing your skills, and that you always have a place ready for you when you have ideas. If you live your life following these guidelines, you're very likely to have creative ideas of your very own and the skills to pursue them. With all of this in mind, let me give you an overview of this course. First, you'll learn how to select a project to work with. You need to be able to evaluate your project ideas and select the project that's right for you. So in this lesson, you're actually going to select a project that you're going to work with for the duration of this course. So hopefully by the end of the course, you'll actually have a completed project. In the next lesson, you'll learn how to explore all of the creative possibilities of that project idea. You'll generate different visions of this project and really expand your idea of what this project can be. Next, you'll learn how to evaluate all of these new ideas you've generated and figure out which ones you want to incorporate into your project, then you'll learn to create prototypes of your ideas. So instead of just jumping right into finished work, you'll learn how to make smaller versions to see how your ideas actually operate in reality. This essential skill is so often overlooked and is one of the most important things to do during a creative project. Next, I'm going to teach you how to present your prototypes to other people so you can get feedback. So this strategy allows you to present a prototype to an audience to see if your work is having the impact that you hope without investing the hours, weeks, months, or even years in the completed piece, only to find out that, that it doesn't have the impact you hoped for. Getting feedback on a prototype is so useful because it'll help you adjust along the way. Make sure that your work has the impact that you want it to have. So after getting feedback, you'll need to learn how to incorporate that feedback into your work. Which feedback is really important and we'll move your project forward. And which feedback you can probably ignore. With all of that in mind, you're going to learn how to make a project plan. You're going to plan out the steps to bring your project to completion. You'll design a project timeline to make sure that your project is completed. Next, I'm going to teach you how to design a studio system. Once you've got a project plan, you need a system in place to make sure that you're consistently showing up to the studio and getting work done. This can be one of the hardest parts of being a creative person. But keeping a studio schedule that you actually adhere to is an essential skill to have. And finally, I'm going to teach you how to know when your project is complete and ready for the world. So this course is going to teach you the process that I use to bring creative projects into reality. So it's important to note that I'm coming at this course from a visual arts perspective. I create drawings that I'm interested in exhibiting and museums, galleries or online. In this work, I use my traditional drawing skills creatively. I explore what I can do, withdrawing beyond just creating a picture on a piece of paper, I've explored more abstract or expressive forms of drawing. I've tried to see if I can make drawings three-dimensional objects. And I love to use the medium of drawing to explore meaning. But the process I'm going to teach you in this course will work for nearly any kind of creative project. This process will work whether you want to use it to design a new line of clothing, to illustrate a comic book or a children's book, or to create an exhibit artwork of your very own, whatever creative project you have, this process will work for you. In the last lesson of this course, I'm going to teach you how you can adapt this process to make sure that this process works for whatever creative project that you have. Now, here's what makes this course truly unique. I am going to be going through this process with you. You're going to see me select a project and take it through the exact same process that you're going to be going through. So at this point, I don't know what project I'm going to select. I don't know if it's going to succeed or fail. And you're going to see in real time how this project develops. So I'm taking a big risk here with this course. I don't know what project I'm going to select, and there are no guarantees that the project is going to work. So in this course you're really going to get a front row view of me attempting to go through this process with all of the messiness and uncertainty that comes along with creativity. Hopefully through this, you'll get an idea of what this process can look like and how helpful it is in solving creative problems and bringing creative projects to completion. So we're going to go through this process together and you're going to see me succeed and fail and stumble, make decisions, and hopefully have a completed project at the end. So if you're ready, let's get started with the first lesson, selecting a project. 2. Selecting a Project: Welcome to Lesson one, selecting a project. Now in order to participate in this course, you need to select a project with the intention of completing that project by the end of the course. Now for some of you, if this may be easy, you may already have a specific project in mind that you'd like to complete. For others, you may have many project ideas, but you're not quite sure how to select one to work with. That's okay. This lesson will help you too. And for those of you who are really passionate about your field, but don't yet have a project idea to work with. That's okay. I'm going to cover what to do in that situation as well. So whatever your situation is, this lesson will help. Now, in this lesson, the first thing I'm going to do is introduce you to some project considerations. These are the things you want to consider when selecting a project, regardless of whether you have many ideas, are a few ideas. Whenever I have the time and the desire to start on a new creative project, these are the things that I think about. So let's jump right into project considerations. It's very important in this course that you select the right project for your current skill level, your current level of experience with creative projects, and the amount of time you have to devote to a creative project. So the first thing I want you to know is that you can go through this course at your own pace. The process that I'm going to teach you in this course will work. Whether your project is small, just too weak or too long, or whether you have a much longer project that may take a year or more. Either way, you can go through the process taught in this course. So you can go through this course at your own pace, regardless of whether you have a small-scale project or a large-scale project. So one of the most important questions you can ask when trying to select a creative project to work with is how much time do you have to devote to this project? So you wanna be able to answer this question in a few different ways. First, ask yourself, how many hours a day can you get into the studio to actually work? How many days a week can you get into the studio to work in? Finally, ask yourself if there's a particular deadline that you need to meet. You only have a month in which to finish a project or can you stretch your project out many months or a year or more? Whenever you select a project, this is an important consideration. If you have an ambitious project in mind, but you only have a month to complete it. And you can only get into the studio for an hour a day, three days a week, this may not be the right time to embark on something that big. So before selecting a project, you want to ask yourself, how much time do I have to devote to a project? Next, you want to ask yourself, what is your current skill level in your chosen field? If you want to illustrate a comic book or do a series of paintings, how long have you been drawing or how long have you been painting? Have you mastered the fundamentals yet? Are you more of a beginner or are you advanced in your field? Now this is a critical consideration. It's very common that I talked to students who have wild ambitions. They want to create something that will stand the test of time are completely altered the field that they're interested in, but they may have the skills of a beginner. So in this case, you want to keep your expectations realistic. You want to select a project that will challenge you, but not so far outside of your current skills that it will overwhelm you. One thing I often do is choose a project that's just outside of my skill level. It'll give me experience, it will challenge me, and it'll increase my skills along the way. So before you select a project, you want to be honest with yourself about where your skill level is in your chosen field. The next question you need to ask yourself, how much creative project experience do you have? Now it's very common that people have advanced skills in their chosen field, but they've never completed a project or they've completed very few. So just because your skills may be advanced, doesn't mean that you have the experience necessary to complete a large-scale project. So if you have skills but no project experience, again, you may want to consider a small-scale project just to help you understand this process. As you gain more and more creative project management experience, you can increase the scale of your projects in the future. Remember, the goal is to do something that is just outside of your current skill level and abilities. You don't want to choose a project that won't challenge you, but at the same time, you don't want to choose a project that so ambitious that you get overwhelmed. So you need to consider your previous creative project experience when selecting a project to work with in this course. So these considerations will help you select the right project for your current skill level, your current experience with creative projects, and the amount of time you have to devote to creative projects. The goal is that you select something just outside of your comfort and skill level. You want to challenge yourself, but you don't want to overwhelm yourself. These considerations will also help you keep your expectations realistic. I have many beginning students who have grand ambitions to create world altering projects. And I think that's great. And hopefully they'll work their way up to those projects. But at the beginning, you need to be able to go through this process to gain experience with creative projects and work your way up to the kinds of projects that you want to do later on, you shouldn't expect that your earlier projects are going to stand the test of time and change the world. It's possible, but it's unlikely. You're much more likely to make contributions to your chosen field by working your way up, challenging yourself with each new project. Once you have a higher level of skill and more experience, then you'll be ready to create world-changing projects that may stand the test of time. But for the vast majority of even famous and successful artists, they worked their way up project by project, challenging themselves a little more with each project. That is the most likely path towards creating quality work that matters. So next, I'd like to cover the most common situations that creative people find themselves in when they're trying to select a project. There are three common situations that creative people find themselves in when they're trying to select a project work with the first common situation is that people are often really passionate about a field, but they don't have a specific project idea. They may have passion and some skills, but they haven't yet come across a project that's uniquely theirs, that they want to devote their time to. Another common situation that creative people find themselves in is they have a singular vision for a project. They have a project that they feel compelled to make. A third common situation is people that have many ideas, sometimes too many ideas. And this is the situation I often find myself in. I have many ideas, but I find it's very difficult to select one project to devote my time too. But regardless of your situation, this lesson will help. So first, I want to address what to do if you have few ideas for creative projects or none at all. So if you have few ideas or no ideas for creative projects, That's okay. I recommend two things. First, I highly recommend you go back to the introduction of this course and revisit the conditions for creativity. You want to immerse yourself in the work of others. You want to develop skills in your chosen field. And you always want to have a clean place that set aside for creative work. So when creative ideas strike, you'll be ready to work on them. I also recommend taking my becoming creative course. By becoming creative course will teach you the tools and techniques that will allow you to come up with creative ideas if your very own. So by living your life, by the guidelines I laid out in the conditions for creativity section in the introduction of this course, you will have a high likelihood of developing creative project ideas of your very own. Once you have a creative project idea that you want to pursue, this course will be waiting for you. And of course, you're welcome to just watch these lessons and familiarize yourself with the creative process. Just to give you an idea of what this looks like. It may be inspiring and it may even help you develop creative projects of your own. But to participate in this course fully, you'll need to have a creative project idea. Next, let me address those of you who have a singular vision for a specific creative project. Now, if that's your situation, if you've come into this course already having a specific creative project in mind, this lesson may be pretty easy for you, but you still want to go through the project considerations I laid out earlier in this lesson. In particular, you really want to assess whether or not you're ready for the creative project that you've selected. It is very common for creative people to have one project that they're heavily focused on. A common project is a comic book that people want to illustrate or a children's book they want to illustrate. Many people have good ideas for projects and a lot of passion. But if your skills and your project experience aren't there yet, you may want to consider an interstitial project that will get you ready for the creative project that you're truly passionate about. E.g. if you want to write or illustrate a comic book or a children's book, but you have no creative project experience or very little. You may want to scale back this project, maybe create a book that's five to ten pages long that tells us short, concise story. Just to gain experience, you want to make sure that your expectations match your current skill level and your level of experience. There's absolutely nothing wrong with scaling back your project idea. So you can learn how to tell the stories you want or design the clothing you want, or do the paintings you want, without having the expectation that they're going to take the world by storm. So even though you feel deeply that you know what project you want to commit to, you still want to go through the project considerations to make sure that you're ready for the type of project that you want to pursue. Ultimately, the project you select is entirely up to you. I just want to get you thinking critically about where you are with your skill level and experience. My role is to push you to pursue the projects that you're most passionate about, but also to keep your expectations realistic and to encourage you to develop the skills and the experience necessary to create the projects that you are truly passionate about. So if you have no ideas, are very few ideas, you know what to do. If you have a singular vision, I've given you some things to think about. Next, I'd like to address what to do. If you have many project ideas and you're having trouble selecting the right project for you. This is the situation that I'm in nearly every time I start a creative project. So let me give you some strategies that will help you sort through your mini-project ideas and select the one that's right for you. Once again, you want to go through the project considerations. You want to ask yourself how much time you have to devote to a project. You want to assess your current skill level and your current level of experience with creative projects that will help you create some criteria for what kind of project you're looking for. So if your current skills are at a beginner level, you have little to no experience with creative projects, and you only have a month or two to devote to a creative project. You can take those criteria and you can select a project that fits within those criteria. Now, if you already have some experience completing creative projects, you can ask yourself if you want a new project or if you want to expand on an existing project. So e.g. I know if my own work I tend to work in series. I have projects that I've been working on for years. Whenever I have time for a creative project, I always try and ask myself, am I looking for a completely new creative project? Or do I simply want to add work onto an existing project? So if I only have a month or two to create work and a limited amount of time to get into the studio. I'll often decide to add work to existing projects. This can be a great strategy because I'm familiar with the work and not reinventing the wheel with a completely new project. So be open to adding new work to an existing project rather than selecting a completely new project. So one of my favorite strategies for selecting a creative project to work with when I have many ideas is to combine ideas. I try and record every creative idea that I have a record them in sketchbooks and I have a file on my computer called future work, where I have literally hundreds of brief project descriptions. Now many of these ideas are fragments or incomplete ideas, but some of them are entire projects. Now I'm sure that most of these ideas aren't particularly good, but I record all of them just in case because you never know. So when I'm looking for a creative project, I can go to my future work file and my sketchbooks and start to combine these ideas together to see what new kinds of projects I can come up with. The reason this works so well is because many of these ideas are simple or incomplete. They may not stand on their own, but by combining these ideas, often an entirely new kind of project will emerge. So this is a great strategy. If you have a lot of ideas and you're not sure which one to commit to, see what happens when you combine your ideas to create new ideas. So if you're like me and you have a lot of ideas and you struggled to commit to one. First, you want to figure out what project is right for your current skill level, your experience in the time you have to devote for a project. Once you have a sense of those three things, you can go through your project ideas and see which one works best with those criteria. Next, you can try and combine project ideas. This way, you can use many ideas at once, and often entirely new and interesting project ideas will emerge. Now if neither of those work for you, Here's a third suggestion. Make a decision at random. I know this doesn't sound satisfying, but hear me out as a creative person, the one thing you want to avoid at all costs is not working. It is much better to spend some time working, developing your skills and learning on a project that may not be right for you than to not work at all by selecting a project at random, even if you don't finish it, even if you find out that it's not the right project for you, you'll develop your skills, you'll gain experience, and you will make distinctions. So you'll be more likely to pick the right project the next time around. Two, if you have a lot of ideas and you're not sure how to make a selection. And the two strategies I discussed earlier don't work for you, then just pick something at random. You can narrow your projects down to as few as possible, hopefully three to five, and then write down each project on a piece of paper, fold each paper in half, put them in some kind of container or a vessel and just pick one at random. That's your project. Working through it, you will gain clues and insights as to what might work better in the future. And that is valuable in and of itself. Creative ideas or new ideas. And new ideas can only be found in uncertain, unexplored territory. The uncertainty is the cost of creative ideas. And as a creative individual, you must be able to make decisions despite ambiguity and uncertainty. And if you can reason through a decision, let fate take a chance, choose something at random, and see how it goes. See what you learned. With all of this in mind. Let's get you to your task for this lesson. So here's your task for today using the project considerations that I laid out earlier in this lesson and any of the strategies that might work for you, you need to select a project you're going to work with throughout the duration of this course, your goal will be to complete this project by the end of the course. And remember, you can go through this course at your own pace. You can choose a big project or a small project depending on your comfort level, skills, and experience. Once you've selected a project, write a brief description of your project. It doesn't have to be anything detailed. It can just be a sentence or two if you like. So as I've mentioned before, one thing that makes this course unique is you're going to see me go through this process with you. So immediately following each lesson, there's a short video showing how I worked through these ideas on my own. You're going to come with me into my studio and see how I solve these creative problems as they come up. You're going to see me go through the same creative process that you're going through. So in addition to selecting your project and writing a brief description, make sure you watch this video so you can see what this process really looks like in action. It may be helpful for you to watch me go through this process before you make your project selection. There are two final things I'd like to leave you with in this lesson. The first is that as an instructor, it is my job to guide you through this process. But you need to be responsible for your own creative decisions. I cannot decide what creative projects you should pursue or what creative decisions you should make along the way, if you're taking this course on an interactive platform where you can message me, you're free to share your projects, but I can't get involved. You need to take responsibility for your own creative decisions. I can teach you this process, but you need to be the decider. And finally, you've heard me mentioned that you should select a project right outside of your comfort zone. You want to select something challenging, but not something too challenging, but will make you feel overwhelmed. So it's important that you hear this. You're never going to feel ready for your creative projects. And if you do feel ready, if you feel confident you know how to do a project and you can bring it to completion, choose something harder. Feelings of insecurity and uncertainty are how you know that a project is at the right place for you. You don't want to feel comfortable with the project. You need to be able to challenge yourself and to push herself into uncomfortable territory. That is how you're going to grow. Feelings of insecurity and uncertainty are perfectly normal, healthy, and they are clues that you are on the right path. So with all of this in mind, go watch the video of me going through this process, select the project you want to work with and write a brief description. And after that, I will see you in lesson two, ideation. 3. Selecting a Project Video Journal: If you've taken any of my other courses, you will know that each lesson has a lecture where I introduce a concept, but then I do a demonstration. Now in a drawing course, these demonstrations are pretty straightforward. You see me demonstrate exactly what I taught earlier in the drawing lesson. But in a course like this, the demonstration is going to look very different. So each lesson in this course is going to be followed by a video of me going through the process that I've just laid out for you. You'll see me put theory into practice. You'll see me taking on the same tasks that I've asked you to take on. Now before I go through the process of selecting a project, I just wanted to give you an idea of what to expect in these videos. Before I create a course, I actually spend months writing, drawing, practicing, trying out ideas. So by the time I actually make the course, I have a really good idea of what I'm teaching you, what I'm talking about. But these videos where I'm demonstrating the tools and techniques in this course are going to operate more like journals or mini documentaries. They're gonna be much more candid. I don't know how these things are going to work out, so I'm just going to turn on my camera and you're going to see me try and work through these ideas and processes. I really want you to get a sense of what this process really looks like in an unscripted way. Right now, my task and yours is to select a project to work with throughout this course. So at this point, I really don't know what kind of project I'm going to select. And I'm taking a big risk here because I have no idea of the project is going to work. I don't know if it's going to be good or bad. And my hope is that this is really going to show you what the creative process looks like. So my task and yours is to select a project for this course. So I need to select a project that I'm going to work through throughout the entire course. And my goal is going to be the complete this project by the time I get to the end of making this course. So the first thing I want to share with you about my process is that every morning I have a habit of getting up, making coffee and writing for about half an hour this morning. I actually wrote about what kind of project that I might want to select for this course. Now, as I alluded to in the lesson you just watched, I always have ongoing projects that I've worked on for years. But for this course, I really want you to see this process in its pure form. So I'm going to select a project that I've never worked on before. To the project I'm going to select is going to be completely new to me. That way I'm starting probably closer to where you are with no idea where the project is going to go and how it's going to turn it out. So I know that I want to select a project that's brand new to me that I've never worked on before. As you also heard me share with you in the lesson that you just watched, I try and record each and every new idea that I come up with. So I do this in two ways. I record my ideas through sketchbooks and most of my sketchbooks or just writing and notes, just little ideas. Occasionally they'll have sketches, but it's a lot of writing. And I will also record my ideas in what I call my future work file. This is a file I keep on my computer that at this stage has hundreds of ideas. Most of them are just a sentence or two long. They're just a very brief description of an idea. Sometimes they include images, are quick sketches that I've photographed, but none of these are fleshed out. They're just short pieces of writing or little sketches. Just y, remember what the idea is. So I'm going to start there. I'm going to start by going through my future work file and by going through my sketch books to see what ideas strike me. Now when I do this, what I'm really looking for are ideas that excite me. And what ideas excite me tend to change from time to time. Often when I go through my sketch books and my future work file, I'll sort through ideas and none of them seem particularly interesting. But for reasons I often can't explain what they will jump out at me. That just seems like it's the right idea or an interesting idea for that time in my life. So my computer is right here, right next to my camera. So I'm actually going to open my future work file and let's see what's in it. So I'm going to share with you some of the ideas that are in here. And again, most of these ideas are probably not particularly good or interesting. But like I said, I try and record everything. I don't even remember half of these. Let's see. This one says Allie projections. Let's open it and see what's here. A dark alley could be the perfect place to create animated happenings. I could see characters doing interesting things in the alley, like building something, performing or reciting, drawing or anything else. I'm not entirely sure exactly what my vision was with that, but I suppose it's projected drawings are animations in an alley where people would just come upon them. Here's one that says billboard ART. So let's see what this one says. I could purchase billboard space and use it as a way to display art in a community. It could be images or ideas. Okay, interesting idea, but expensive, perhaps this one says text-based art. So this is the idea that I include more text. Simple idea, not really a project, but I do like texts. I've always liked the look of artwork that has images and text. And so that could be something to explore, striking these interesting right now. Here's one that says cosmic Domino's creature collage, culture bomb, cyclo Rama dioramas. Let's see what this one says. Create a series of dioramas. So if you're not familiar with dioramas, a diorama is a three-dimensional scene in which people, animals, or other objects are depicted in some sort of environment. Dioramas can be miniature. Most people do diorama projects in school. Dioramas can be life-size like it museums. But I have to say the idea of doing dioramas is very interesting. So I'm gonna put that one aside. I've always loved dioramas. So that could be something to work with. Drawings on Flags, doing drawings and then printing them on flags and flying them. A game gallery, this one says an exhibition where the art is a series of games and activities designed to get attendees to interact with each other. Idea cards, jumbles, marginalia, stuffed drawings, toy theaters. I could create paper toy theaters to tell stories and explore ideas. So if you're not familiar with toy theaters, a toy theater is like a model of a theatrical set. We have miniature actors and they're usually made out of paper. In fact, many toy theaters are actually referred to as paper theaters. Well, that's interesting. Toy theaters are very similar to dioramas. And we'll put that one aside as well. Torn paper stencils, question creatures, twist certifications, walk through drawings. So this is an interesting idea that I've recorded. So in addition to keeping a future work file, I also have a file where I collect interesting questions and I've always wanted to do something with those questions. I really love to ask myself questions and to write out answers. This has always been a really important part of my process of living. It's how I figure out how to live my life, what I think, what I feel, what I believe, how I should act. So this process of asking myself questions and writing out the answers has been really important to me. And as a result, I have kept a collection of my computer of questions that I think are interesting or important. I've always wanted to find a way to incorporate those questions into my art. So that ideas is interesting to me right now. Again, I'm trying to take this opportunity to explore new work that I've never done before, but that I've always wanted to do. So this could be an interesting way to use my collection of questions in my art work. Okay, so here is a file that talks about using my old drawings as collage elements. So this is something that I've been interested in doing for a while. Somebody who draws a lot, I literally have hundreds, if not thousands, of drawings stored away in flat files here at my studio. These are drawings of all kinds of subjects, birds, random objects, people. Most of them are just for practice or for pleasure. They're not intended to sell or to exhibit. So they just gets stored away here at the studio. So they're just sitting there not being used. Nobody ever sees them but me. So I've thought about cutting up these drawings and using them as collage elements and it works. So this has been a very interesting idea. So all of these drawings could be cut up and used as the raw elements. The raw images in dioramas are toy theaters, time-lapse drawing, tug-of-war drawings, walking, Zoetrope, projected graffiti. So I found a number of interesting things in my future work file. And I think the thing that struck me most, the thing that was most interesting and exciting to me was the idea of dioramas are tweet theaters. So I've put those aside. Now I'm gonna go through my sketch books to see what ideas I can find there. So my sketchbooks have a lot of writing in them. And you'll notice that a lot of the drawings are very, very simple. For years. I've actually had people pretty disappointed to see what's in my sketchbooks because they know I like to draw, but most of what's in my sketchbooks is writing and very quick drawings. Here is architectural shadow boxes. Interesting idea. Once again, shadow boxes similar to dioramas are toy theaters. Here intersecting drawings. Drawings intersecting with text. Kind of an interesting idea and that could work for dioramas. Here is an idea for creating a three-dimensional cube with drawings on each face of the cube. So again, it's making drawings three-dimensional, and that's something that could. Very, very nicely fit into dioramas or toy theaters. Fact, so many of these ideas are about making drawings three-dimensional. Here's an idea of drawings used for, in a three-dimensional way for theatrical set design. Drawings that creates set. So again, there's that toy Theater idea popping up. Okay, so let's take stock of where we are. I have some ideas I'm really interested in. I love the idea of creating dioramas are toy theaters. I love the idea of using my old drawings as images for collage. I love the idea of incorporating text into my artwork. Something I've done a little, but I don't feel like I've explored it as much as I'd like. I love the idea of incorporating questions into artwork. I've always wanted to create work that asks viewers questions. So hopefully you can see how powerful this strategy is of combining ideas together. I started off not knowing what kind of projects I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to pick something completely new that I'd never done before. So I started going through my old sketchbooks. I started going through my future work file and I started pulling out ideas for projects that excited me that I thought were interesting. These are the ideas that stood out. Dioramas in toy theaters, creating work that incorporates text, creating art that asks viewers questions. So I'm getting excited about this project. I should tell you that I have no idea what it's going to look like. I have no idea how to make it yet. But I'm very interested in this idea. I'm getting excited about exploring it further. So now I have some ideas. They're working well together. And I think I'm about ready to attempt to write a brief description for this project. So here it goes, I'm terrible at typing. By the way, I will create a photograph, a series of dioramas made from my drawings. These dioramas may include text that asks viewers questions. So my brief description is rough. It's pretty short, but I feel like it's a good start. It's a good starting point that I can refine. So I have to say I'm a little nervous about this. This is a very new project. I've never done anything like this before. And I'm taking this risk so you can see what it really looks like to have a creative idea, to commit to a project, to not know how to do it, to not know how it's going to turn out, but to make decisions and move forward. So I hope this is valuable for you to see me go through this process, to see the uncertainties that go along with it. And I really hope the project works out by the end of the course. So there's one final thing that I should say before we conclude this video journal. I'm coming at this from a fine art perspective. I want to create interesting artwork that I can exhibit that gets people thinking that introduces people to new ideas. Now reading my project description, it may sound a little strange to some of you, to be honest, it sounds a little strange to me, but I want to assure you that even if you have a much more conventional kind of project, if you want to do a comic book, if you wanted to align of clothing, if you want to do a series of botanical paintings or landscape paintings, if you want to illustrate a children's book, if you want to write a movie script, if you want to write a novel, I want to assure you that this process will work for any kind of creative project. So if your project is much more conventional than mine, That's great. This process will work as well. But my hope is that by seeing me use this process to create something more experimental or more contemporary, you'll really get to see how this process organizes thoughts and ideas, how it pulls together creative impulses, and how it will allow you to take your creative ideas and work with them so you can actually create finished work by the end. I don't want you to think that this process only works for more contemporary or experimental art. This process will work for any kind of creative project. Alright, so I feel like I have accomplished my task. I went through my many ideas for projects. I selected some of them, I combine them and I feel like I've got the foundation for an interesting project. I've written a brief description, so I think we are ready to move on to lesson two, ideation. 4. Ideation: Hi, welcome to lesson two, ideation. Imagine you had all of the resources you could possibly want for your project. Imagine you had no limits. Imagine you had all of the time and skills you needed to make your project whatever you wanted to make it. What would you do with no limits? What would you do with infinite resources? What would you create? How might that change your current vision for your project? In the previous lesson, you should have selected a project to work with throughout the duration of this course. Your goal will be to complete your project by the end of this course. Now of course, as your instructor, I'm not sure what kind of project you've selected, but whatever your project is, whether it's conventional or experimental, whether it's art-based, are design-based, whether it's a big project or a small project, this process will work. The process I'm teaching you in this course will allow you to bring whatever your project is from concept to completion. So of course, for you to participate in this lesson, you need to have selected your project. So assuming that you've selected a project, you've written a brief description for your project. Let's get into today's lesson, ideation. So what is ideation? Well, to start, let me give you a few thoughts. So instead of just committing to your initial vision for your project, you want to explore what is possible. Ideation is the act of generating ideas. And in the ideation phase of the creative process, you want to generate as many ideas as possible for your project. This activity serves two purposes. First, it will inspire you as you generate more and more ideas for your project, you should get more and more excited about the possibilities. Now this is critical for a project you may be working on for weeks, months, or even years. Now, much more importantly, the second purpose of the ideation phase is to explore what is possible for your project without any limits. By engaging in the ideation phase, you're going to discover new ideas about your project, new methods you've never explored new ways to approach your project. New elements that you would not have thought of if you had just stuck with your initial vision and new strategies for pulling your audience into your work, truly engaging them, whatever your project, maybe. I have a basic rule, but I'm working in the studio. I am never allowed to go with my first idea. This is because I believe that no matter how good your initial ideas are, they can almost always be improved upon or expanded. It is highly unlikely that your first ideas are going to be your best ideas. The process of ideation, of generating numerous ideas for your project will allow you to explore your project in whole new ways. And if you generate enough new ideas, you are very likely to find a few of them that will improve your project, make it more engaging to your audience. Now of course, at some point, your project must collide with reality and all of the limitations that reality will impose upon it. But not yet. The process of ideation that you're going to learn about today is where you get to explore all of the possibilities for your project, to see what your project can be if there were no limits and no restrictions. Now, the process of ideation goes by different names depending on the practice or the profession. In business settings, it's often referred to as brainstorming. Imagineers refer to it as blue sky. But regardless of where it happens or what it's called, the process of ideation is remarkably similar. The goal is simply to generate as many ideas as possible for your project. Big ideas or small ideas. Now it's very common for people to have a vision for their project that they are committed to and don't want to change. And I can completely understand this impulse. However, by skipping the ideation phase, you risk your project being underwhelming. You risk missing opportunities and ideas that could have made your project more engaging. You risk working within self-imposed limits that are far too narrow. The goal with the ideation phase is that even though many of your ideas will be unattainable, by generating enough ideas, you will discover some that are completely doable that you would not have otherwise thought of, and that will improve your project in measurably. So in this lesson, you're going to learn to push your project into unexpected territory and to discover all of the possibilities that holds. So how does the process of ideation actually work? How do you do it? Now, although there are no hard rules for ideation, there are some general guidelines you should follow first. And most importantly, the primary goal of ideation is to generate and record as many ideas as possible. And as you're generating ideas, no part of the project should be out-of-bounds. You can generate ideas that relate to the big picture, or you can generate ideas that focus on my new details. You can generate ideas for concepts and themes or materials. The goal is to develop as many possibilities for your project as you can think of. Next, Do not judge or criticize any of your ideas. This is one of the hardest parts for most people when they're in the ideation phase. For most people, it's very natural to think of an interesting idea, but then immediately follow it up with reasons that it probably won't work. Now of course, later on in the creative process, your project will have to collide with reality. Limitations will be considered, but you do not want to think that way when you're in the ideation phase, when you're in the ideation phase, there are no bad ideas. You shouldn't even consider whether or not an idea is possible or feasible for your project during the ideation phase, it is critical for you to understand. Good Ideas are rare and the only way to find good ideas that will work for your project is to generate many ideas. The more ideas you generate, the more likely you are to find ideas that will work for your project. If you're immediately judging or criticizing your ideas, finding their limitations are coming up with reasons why they won't work. You're going to shut down the process of generating new ideas. And the fewer ideas you generate, the less likely you are to discover the ideas that will enhance and improve your project. So here's the next guideline. Let one idea lead to others. Once you get into the ideation phase, it's very possible that ideas will begin to flow. When that happens, feel free to follow whatever path your ideas lead you down, regardless of whether they seem silly or out of place for your project, just follow the path. See where it leads. By following an absurd or seemingly far-fetched idea down its path, you may discover good ideas down there that you would never have thought of otherwise. So our next guideline is related to this idea. Seek out wild, outrageous and daring ideas. When you're in the ideation phase, the wilder the ideas, the better you probably won't use your more far-fetched ideas and your actual project. But wild ideas will push you into new ways of thinking. And that in turn, will help you generate more ideas. And of course, we always want to keep this in mind. The more ideas you generate, the more likely you are to discover good ideas that will enhance and improve your project. So here's the final guideline. Let the ideation phase go on for as long as it has two. Now of course, at some point the ideation phase needs to m so you can get on with the rest of the project, particularly if you have a deadline. But the reason this guideline is important keeps you from having ideation sessions that are too short. Generally speaking, if I were to track the time it took to complete a project from beginning to end, I would find that I usually spend 5-10% of that time on the ideation phase. Now again, these are just soft guidelines, not hard rules, but if our goal is to generate as many ideas as possible that we should be willing to spend more time in the ideation phase, not look for reasons to limit it. So those are the guidelines for successful ideation. So before I set you loose, I want to spend some time talking about the tools and methods that I use for ideation. During the ideation phase, you need a way to record your ideas and a way to explore them. This should not all be done in your head. Remember the goal is to get ideas out of your head and into the physical world where you can explore them and evaluate them. So here are the tools and the methods that I use and are very commonly used by other creative people during the ideation phase. One of the most common tools people use is a sketchbook. Sketch books are fantastic, particularly if your ideas require images as well as writing. A sketchbook is a great place to write notes and do quick simple sketches if required. Any kind of sketch book will work. In sketchbooks are particularly useful if you'd like to go through the ideation phase out in the world, if you work best at coffee shops, bars, restaurants, parks, bringing a portable sketchbook with you is a perfect way to capture ideas as they arise in your mind. Now, as I've alluded to before, a common way that I record my ideas is through writing. Many of the ideas I record don't have any images with them at all. They're just text files that I keep in a folder on my computer. There's something so incredibly powerful about translating your ideas into words. To do that you have to be able to organize your thoughts well enough. To create sentences and paragraphs, I find the act of writing incredibly powerful. I write nearly every day and for nearly every part of the creative process. Now I tend to use a computer or a tablet for my writing, which means that I'm typing. I'm not particularly good at typing, but because I draw so much when I get a pencil in my hand, I tend to think in images and not words. So my handwriting is nearly illegible. I think much better in words when I'm in front of a keyboard. And I think the combination of sketching ideas and writing about them is an incredibly powerful way to really get at the heart of the idea to see what it is. Using drawing as well as writing, allows you to think about one idea in two unique ways that will help you better understand your ideas as a whole. Now at this point, I should mention that many people myself included like to use a digital tablet for writing and sketching. If you have access to one, a digital tablet can work rate. It allows you both to write and draw, and they're portable like a sketchbook. Another set of tools I commonly used during the ideation phase are loose sheets of paper or card stock. Now sketch books are great for recording ideas, but they can be limiting when you're trying to compare ideas to one another. Now when I go through the ideation phase, I will often write an idea down on an individual sheet of paper or a piece of card stock. Frequently on a three by five inch card or a five by seven inch card. Occasionally, I'll use an entire eight-and-a-half by 11 inch sheet of paper. What I love about using individual sheets of paper or card stock is that I can pin them up in my studio. So each idea I generate, I write down on a card, I do a quick sketch and I pin it up. This allows me to immerse myself in my ideas and I can see all of my ideas at once, which allows me to find relationships between them. Or if I see a common theme or a set of techniques emerging, I can group ideas together. Being immersed in your ideas and your physical environment can be a powerful and profound experience. So I highly recommend trying this out to see what it's like to surround yourself with your ideas. So those are the tools that I use to record my ideas. These ideas are primarily recorded using writing and drawing. Now I'd like to explore a couple of methods or techniques you can use during the ideation phase that will help you generate new ideas, particularly if you're struggling. So as I alluded to in the previous lesson, I record all of my creative ideas. This means that I have hundreds, if not thousands, of little ideas written down and sketched out. I have them in sketchbooks, I have them in text files in a folder on my computer. And I have them on three by five cards or individual sheets of paper. So this means that at my studio, I have a huge number of ideas that have been recorded in sketched out when I'm working on a new project. In addition to generating new ideas for that project, I will also go through my old sketchbooks and files to see what ideas I've come up with in the past and to see if any of them might be right for my project. This is a great way to collect ideas and to inspire yourself because even your old ideas might lead you to good ideas that can be useful for your current project. In one of my favorite methods during the ideation phase is to get inspired by the work of others. During the ideation phase, feel free to open books at your favorite artists or designers. Feel free to go to websites or watch films are many documentaries. Checking out the creative work of others is a great way to spark your own ideas. Let the good ideas of creative masters inspire you and push you to think in new ways about your project. So those are the common tools, methods and techniques that I use when I'm going through the ideation phase. And these are the tools and techniques that are most commonly used by other creative professionals across a wide range of fields. So the last thing I'd like to do before we get you going through the ideation phase is to give you some examples of what this might look like. Now of course, the ideation phase may look completely different for different kinds of creative activities. The ideation phase of a fashion designer may look very different from the ideation phase of a landscape painter or a children's book author. So if your project is say, a comic book, you may want to explore different ways. You can lay out a page, different styles of drawing for your comic book. You may want to push your character's attributes or their adventures. Two extremes. See what happens when you add new characters or remove existing characters. See what happens when you add new twists and turns to the plot. Ask yourself, what is the wildest kind of story you can come up with for your characters. If you're a painter and your project is a collection of botanical paintings, try experimenting with unorthodox compositions or color combinations. Explore unique ways of applying paint. You can explore outrageous ways of exhibiting your work. What would happen if your paintings were projected on the side of the gallery they were being shown at, in addition to being hung on the inside, what if next to each of your original paintings? Also exhibited a huge close-up photograph to show the brushwork. Now of course, I'm just throwing out whatever ideas come to mind here. I'm not saying these ideas are good or bad, but I'm just trying to give examples of the kinds of ideas you can explore during the ideation phase. Remember, nothing should be off limits. If you're a fashion designer in your project is a new collection of clothing. Try unorthodox ways of stitching, experiment with strange new materials. Think of each clothing piece as a piece of architecture with protrusions or cantilevers. Again, I'm just throwing out ideas here, but your goal should be to come up with as many wild ideas for your project as possible. Of course, in the next video, you're going to see me go through this process. I'm going to bring you into my studio while I go through the ideation phase. So you can see what this really looks like in practice. So if you're still struggling with the idea of ideation, don't worry, you're going to get a demonstration of what it actually looks like in the next video. Okay, so with all of this in mind, here is your task. Gather whatever supplies you need to record your ideas. It could be a sketch book, a digital tablet, or loose sheets of paper or card stock. And of course, if you're working on paper, you'll need a pen or a pencil or some other kind of writing instrument to record your ideas and get sketches down. Once you've got your supplies, spend a minimum of 1 h generating new ideas for your project. And try and remember the guidelines we just went through earlier. You want to generate as many ideas as possible. Record every idea you have. Do not judge or criticize any of your ideas. Let any one of your ideas lead to other ideas. And of course, try not to limit the amount of time that you spend in the ideation phase. Remember, I said spend a minimum of 1 h generating new ideas. If the ideas are flowing, feel free to go as long as you need to. If after an hour the ideas just don't seem to becoming, take a break, come back and try again. Be open to spending hours or even days generating new ideas for your project. So here are a few closing thoughts before you generate ideas of your own. First, it's important to remember that ideation is a skill just like anything else. The more you do it, the better you'll get at it. So if you're new to this kind of thinking and the ideas just aren't coming, stick with it. I promise it will get easier with time and experience. And remember, if you need to revisit my becoming a creative course, ideation is simply a form of divergent thinking. I teach divergent thinking in depth and my becoming creative course. And if you haven't taken that course yet, I highly recommend doing so. And finally, I want to remind you one more time that good ideas are rare. To discover good ideas, you need to generate a lot of ideas. The more ideas you generate, the more likely you are to find good ideas that will enhance and improve your project. But the flip side of this idea is that most of your ideas are not going to be particularly good or useful. That is perfectly fine, that should be expected. Remember, you shouldn't be judging or criticizing these ideas at all that will come later. But during the ideation phase, the primary goal is to generate as many ideas as possible, good or bad. You can sort through them and figure out which ones will work later on in the process, I will cover that, but for now, we're going for quantity. And of course, in the next video, you're going to come into my studio and see me go through this process. Then I'll see you in the next lesson when you're going to learn how to incorporate new ideas into your current project. 5. Ideation Video Journal: Welcome back to the second video journal in this course. This video journal is going to document me going through the ideation process. I'm going to take you with me into the main part of my studio where you're going to see me generate as many ideas as I can for my project. So I'm gonna do this in a few different ways. First, you're going to see make it a stack of cards and a pen. I'm going to turn the camera on and I'm going to record the process of mu recording ideas as they come to my mind. For those of you who have taken drawing courses with me in the past, you may be surprised to see how simple my drawings are. Recording ideas is not about good drawing. The kinds of drawings I'm gonna be doing when recording my ideas is a form of shorthand. I'm trying to draw as quickly and as simply as possible just to get the idea out of my head. Remember, our goal here is to generate as many ideas as possible. Good drawings that include proper perspective, detailed shading or high levels of rendering take a huge amount of time. And during the ideation phase, we want to spend our time generating ideas, not spending time who rendering our ideas. I'm going to try and get the ideas out of my head and onto paper as quickly as I possibly can. I'm going to draw just enough so I can get the idea on paper. But as you will see, I am not interested at all in doing good drawings. Later on, I can spend much more time exploring and working with each individual idea that will be a more appropriate time to do more detailed drawings. Although I've gone through the ideation phase numerous times and other projects, I've never done it like this. I've never turned a camera on and attempted to record the process. So again, this is an experiment. But my hope is that by seeing me go through this process, seeing what kinds of ideas I generate, what kinds of notes I'm taking, the kinds of drawings that I'm doing, that you will get a front row view of what the ideation process really looks like. Now for me, I'll usually start the ideation process with one focused session, usually an hour or so. But once started, ideas tend to come to me at all hours of the day. So I always keep a sketchbook handy to make sure that I can record ideas whenever they come to me. And at those rare times that an idea comes to me and I don't have a sketchbook, I will often send myself a text describing my idea so that I can get it into my sketchbook later on. Before we go into my studio, it's important for you to know that what you're going to see me doing is not the right way. It's not the one correct way to go through the ideation process. Remember, there are no hard rules and creativity. There are only guidelines. And what you're going to see me go through is just one possible way of going through the ideation phase. Yours will likely look very different and that's great. So just a reminder of what my project is, I'm going to create an photograph, a series of dioramas made from my old drunks. These dioramas may include texts that asked viewers questions. So as I mentioned before, I really don't know how this project is going to turn out. I don't know how to make it. I don't know what it's gonna look like. This is why the ideation phase is so important for a project like this. Hopefully you'll see me coming up with ideas for the finished product. What I want it to look like, what I wanted to feel like. But I should also be coming up with ideas for how to make it. How do I go through the process of making a diorama from my drawings? How do I take flat drawings done on large sheets of paper and get them into a diorama, into a 3D setting. How will I stand them up? Will there be other objects in these dioramas? We only need to create new drawings. How many ways can I think of to make drawings three-dimensional? I'll also be looking for ideas, for themes and subjects. What are the actual subjects I want in these dioramas, people, animals, objects. I don't know yet what relationships should there be between the questions asked in these dioramas and the visuals? How big should they be? How should I light them? Even as I'm sitting here preparing to generate ideas, you can see my mind is coming up with numerous questions and that's actually a great way to start the ideation process. Come up with questions. What do you need to learn about your project? What do you need to figure out? What is unknown about your project? That you need to know. This is actually a great strategy, particularly if you're having difficulty generating ideas. Start by asking yourself questions. It can be very difficult to just sit down and tell yourself to generate ideas. This is often too broad and too vague for people. But if you can generate a series of questions about your project, what you don't know and what you need to know. It will help you focus your mind on generating ideas that are relevant for your project. So let's head into my studio for this little experiment where you're going to see me generate as many ideas as possible for my project. So what you're seeing here is a view from above one of my drafting tables. I have a stack of four by six cards and depend on placing a card on my drafting table and waiting for ideas to arrive. Now instead of just waiting passively in my head, I'm asking myself questions about the project. The question that keeps popping up in my mind right now is how do I use my drawings to make three-dimensional dioramas? How can I use my drawings and creative ways instead of letting my drawings remain flat on a piece of paper, how can I bring my drawings into the three-dimensional world where they will operate as objects. So a memory pops up in my head. I used to use my old drawings as a wrapping paper when I gave gifts. By folding my drawing around a box, it immediately becomes a three-dimensional object. So this isn't a new idea. But during the ideation phase, we're looking to grasp onto any idea to get us started. Remember, at this stage, I'm not interested whether or not this idea could be useful in my project or not. Everything gets recorded into note how simple this drawing is to the point of being crude. All it needs to do is remind me of the idea. So probably because I'm now remembering ways that I've made images three-dimensional in the past, I'm now thinking back to my teens when I did lighting in theatrical set construction for theaters, set designs often use flat paintings to create the illusion of three-dimensional environments. I could easily do the same thing with my drawings, but on a much smaller scale. So now I'm wondering, how else could I display my drawings on a much smaller scale that would be impractical with a theatrical set. How else could I stand these drawings up? So I have the idea of creating small stands, probably out of wood. Maybe these stands could include some form of scaffolding. Scaffolding is frequently used in theatrical set design, and I couldn't make much smaller versions for my dioramas. I like the idea of scaffolding so much. I give it its own card along with a sketch of a different idea for a scaffold. This scaffold contains numerous horizontal slants that I could attach drawings to. You can see so far that much of the ideation process comes down to association. We're letting one idea leads to another. You can also see that my memories and previous life experience have led me to some of these ideas. So just a few minutes ago, I recorded the idea of wrapping gifts with my old drawings. This made me think of people opening those drawings and tearing those drawings. So I became interested in the idea of tearing out certain parts of drawings. I think torn paper edges can be very beautiful and interesting. So here you'll see me make a simple note about torn out drawings. And of course, the same technique could be used for text. So I'll make a note of that to push the idea even further, I could even crumble the torn paper that the text is on, distorting it and making it more dynamic. By crumpling paper, we take something flat and make it topographic. Crumpled paper is almost sculptural. Another way you can generate new ideas is to think about scale. What happens if you make something bigger or smaller? What would happen if I increased the scale of my dioramas? If I made them big enough for people to actually walk through them with large-scale cutout drawings, I could immerse viewers in a diorama. This makes me wonder how else I could make a diorama in immersive experience. This gives me the idea of putting a virtual reality camera inside a small-scale diorama with a virtual reality headset. This could create the illusion of a life-size immersive diorama. I have no idea if ideas like this or even practical, but at the very least, they're interesting. For some reason. I have an image flashed in my mind of drawings and texts on crumpled and torn out pieces of paper hanging from strings. It's hard to know or some ideas come from. But my guess is that this idea may have come to me after I organized my studio supplies and relocated my twine threads and yarn, another image that came to me was writing on an apple that had been cut in half. It's not really important to understand where these ideas come from. But the more you go through the ideation process, the better you will get it turning your experiences into ideas. So after taking a break and looking at the work of other artists for inspiration, I came back and began generating more ideas. So a number of the ideas you'll see me record here aren't original or uniquely mine. There things I've seen other artists use or that I've seen in other exhibitions. But when I use them in my work, with my drawings, with my creations, that I'm using them in a way that's unique to my work. Ideas like projecting images onto backgrounds, have been used for decades in theatrical productions, in theme park rides, and for special effects in movies. But it is absolutely something I can explore in my dioramas. So I record it. Once I get started, the ideas begin to flow more freely. I have an idea about viewing my drawings through different shaped apertures. The image of a shattered drawing pops into my mind, which gives me the idea of drawings and shards. An image of drawings growing out of potted soil comes to mind. So much of generating new ideas comes down to a remixing the memories and thoughts and images you have in your head. So after another break, I decided to select some ideas I thought were interesting and explore them further. I'm very interested in this idea of using wood to create structures, to display my drawings. I start sketching out different ideas. Here's one of a four-sided wooden structure on Wheels. Each side contains a screen where I could display text or drawings. The wheels bring to mind the idea that this could move around, which in turn makes me think that I could create Stop Motion dioramas, dioramas that appear to move. Once the idea of motion came to mind, I started thinking about different ways to get drawings and text to move. The idea of texts and drawings flying through an open window came to mind. Of course, you're just getting a brief glimpse at some of the ideas I came up with during my ideation process. I spent hours over two to three days generating ideas. Here are a few more sketches of different kinds of scaffolding or structures that I could use to display drawings. For some reason, I had the idea of putting a nest on top of one of them. Here's an idea for creating set pieces using drawings of architectural elements. Some of my ideas may be unique, most of them probably aren't, but everything gets recorded. I spent many hours generating new ideas for my project over the course of many days. I don't usually count the number of ideas I generate, but I know it's a lot. As I mentioned in the lecture portion of the ideation lesson, I love taking my ideas in pinning them up on a wall in my studio, immersing myself in the possibilities of my project. So here you'll see ideas on cards, ideas torn from my sketch books. You'll also see ideas that are generated during an ideation session just at my computer, typing out their ideas by changing the materials that I'm using and the methods that I'm using to record my ideas. It pushes my mind in different directions and allows me to come up with ideas that I might not otherwise have generated. Of course, this wall contains many ideas that you did not see me record. But hopefully this gives you a sense of what the ideation process can look like. I generate as many ideas as possible for my project. Nothing is judged. Everything gets recorded. As I talked about in my becoming creative course, generating new ideas requires that you live a lifestyle that promotes creative thinking. Ideation is not a mere activity that you engage in. Every once in awhile, you have to have the habits and live your life in a way that promotes idea generation. Now I cover the habits and the mindset necessary for creativity in depth and my becoming creative course. So if you haven't yet already taken that course, I highly recommend you do. So what you've just seen is the way that I go through the ideation process, the way that I do it is not the right way or the single correct way. There are numerous ways you could go through this process, but hopefully seeing me go through it gives you a sense of what it can look like. I have a few reflections I'd like to share. First, you'll notice that before the ideation process and throughout it, I asked myself questions. I asked myself what kinds of things I wanted to learn about my project, what I wanted to discover, what did I need to know to make it and what effect I wanted it to have on viewers know during this video journal, you also heard me try and figure out where these ideas might have come from. Now in reality, it's not really important that you understand where individually ideas come from. What is important for you to understand is that every idea has a geneology. Ideas don't simply pop up fully formed in the mind from nothing. New ideas come from the mind, combining and recombining the raw elements that it has within it, your mind is filled with memories, ideas, stories, symbols, narratives, and a near infinite number of objects and living things that recognizes. And hopefully your mind is also filled with ideas from other creative professionals. Hopefully you have a rich storehouse of images, of paintings, sculptures, architecture, graphic design, dance, theater, all kinds of creative endeavors. When you're coming up with new ideas, it is your job to mind these mental resources and finding new and meaningful combinations. Another thing you may have noticed is that many of the ideas that I wrote down aren't really new ideas. I've seen other artists are creative professionals use them in a whole series of ways, but they still get recorded because their ideas and methods that I can use in my project. We're not copying the work of other creative professionals, but we can adapt the tools and techniques that other creative people have used for use in our project. So as you know, I've chosen a creative and somewhat unorthodox project to work on in this course. But I used this same process of ideation when I worked on a much more conventional project, when I wrote my book, The Art and Science of Drawing. Now when I was writing that book, I could have just copied what I did for my online courses, but instead, I took the opportunity to generate ideas of what else it could be, what else I could do with a book that I couldn't do with my video courses. By taking my book through this ideation process, I came up with new and better ways of organizing the book. I added new drawings and I found new ways to teach familiar ideas. So in this way, my book stands on its own. It's not merely a copy of my courses. I would not have been able to take the book in a new direction had I not brought it through the ideation phase? Remember, everything you're learning in this course will work for creative and experimental projects, as well as completely conventional projects. Right now, my book is selling very well. The reviews are excellent, so I can see that approaching it in a new way, in a different way than I approached my courses, made a big difference and made my books stand out on its own as a quality instructional manual for drawing. This would not have been possible without generating new and interesting ideas for my book, which could have been a very straightforward project. So I hope this gives you some insight into the ideation process, what it can look like, and how it works. You've seen me generate numerous ideas. I haven't criticized them. I've just recorded everything as it comes to my mind. I've let my mind free associate. I've led ideas, lead to other ideas. I've used my memories and my storehouse of the creative work of others to influence the ideas I'm coming up with. At this point, I have no idea if these ideas are useful or not. If they're practical or if they have any place in my current project, but everything gets recorded. So in the next lesson you're going to learn how do we incorporate new ideas into your project. So I hope to see you in that lesson. 6. Incorporating New Ideas: Welcome to lesson three, incorporating new ideas. So in this lesson you're going to go through the ideas that you generated during the ideation phase. And you're going to select the ones you think are most likely to improve or enhance your project. Now knowing what kinds of ideas are likely to be beneficial for your project requires having a sense of the impact you want your project to have. It requires knowing what kind of experience you want to give your audience. How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to think when they experience your work? We, as creative people create our work. We have a vision in our head that we are trying to fulfill or passionate about pursuing a particular project. And we have a sense of what we want that project to look like and feel like. But then once the project is complete, it's put out into the world where it's experienced by different kinds of people. It's at that point we get to see whether our project had the impact that we were hoping for when we are evaluating or new ideas, when we're trying to figure out what ideas to incorporate into our project, what we're really doing is looking for ideas that we think are most likely to give our audience, to give our viewers the experience that we're hoping for. Now of course, this can range wildly from project to project in order to know what to do with our project and how to incorporate new ideas, we need to have some understanding of what ideas are beneficial to our project and what makes an idea beneficial has to do with what we want the impact of our project to have on our audience. Now we're going to explore this concept too much further in the next few lessons. But for now, you need to start thinking about what you want your audience to think and feel when they experience your work. One of the best ways I've discovered of doing this is to make a list of adjectives that I would want viewers to use when describing my project to someone else. So imagine your project is complete. It's out in the world. And a stranger, someone you don't know, experiences your work for the first time and a friend asks them, What was the work like? What do you want that person to say? How do you want that person to describe your work to others? What adjectives which you want them to use? Would you want your work to be funny or perhaps mysterious, playful, or perhaps dark and morose, amusing or perhaps contemplative. These are very different kinds of adjectives and how you handle the work, what new ideas you incorporate into the work are largely going to be determined By what you want viewers to think and feel and they experience your work, which will in turn determine how they describe this work to others. So when you're evaluating ideas, you want to look for ideas that are going to be beneficial to your project. And how do you know that? You determine what kinds of adjectives you want people to use when they describe your project. This will help give you a lens to view your ideas through and a filter that you can use to help you decide which ideas to incorporate in which ideas to leave behind. Now, in my experience at this stage, it can be difficult to know what kinds of ideas are going to be beneficial. And it's important for you to understand that the ideas that you select today to incorporate into your project, you're not committing to using them. What you're doing is you're committing to exploring them further to see how they'll impact your project. And I'm gonna give you a number of ways to do that over the next few lessons. But for now we're just looking for ideas that we think are likely to be beneficial to our project. And how we're defining beneficial is by how we would like viewers to describe our project. In my experience, new ideas tend to fall into two categories. They're either beneficial or they're not beneficial. Now ideas and the not beneficial category may just be neutral or you may feel that they will actively hurt your project and take you further away from the project that you want to make. But either way, ideas that are not beneficial, we can leave alone for now. So that's the first category you want to think about. Is an idea going to be a benefit to your project or not? The next way I tend to think about new ideas is if they are possible or not. So beneficial ideas tend to fall into one of two categories. Either their possible or they're not possible. And when I say not possible, I'm gonna give a few caveats to that. Because we as creative people, should be in the business of making the impossible possible. But for now, let's assume that they're going to be some ideas that are beneficial to our project and that are absolutely possible to incorporate. And they're going to be beneficial ideas that although very interesting, that you think would be a benefit to your project, may not be feasible with the skills and resources you currently have. So what I've done is I've introduced two possible categories that you can use to evaluate your new ideas. Ideas can either be beneficial or not beneficial. And you get to define what beneficial is. Any idea that you don t think is going to be beneficial to your project can quickly be discarded. Now remember, these beneficial ideas that you've selected. You don't have to be certain del, improve your project. You just need to be reasonably short enough that you're willing to explore them further. These ideas that you've selected as likely to be beneficial will also fall into two categories. They may seem very possible and feasible to incorporate into your work, or they may seem difficult or near impossible to incorporate. For some of your ideas, perhaps you don't have enough money to pursue them or you don't have the right skills, or you don't have the team of people necessary to make them happen. So what I've tried to give you here is a decision-making matrix. A matrix you can use to help you figure out what ideas you want to incorporate in your project. You have ideas that may be beneficial and ideas that may not be beneficial, then you have ideas that may be possible. You have ideas that won't be possible. Any idea that you don t think is going to be beneficial can be quickly discarded, then you're left with two categories. Ideas that are beneficial, impossible, and ideas that may be beneficial but don't seem possible to you. So any idea that you think is likely to be a benefit to your project and is possible to incorporate. That's a no brainer. Select that idea to explore further. Now I think where creative people really shine is in this category of ideas that may be beneficial but seem difficult or near impossible. So here's some strategies that I use with those ideas. I don't simply write them off as being too hard. I asked myself this question. If I had to pursue that idea, how would I do it? If for some reason I was forced to pursue the ideas that I thought were likely to be beneficial but not possible. How would I make them possible? What I need to learn a new skill, what I need to fund raise when I need to hire a team of people or consult with an expert, if I had to pursue these ideas, how would I do it? The reason I think this is so important is because many ideas that we initially think of as being too difficult, we can actually solve if we put our creative problem-solving skills toward them. Now of course, in the video journal for lesson three, you're going to see me put these ideas into action. So if all of this seems a little theoretical now, don't worry, you're going to see theory put into practice soon enough. Now before I set you loose on your task, there are a few additional thoughts I'd like to share. The first is that so far I've presented a seemingly simple way to select new ideas to incorporate into your project. But nothing about the creative processes that straightforward. I certainly don't want to give you the impression that all you need to do is use this decision-making matrix. And voila, you will have selected the right ideas for your project. It doesn't work that simply. There's a lot of intuition that goes into selecting the right ideas for your project. And I am very confident that in many projects I have selected ideas to incorporate that may not have been the best ideas. I'm also very confident that ideas I wrote off and thought of as non beneficial would likely have benefitted my project in ways that I can barely imagine. This is the risk of creative work. Nothing is straightforward, and we will likely never know if we decide correctly which ideas to incorporate into our projects, in which ideas we leave behind. But remember, it's better to select an idea that isn't perfect and move forward and continue to work than it is to not select any ideas and have your projects stall. By selecting an idea in working through it, we will likely discover whether or not it has a beneficial place in our project. If we discover it doesn't, we don't have to use it. So there's little risk and making a wrong decision here. And while we're working through it, we'll learn about our project will make distinctions, and that is so important. In fact, every once in awhile, I will select ideas to incorporate into projects that I don t think are beneficial just to see what happens. Remember, there's a huge experimental aspect to creativity. We need to be open to exploring new ideas just to see where they lead. What I can tell you is that the more you go through the ideation process, and the more you select ideas to incorporate and work through those ideas, the better you will get at both generating ideas and selecting which ones to incorporate into your project. The only way to do that is to gain experience. So again, I don't want to give you the impression that selecting new ideas comes down to a black and white, clear cut decision making matrix. It doesn't, but I find a tool like this to be a useful guide. It may help you determine which ideas to incorporate, particularly if you're struggling. So the final thing I wanted to share with you before we get you to your task is how I make these decisions in my own studio. Yes, I think about which ideas might be beneficial and which are not. And yes, I try and figure out which of those beneficial ideas are possible for me to incorporate. But really what I'm looking for when I'm evaluating my ideas is what impact they have on me. Some ideas just seemed compelling to me for reasons I often can't explain. Sometimes as I'm generating new ideas during the ideation phase, I'll come up with an idea and it will strike me as immediately compelling and interesting and something that I'm excited to incorporate into the project. You have that experience. Immediately make a note. That's a great experience to have. Other times as I'm going through the ideation phase, I'll record an idea and it won't strike me as interesting. But as days go by, it keeps popping up in my head. For ideas like that, I will often experiment with them just to see what they do in my project. So really I'm just looking for ideas that produce some kind of strong reaction, whether it's immediate or whether it's days later, because that's what we really want from people who experience our work. We want an emotional reaction. We want them to feel something. And if we feel something, if we have a strong reaction to an idea, it makes it more likely that our audience will as well. So yes, if you're trying to figure out which ideas are most likely to benefit your project. And you want to know which of these ideas you can actually incorporate into your project with your current level of skills and the current resources you have. But you're also looking for ideas that produces strong reaction, even if it's not necessarily a good reaction. Because we want our audience to feel something. We want our audience to connect with our work, whether it's on an emotional level or an intellectual level or both. And feel free to use your intuition to help guide you toward which ideas might be beneficial to your project, even if you can't explain why. Okay, So here's your task. First, make a list of adjectives that you would want people to use when describing your work. Remember, that's what an adjective is. It's a describing word where it's like funny, dark, scary, light, humerus, amusing, thoughtful, mysterious. You want to make a list of as many adjectives as you can think of for your project. That list of adjectives is how you're going to evaluate whether an idea may be beneficial for your project or not. So the next part of your task is to select a minimum of three ideas that you think are most likely to be beneficial for your project. How do you know which ideas are beneficial there? The ideas that are going to push your audience to describe your work using the adjectives from the list you just came up with. But remember, if you find a 90th compelling, even if you're not sure if it will be beneficial, even if it doesn't meet the list of adjectives that you came up with, feel free to explore it further. Now remember, in this lesson, all you're doing is selecting which ideas to explore further. You're not committing to using them in your project. And I'm not asking you to explore them just yet. All I'm asking you to do is evaluate the ideas that you came up with during your ideation sessions and select some you'd like to explore further that you think will be a likely benefit to your project. The last thing I want to share with you is this. Now in your task, I've told you to select a minimum of three ideas. But remember, the reality is, sometimes you're going to have a lot of ideas you're interested in incorporating. Other times you may go through your new ideas and find that there aren't any there that you're interested in incorporating into your project? I've had it happen both ways. So if you go through your list of new ideas and only one of them jumps out at you. That's fine. You can select just one. If you want to explore a dozen or more new ideas, that's fine too. Remember, you can go through this project at your pace. Now, if you've gone through the ideation phase and you haven't come up with any new ideas that you're interested in exploring further, I recommend going through the ideation phase again. Remember the guideline I live by, no matter how good I think my first ideas are, nearly every idea can be improved or enhanced. So I go in assuming that no matter how good I think an idea is that it can always be improved. And I urge you to do the same. Even if you discover later that your first idea really was your best idea. You will know for certain because you've explored the other options, but I will tell you that's pretty rare. So go select some new ideas that you want to explore further. I will see you back here for the video journal where I'm going to put these ideas into practice. And you're going to see me evaluate my new ideas to figure out which ones I want to incorporate into my project. After that, I will see you back here for lesson for when you're going to learn how to prototype. 7. Incorporating New Ideas Video Journal: Well, hello, Welcome to the video journal for lesson three. In this video, you'll see me evaluate the ideas that I generated during the ideation phase. And you'll see me select a few to explore further to see how they're going to operate in my project. Now before we begin, I'd just like to give you a reminder of what my project is. I am intending to use my drawings to create dioramas that ask viewers questions. So if you remember at the beginning of the ideation phase, I didn't know how to make it. I didn't know what I wanted the work to look or feel like I just had a broad idea of what I wanted to do in, during the ideation phase, I generated numerous ideas to help me figure out how to make this work, what it should look and feel like, what kind of elements that should include. So during the ideation phase, the whole point is to generate as many ideas as possible and not be critical about those ideas. In fact, you even saw me seek out wild ideas that were unlikely to be used in the final project. But that kind of thinking allows me to view the project in a whole new way. And it is very likely to allow me to generate ideas that I would never have come up with otherwise, as I'm evaluating my ideas, I'm still generating questions to help me figure out what ideas I want to incorporate. And in particular, these questions usually revolve around the various creative problems and challenges that I need to solve in order to make the work. Now I've also asked you to generate a list of adjectives that you would want viewers to use when describing your work. Those adjectives will help give you a filter through which you can view your ideas. It will help you understand what kinds of ideas are likely to be beneficial for your project and will produce the impact on viewers that you're hoping for. So in addition to coming up with a list of adjectives, part of my process is generating questions, and that's a theme you're going to see throughout the entire creative process. For me, I'm always asking myself questions about the work. And once a project gets started, for me, the process of asking questions and ideation never really stops. It extends throughout the duration of the project and gets used in a number of different ways. So I made a list of adjectives for my project. I'm not going to read you the entire list, but I'm just going to focus on some of them. I'd like my work to have a sense of mystery to it. So I have the word mysterious, but it also like it to seem somewhat playful. I'd like the work to be intricate, to include a lot of subtle detail. I'd also like it to include texture. I love work that has a lot of different kinds of textures to it. Now, I love to draw. So it's important to me that the work exhibits a lot of skillful drawing. That's such an important element for me. I like to do work that's creative, but I always want my work to be rooted in extremely skillful drawing. So on my list I also have words like dynamic. And in particular, I want the composition to be dynamic. I don't want it to be too formal or too rigid. I want a lot of diagonals and flowing lines. I also want the work to be thoughtful or contemplative. I want viewers to go away really pondering what they just saw. As you know, I'm going to include questions in my dioramas. So when people see my work, they're actually going to be asked questions in the work itself. So my hope is that viewers going away thinking about these questions and maybe even try and answer these questions for themselves and about their own lives. I want the work to have a lot of contrast, both in terms of visual elements as well as content. So I'm hoping my work has a lot of contrast. I want really deep blacks as well as bright whites, but I also wanted to contrast and the composition. I want to include parts of it that seem very structured and rigid, but other parts that seemed very chaotic and dynamic. I also included the word immersive. I want the viewers to feel like they could step inside these dioramas. So this is just a partial list of the adjectives that I came up with, but hopefully it starts to give you a sense of what I'm hoping this work will look and feel like. It also gives potential clues on how to make the work. Just by going through this process of listing adjectives, it forces me to think about what I want the work to do, what I want it to be, and how I want viewers to experience it. So with these early stages, any activity you can engage in that helps you visualize the work and figure out how you want it to impact viewers is going to be extremely helpful if you're struggling to select ideas that you want to incorporate into your work. In addition to listing adjectives, try asking yourself questions. It's just one more strategy you can use during the creative process. So in the video journal for lesson two, you saw me go through the process of generating new ideas. So I'm not going to revisit the ideas here. Instead, I'm going to show you which ideas I've selected and tell you why. So for me, the biggest challenge of creating these dioramas was how to make them. I know I want to use my old drawings that are stored away in flat files here at my studio. But how do I take those flat drawings on large sheets of paper and turn them into dioramas subjects. So I have this idea of cutting them out and collaging them together. And again, that's a great start. But one of the biggest problems I'm trying to solve is how do I get them to stand up? If I were making a collage on a flat sheet of paper, I could just glue them straight down, but these are supposed to be standalone three-dimensional elements. So first I was looking for any solutions that would help me display the drawings. That would give me a way to take these cutout drawings, collage them together in, stand them up. So there are two ideas that I've found that would allow me to do this. So if you remember first that came up with an idea to display drawings on stands or scaffolding. And I did a little sketch of what appears to be a drawing in a frame that is displayed on a stand. Now, in my mind, the stands or scaffolding could be made of wood, Probably simple password, the same kinds of things you would build model airplanes out of or architectural models. It's lightweight, it's inexpensive and it's easy to cut. So I started to ask myself, well, what else could I make out of that wood? I immediately came up with the idea of scaffolding or screens that I could have fixed drawings to. So I can use horizontal or vertical slats of this lightweight wood in create a semi-transparent screen that I could have fixed drawings to. I don't know yet whether drawings will be taped or glued or fixed in some other way. But this scaffolding or wooden screen would absolutely allow me to a fixed drawings to it. When I was generating these ideas, you'll notice they seem separate and they were put on two different cards, but I'm counting them as one idea. This idea of constructing simple scaffolding or stands for lightweight wood that would allow me to display my drawings and get them to stand upright. So the idea that I'm going to incorporate into my project is that I am going to build wood scaffolding in screens. So hopefully this will help me solve the problem of how I take flat drawings, cut them out, collage them together, and stand them up right in the dioramas. So another problem I was trying to solve was how to get text into the dioramas. So as you know, I've had this idea that each diorama could include a question. When looking through the ideas I came up with. One idea is stood out the idea of putting text on torn out and crumpled paper. Now I like this idea for a few reasons. First, if you remember some of the adjectives I use, I wanted texture, I wanted dynamism, torn out paper has a rough, interesting edges that are very textural. And of course, when you crumple paper, it becomes topographic, it becomes very three-dimensional. Again, another element of texture, additionally, crumpled paper and torn out edges will have a lot of roughness and diagonals. All of these diagonals and unpredictable edges will appear very dynamic. The next idea I'm selecting to incorporate into my project is text on torn out and crumpled pieces of paper. Now both of these ideas, the wooden scaffolding and screens, as well as the crumpled paper texts, are both very possible to do. So I think there'll be beneficial to the project. They helped me solve a number of challenges and they're accessible for me to experiment with the current skills and resources that I have. For the third idea, I'm going to select an idea that I think will be beneficial to my project, but didn't seem possible to me at first. And I'm going to take it through another ideation phase to see if I can get it to work. Because remember, that's what we as creative people are supposed to be doing. We are supposed to not just go with what's easier, what's obvious, but to explore new routes of doing things, to push ourselves to come up with creative solutions. And that is always going to be more difficult than doing what's expected, common or conventional. So in order to demonstrate how to deal with ideas that seem beneficial to your project but not possible to accomplish. I've pulled two from that category. I pulled these two ideas because to me they seem related. So the first idea is a full-scale walk through experience. So instead of just small-scale tabletop dioramas, for this idea, I imagined immersive dioramas that people could actually walk into and to occupy with huge drawings, both as backdrops and as stand-up elements. Now I really liked this idea. I think it's very exciting. It makes it almost like a theme park attraction. But I hope you can see why I would put this in the not possible category. An idea like this would take a huge amount of time, money, and resources that I don't necessarily have. The second idea I selected was for an immersive virtual reality experience. The idea for this is that I could create dioramas and put in a 3D virtual reality camera. With a virtual reality headset, you would be able to put on the headset and feel like you were inside this diorama. So both of these ideas are all about immersing people in a diorama. So although these ideas are a bit different in nature, hopefully you can see that they have immersion at their heart. I find both of these ideas very exciting and very impractical. So how do you deal with ideas like these? How do you deal with these ideas that seemed really exciting but very difficult to accomplish and incorporate into your work. So one way I deal with ideas like this, depending on how exciting they seem, is I ask myself if I had to accomplish this, how would I do it? This is such a great question because it presupposes that it must be done. And instead of generating ideas why it won't work, you're much more likely to explore ideas that would make it possible. So let's take the virtual reality idea as an example. Now for me to purchase a 3D virtual reality camera, learn how to use it, learn how to edit that video and learn how to put it up on a VR platform. Now that's a lot of extra work that goes on top of a project that I don't even know how to make yet. Now, if an idea is exciting enough, you may just want to go for it. So if money is a problem, consider crowdfunding. Now I'm not going to be crowdfunding it all here, but that's an option that anybody has at anytime. The barrier to an idea is new skills. Well, my guess is that there are areas of your life, habits you have or activities you regularly engage in that you could replace with learning a new skill. Now, many people spend an hour or two every day scrolling through Instagram or playing video games. Imagine what you could learn if you replaced that time with pursuing and learning a new skill. Now, in my experience, crowdfunding, grant writing, skill development, or asking for friends to volunteer can solve a lot of problems. There are a lot of good strategies you can use to pursue ideas if you think they're exciting enough. Now for many of you, that will sound like a lot. So what I'm going to demonstrate now is how to take these ideas that seem really exciting but impractical and tone them down. I'm going to ask if there is a version of this that would get me most of the way there, but that would not take as many resources, wouldn't take as much money, or wouldn't take as much new skill development. How can I make this great idea that I'm very excited about, but that seems impractical. How can I make it more practical? How can I bring an idea that seems out of reach, into my reach? How can I make it accessible? How can I accomplish this idea with my current skills and resources? The barrier for so many interesting but in practical ideas is money. So is there an inexpensive way to do this? First, I went online and I searched for cheap virtual reality. So some of the search results I got back included cardboard headsets that you could use for virtual reality with your phone. So I decided to take a look at these designs for cardboard headsets. What I learned is that they are essentially just cardboard versions of stereoscopic viewers that were designed in the Victorian era. Now stereoscopic photography is now actually known under a common nickname, which is Victorian virtual reality. But all you need to do in order to take stereoscopic photographs is have a camera. Now if you're not familiar with stereoscopic viewers, Here's how they work to create 3D images for use. And is stereoscopic viewer. All you need to do is take one photograph slightly to the left of your subject, and then one photograph slightly to the right. And then use a stereoscopic viewer to combine them to create the illusion of a three-dimensional photograph. Now I'm not quite sure how I'm going to incorporate this into my project yet. But what I'm thinking is that I will have already made three-dimensional dioramas. It'll be a pretty easy additional step for me to take two extra photographs of each diorama. So as I'm photographing my dioramas, I'll take one photo directly in front of it. That'll be the photo that I use on the website and in print. But additionally, I can move the cameras slightly over to the left and take a photograph there and then over to the right and take another photograph. So I'll have a stereoscopic pair. Now, these two images I can use later on to create a three-dimensional stereoscopic experience for viewers. Although to be honest, I don't know how I'm going to do that yet, but remember, this is how the creative process works. We come up with ideas. We select the ones we think are interesting and that will be beneficial and we explore them further. So the third idea that I'm going to incorporate into my project is stereoscopic photography. For each diorama I create, I'm going to take a pair of stereoscopic photographs that I can combine later to create a three-dimensional experience for viewers. So I've started with this idea of immersing viewers and a diorama. And those ideas included either making giant life-size occupy a little dioramas, which is very impractical. Or spending a huge amount of money on getting a three-dimensional virtual reality camera and moving them inside dioramas. Again, interesting idea, but very expensive. Not to mention, I would have to learn a huge number of new skills in order to take that idea from concept to completion. Now I'm not unwilling to do that, but I wanted to demonstrate how to take ideas that seemed out of reach and bring them in to reach with your current skills and resources. I think that's a much more powerful way to solve these problems. And it makes so many ideas so much more accessible. So I found a way to create an immersive, three-dimensional experience with a camera that I already have. Simply photographing the work that I'm already making. And although I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet. I am confident that through further ideation sessions, I'll be able to generate ideas and come up with solutions. So I've taken these ideas that seemed out of reach and I've scaled them down. I've taken these large-scale impractical ideas and made a practical version of them. Now are stereoscopic photographs as exciting as immersive walk through dioramas or 3D virtual reality experiences. I don't know, but what I do know is this is an idea I can actually accomplish with my current skills and resources. And it's an idea I would never have thought of Had I not explored this more wild, outrageous idea. Hopefully you can see why it's so important to generate these wild ideas because they will push your thinking in whole new ways. So before we wrap up this video journal, there are a few more things I'd like to discuss. Now. I know many of you have much more conventional projects than the one you see me pursuing here. So I'd like to tell you a quick story about how I incorporated new ideas into one of my more conventional projects, my book, so of course, my book is all about learning to draw, which means that it has hundreds of drawings in it. Knowing the initial designs for the book, the drawings were quite small on the page and they were simply placed in-between text blocks. And of course, this is very common for books. This is the easiest and most conventional way to do a layout. But I wanted to go further than that. I wanted to do something different, something more interesting, something more creative. Now as you can tell from these videos, I really liked the idea of immersing my audience. But how do you do that with the book too, instead of just having these small images of my drawing sandwiched in-between the text. I wanted to make the drawings as big as they could possibly be. So when I'm practicing my skill development, I draw on large 18 by 24 inch sheets of paper and I fill them with sketches of objects in the book. I wanted to re-create that experience of standing in front of a large piece of paper filled with practice drawings. So I asked the publisher and the designer if we could reproduce these practice drawings as large as possible, full bleed going across two pages. So the initial designs of the book had small images of my drawings in-between text. But look the final product. Here we see a drawing produced full bleed. It covers the entire spread of both pages. So I think this does a much better job at immersing the readers in the book to give readers a sense of what it feels like to stand in front of a large sheet of paper filled with drawings. Now of course not all of the drawings in the book or like this. But what I will say is all of the drawings ended up being much bigger in the final version of the book than they were in the initial designs. This came out of my goal of wanting to immerse readers in the world of drawing, to make the drawings as big as possible whenever I could. This is a great example of coming up with creative ideas for a much more conventional project. But being creative, even in conventional projects, means going beyond what's common, going beyond what's conventional in seeking interesting solutions with a goal of giving your audience a unique experience. So the final thing I'd like to share is that for me, once the ideation phase gets started in a project, it goes throughout the entire rest of the project. Whenever I come across a challenge, a problem, a barrier that's stopping me from moving forward, generate new ideas. I go through ideation sessions to figure out how I can solve these problems, how I can move forward. I use ideation for both big and small problems. That's why I'm introducing the strategy of ideation at the beginning of the creative process. Not only is it essential here at the beginning, but it's an essential strategy that you can use anywhere throughout the creative process. So I hope this video has given you a sense of how to evaluate your ideas and how to select some to incorporate into your project. I will see you here in the next lesson when you're going to learn how to take your ideas and prototype them. 8. Prototyping: Hi, Welcome to lesson for prototyping. So before we jump into prototyping, let's take stock of where we are in this course. First, you selected a project to work with, with the intention of completing this project by the end of the course. Next, you generated new possibilities to explore what your project can do and be out of the ideas you generated. You selected some ideas to explore further. So at this stage of the process, you've done a lot of creative planning and exploration. You should have a good idea of what your project is about, what the possibilities are. But up until now, nearly everything has been conceptual work. We haven't yet taken your ideas and put them into practice. That changes today. Now, we get to actually begin making things and we're going to start with prototypes. Now one of the biggest misconceptions people have about the creative process is that artists and designers have an idea and they just get to work on the finished product. This is rarely, if ever true. What tends to separate amateurs and enthusiasts from creative professionals is prototyping. Successful creative professionals across a wide range of creative fields rely heavily on prototypes. What exactly is a prototype? A prototype is a preliminary version of something from which other forums are developed. Now, prototypes can vary wildly from field to field, but they tend to have a few things in common. Prototypes tend to be scaled back versions of a project. They tend to be smaller, simpler, less expensive, or easier to make. Prototypes serve two primary purposes. First, they allow you to test your ideas, to get them out into reality, to see how they really work. So they allow you to gain knowledge and experience working on your project. The second function prototype serves is to get feedback. You can show your prototypes to other people and get them to experience a version of your project, even if that version is scaled down. But by showing it to other people, you can get feedback about your work. So to help you understand what prototypes are and why they're essential to the creative process. Let's take a look at some of the common prototypes you'll see in different fields. So one of the most common prototypes used by both visual artists and designers is the preparatory sketch. So before a painter begins a large painting or before it designer actually does a screen print. They'll often make a series of preliminary drawings just to explore ideas and to get them out on paper. Sometimes painters will make what is known as a thumbnail sketch, a very small sketch that will allow them to work out issues of composition, light and shadow patterns, color design, or anything else they might be struggling with. E.g. before Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he did hundreds of preparatory drawings. Now these drawings are considered works of art in and of themselves. But hopefully you can see that these drawings, as good as they are, are a scaled down version of the final paintings. Michelangelo worked out the designs that he would eventually paint on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But he worked them out through drawings first, these drawings are just a fraction of the size of the final paintings. But he did not just have an idea and start painting in-between his concept and the finished work or hundreds of preparatory drawings. Let's move to another creative field, architecture. Now of course, we know that architects don't just have an idea and begin building. They do dozens of preliminary drawings and then they make scale models. So architects tend to use two kinds of prototypes, plans, elevations, and section cuts, and then scale models. By creating a small prototype of a building, architects are able to work out all kinds of issues that are difficult to see in two-dimensional drawings. I hope it's obvious that working these issues out in a scale model is much easier and cheaper than building a structure and then figuring out what's wrong with it. Now, as I mentioned before, prototypes can also be used to get feedback. Michelangelo would have presented his drawings to his benefactors along before he ever got started painting. And of course, architects show their scale models to their clients to make sure that our clients are happy with the project and to see if any changes need to be made. So again, we see prototypes first being used to work out any issues that may come up when a project leaves the mind, it goes out into reality. But we can also see prototypes being used to get feedback, to see how people react to your work in the real-world, it's important to realize that when a project only exists in your mind, you don't have a sense of how it's going to work in reality or how people will react to it. Prototyping help solve both of these problems. So as I mentioned, prototypes can take all kinds of forms depending on the creative field. Prototypes can be two-dimensional or three-dimensional depending on the project and the problems you're trying to solve. But despite their differences, prototypes do have some commonalities. So I'd like to share some of the common characteristics of prototypes just to get you thinking about how you can use prototypes for your project. First, prototypes are usually done quickly, or at least much more quickly than the actual project. It should be obvious that a scale model for a building is much quicker to build than the actual building itself. Next, prototypes are usually simplified. A prototype doesn't need to address every detail in the project. It shouldn't. A scale model doesn't include light switches or plumbing. It's just there to work out the broad shapes and forms of a building. A prototype can edit out any unnecessary detail that it's not trying to work out. A prototype should focus on whatever idea you're trying to solve, but you can edit out any unnecessary ideas or information. Next, prototypes can be small. Now it's important to note that prototypes aren't always smaller than the final product, but they can be small. Scale models are much smaller than the buildings they depict. And finally, prototypes can be cheap or at the very least, less expensive than the final product, depending on the prototype, you can use less expensive materials or because of prototype is often smaller, you can use much less of whatever material your prototype is made out of. Because prototypes are usually much less expensive than the final products, you're free to explore and experiment. You're free to create things that may not work, and that's completely fine. Using prototypes to work out these issues is a much less expensive way then to create the final product. Only then to realize that some essential aspect of it doesn't work the way you thought it did. So most prototypes can be quick, simple, small, and inexpensive. Now not all prototypes meet all of these criteria, but this should help get you started thinking about what your prototypes can do and be, and what problems they can help you solve. And how you can use prototypes to figure out aspects of your project and get feedback later on. Now before we get you to your task, I just want to provide a list of some of the prototypes used my creative professionals. So as we already talked about, visual artists and designers of all kinds use preliminary drawings and sketches as prototypes. Now we've talked about architects using scale models, but scale models are also used by furniture designers, theatrical set designers, product designers, in any other kind of design where three-dimensionality is a factor, fashion designers use test garments. These tests garments are often known as Muslims. Now these tests garments, or Muslims, are a good example of prototypes that are often the same size as the final product. So test garments can be cheap, simple, and quick, but they're often not smaller than the final product. Other common prototypes includes storyboards. Storyboards are used by filmmakers, video game designers, and even the theme park designers. In addition to storyboards, video game designers will often create three-dimensional virtual walk-throughs of their games to test out environments and gameplay. In the publishing world, authors will use all kinds of prototypes. First, they often outline their books. Next, they create draft after draft, where depending on the type of book, they'll figure out things like organization, storyline and plot or character development. And before a physical book is printed, the publishers will order a proof. It is a full size printed version of the book, but they only make one of them just to see what the book looks like in its physical form. This final prototype is used to see if there are any other changes the publisher or the author want to make before a book is printed. This is a good example of another prototype that is the same size as the final product. But hopefully you can see the value in printing one single book that everybody gets to sign off on before printing hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of copies of a book. Now this is a very incomplete list of prototypes, but hopefully you can get a sense that nearly all creative professionals, you use prototypes both to solve problems in their projects as well as to get feedback from other people. So the important question now is how are you going to use prototypes for your project? So here are some considerations. The first question I always ask is, what problems am I trying to solve? Prototyping is an excellent way to solve problems. It forces you to make decisions about your work and it gets your ideas out into reality where they can be tested and shown to others for feedback. While your prototype be two-dimensional or three-dimensional. And remember, you can make as many prototypes as you need. So if you want to start with a two-dimensional prototype and move on to a three-dimensional prototype. That's fine. Remember there are no hard rules in the creative process, only guidelines. Another great question is how can your prototype be simplified? Remember, the goal of the prototype is to work out problems quickly and easily before you get to the final product. For the final consideration, ask yourself, do you need to prototype the entire project or can you focus on a small portion of it? Prototyping can be used in so many different kinds of ways throughout the creative process, I tend to prototype a lot. Prototyping is one of my favorite methods of solving problems and getting feedback to for any project, I'll often create dozens of prototypes before I ever start the final product. This allows me to gain experience, to learn how the project works, and to see how other people interact with it, and that is so valuable. Okay, So here's your task for this lesson. Decide what you're going to prototype to do this, figure out what problems you're trying to solve. You have your original ideas for your project and you have new ideas that you want to explore further. Now it's time to put all of these ideas together into action. So if you're creating a comic book, Let's say that you're not sure how to end your story or you have a couple of different ideas about what the plot could be. So try making a few different versions of your comic book, but make each 13 to five pages focus on only the essential plot elements. Or if you're writing a children's book, try and create the shortest version of that book possible or creative version with simple sketches just to work out your story and to see how people like it. If you're making clothing, consider making small-scale versions just to see how they operate. Or you can consider making full-size versions out of paper or less expensive material. Remember, a mere sketch of your idea can be thought of as a prototype. So you want to figure out what prototypes you need for your project. Prototype should help you solve problems and provide you with something that you can show to other people to get feedback. Once you know what problems you're trying to solve and what feedback you're looking for. Get started prototyping. I'd like you to make a minimum of three prototypes for your project. Your prototypes can address the entire project or focus on small parts of them. Hopefully, these prototypes will include both your original ideas for your project, as well as new ideas that you're not quite sure how to incorporate yet. Prototyping is the best way to experiment with your new ideas, to see how they will interact with your existing ideas for your project. So I'm very excited for you right now. This is one of my favorite stages of the creative process, where all of the ideas and conceptual planning gets put into action and we get to start making things. We get to start bringing our ideas into reality. Even though prototypes or not the final product, they are still a huge step forward where we get to test our ideas and eventually get feedback. If you're so inclined. Now, you can watch the video journal where I'm going to put my ideas into practice and use prototypes in a wide range of ways. So I hope these video journals have been useful for you to see how I put these ideas into practice. So once you're done with your prototypes, I will see you back here for lesson five when you're going to learn how to present your work to others and how to get feedback. 9. Prototyping Video Journal: Hi, welcome to the video journal for lesson for prototyping. In this video journal, you're going to see me get into the studio and start prototyping my ideas. Now it's important to know that everything we've done in this course so far has been conceptual. We've generated a lot of ideas, but we haven't yet made anything. The prototyping phase is where we put our ideas into practice and actually start making things for our project. In this video journal, you're going to see me doing a lot of prototyping. And of course, the prototypes you make are going to be completely different from what I make. But nevertheless, my hope is that this video journal gives you a sense of how important prototyping is, how it can be used and what can be learned from it. And the goal of these prototypes is to get experience with our project and to have something that we can show others to get feedback. So first, we have to decide what to prototype. So for my project, I've got some ideas I'm excited about. I've got some ideas that I wanted to explore, but so far, I don't know what the project is going to look like. I don't know how to make the work. I really don't know much about it beyond the simple sketches I've done. This means that I need to prototype a lot. I need to prototype nearly every aspect of this project. Not only to figure out how to make the work, but hopefully how to make it well. So before we begin, I just want to remind you of what my project is. I am creating and photographing dioramas made from my drawings. These dioramas will attempt to depict the interior space of the mind. And they may include texts in the form of questions. So to me, this is such an interesting part of a project, particularly one that I don't have any experience with. When I hear this description of the project, I get pretty excited. But again, right now, I really don't have any idea of what the final result is going to look like. I have to invent the process, the visual language, and the standards for the project. So I can tell which pieces are working and which pieces aren't. In. Prototyping is the best place to learn these things. So again, I need to use prototypes to figure out nearly every aspect of this project. So first, I'm asking myself, what specific problems am I trying to solve and what do I need to learn about the project? That's one of the best ways I've found to direct prototypes. So in order to make dioramas, I need to figure out how to create backgrounds for these dioramas. I need to figure out what my drawings look like when I cut them out and put them together, I need to figure out how to take my cutout drawings and how to stand them upright. I need to figure out how all of these elements operate separately. And then I need to figure out how to get them to work together in a single finished piece. So I have a lot to figure out. But I like to keep in mind that prototyping is such a great place to figure these things out because there's no pressure here yet. I can explore, I can make mistakes. I can make prototype after prototype until I solve all the problems I have. So I'm going to start this project by going into my flat files, pulling out dozens of old drawings and cutting them out. To me, that's the most obvious place to begin because these cutout drawings, you're going to be the primary visual element in these dioramas. So now that I've cut out dozens of drawings, I need to see what they look like together. So to start, I'm just going to put drawings down on the surface and start combining them to see what images arise. One thing I think is fascinating about these cutout drawings is each one of them is like a symbol. They're not simplified symbols. There's a lot of care that's gone into these drawings, but each individual drawing cutout seems to carry with it a lot of meaning and connotation in the image of an eye is so powerful, a drawing of an eye seems to watch us as we are looking at it. It brings up ideas of introspection, of seeing both literally and metaphorically, of attempting to understand, of investigation connection between others. But there's also something a little intimidating about an AI that never blinks and just stares back. Here's an old drawing I found of a witch's hat. This brings up ideas of Salem witch trials, superstitions, Halloween, the occult, the unknown. So even a simple drawing carries with it so much meaning. Figures are of course always very powerful. They remind us of our power, but also our mortality. They're beautiful and vulnerable at the same time. So this particular drawing wasn't finished, and in particular I hadn't finished the hint, so I just cut it out without the head. So the next question is, what happens when we start to bring them together? How do they play off of each other? How can they be combined? How does laying one image next to another impact the meaning of both of them? Just seeing these drawings together on a surface, even without combining them in any specific way, it creates a really rich tapestry of ideas, memories, and meanings. So for those of you that are familiar with my more traditional drawing work, you'll know that I absolutely love figure drawing. So my flat files are filled with unfinished drawings and sketches of the human figure. The human figure is such a powerful symbol in art. So as I start trying to combine these images together, I'm going to start with a figure. So again, I'm not looking for anything in particular here. I'm just randomly grabbing drawings and putting them together. Just to see what they look like, what they make me think about, what they make me feel. So right now with these combinations, I'm just looking for anything I think is interesting. Anything that is evocative, anything that I haven't emotional or an intellectual reaction to buy collaging different elements onto the same figure, we get completely different meanings and results. So at this stage, I'm not being critical of these at all yet. I'm not trying to figure out if these are good or bad. I'm just trying to gain some experience as to what these drawings look like when collage together. So these individual elements combined together seem to create cameras. There's something both playful and disturbing about these combinations. This is an interesting idea, putting a witch's hat on top of an eye, which has had a top. And I makes me think about both the power of observation, but also how our observations can be distorted by superstitions. So of course, right now in these collages don't have any intrinsic or intentional meaning. I'm just experimenting with how they operate when combined. So I think these collages of drawings are pretty interesting. I think they're very evocative. So even though I'm probably going to interpret these images differently from other people, the fact that I think they're evocative is a clue that hopefully others will find them evocative as well. So before using these collage drawings in three-dimensional dioramas, I wanted to see what they would look like just in a two-dimensional format. So I decided to place these drawings against simple backgrounds. Here you can see I've also started combining them with words. I wanted to see what these drawings would look like when juxtaposed with text. So the text you see here was printed on paper and then torn out. I think the rough edges of the torn paper give the texts and more handmade look. But seeing it now with the drawings, I think I'd like to push the handmade quality of the text much further. So at this point, I have cut out dozens of drawings that I can use in my dioramas. I've collage them together to see what they look like with one another. And I've tested them against drawn backgrounds with text. So my first impressions are pretty positive. I like the aesthetic that's developing here. I think the drawing collages are interesting. I think they're evocative and I think they're creating a unique aesthetic that really resonates with me. So at this point, I've gone through the process of cutting out my old drawings, collaging them together and even putting them against the background with text. So this is what the prototyping process is all about. Getting in the studio, testing out your ideas to see how they operate, what they look like, and how you might be able to use them in your projects later. So the next challenge I need to figure out is how to get these collage drawings to stand upright in a three-dimensional environment. So as you likely remember, my idea to help solve this problem was to create some wood scaffolding and screens that I could have fixed these drawings to. So in the ideation session, I came up with some very quick sketches. But now I'm going to get into the studio and actually create some of these screens just to see how they work. Some of these screens are very small. Some of them are vertical and slender, while others of them are closer to square. Some of them stand on their own and some of them require stands. Now initially, I was just intending to use these screens and scaffolds as surfaces that I could have fixed the drawings to. But now that I see them, I think they're interesting objects in and of themselves. There is something very architectural about them. I think they may have a place on their own and the dioramas, I think that the rigid and rectilinear qualities of these screens will add a nice sense of structure to what may be otherwise chaotic pieces, objects and environments that are hand-drawn can have very dynamic and wild lines that are very organic lot of diagonals. But these screens are the opposite of that. They're very structured. They have a lot of right angles. They have predictable patterns. So I think they could play off of the more dynamic and chaotic aspects of the drawing quite nicely. One of my goals with this project is to attempt to depict what it might look like inside the mind to capture the thought process. And of course inside the mind, we do have swirling and chaotic thoughts, words, images, memories. But part of constructing meaning is bringing structure and stability to that chaos, to all of those raw images and ideas. When we develop our belief systems, it is like structuring the chaotic contents of the mind. These screens may be a really nice metaphorical indication of structure and stability in the mind. So at this stage, I've worked with prototypes in the form of drawing and collages. Now I have prototypes of the scaffolding and screens that I'm going to use to fix these drawings to. Another essential element that I need to prototype is the text on crumpled and torn paper. So because the texts and typography are going to be in a drawn environment, I want them to look somewhat handmade. So I've selected a number of words and phrases from the questions that I might want to include. Printed them out on the same kind of paper that most of the drawings are done on. I've torn out words and phrases and then I've crumpled the paper. I think that the crumpled paper does add a more handmade element to the text. But I wanted to push that further. So I decided to experiment with mark-making over the text itself. So in addition to printing the text, I also went over it with pencil. I went over the letters themselves just to give them a bit more of an organic handmade quality. And then I drew lines and marks over them. These lines and marks are abstract and expressive, so I don't know why, but there's something about the texts on crumpled paper that's torn out and that has all these marks and scratches on top of it. That seems right for word swirling around in the mind. The topography here almost looks a little beat up. It appears to be well-worn. It looks less crisp, less machined, in more organic. So I've printed phrases, but also individual words. So for each word or phrase, I've experimented with different fonts, as well as different kinds of mark making. I just want to see how I can manipulate the text to integrate it into a drawn environment. So I actually tried out hand lettering because I thought maybe if the text is completely drawn, then it will integrate more. But actually didn't like the aesthetic that, that yielded. I ended up liking the printed text that was manipulated with marks later on, much more than the texts that was completely hand lettered. Now, I don't know if everybody would agree with that decision, but it seemed quite clear to me these are the distinctions that we make when we go through the prototyping process. There are some decisions you can't think your way through without actually making things and comparing them to one another. So at this point I have dozens of cutout drawings. I have scaffolding and screens to a fix them too. And I have some texts and typography to experiment with. So I have all of these different kinds of prototypes, but at this point I can start to put them together to see how they work with one another. So as you likely remember, an important part of this project for me is including questions in these dioramas. I love the idea of creating artwork that invites the viewer to investigate their own thought process, to examine what's going on inside their mind. So here is my first attempt at a fixing these torn out words and phrases on a scaffold on one of these wooden screens. So for me, this is such an exciting moment where we've gone through this conceptual phase. We've done a lot of prototypes, but now we first get to see how these separate elements come together. And it's hard to predict what they're actually going to look and feel like without actually making them. So now I need to try out some additional elements. So one thing that's really important to understand about this project is that these dioramas, once they're constructed, are going to be photographed, but then they're gonna be taken down. So the photographs of the dioramas are the end product. I really like this idea quite a bit because if these dioramas are attempting to depict what goes on inside the mind, thoughts are fleeting, memories are fleeting. The ideas that we have are fleeting. So I like the idea that these dioramas themselves are fleeting. These dioramas will only exist long enough to be photographed, but then they're taken down and the drawn elements and texts that made up the diorama are then going to be re-used and other dioramas. And to me, that's so close to how thought works. Here we have a set number of elements in ideas and we combine them and recombine them in new ways to form meaning. So here's a shot of all of the elements brought together. So I've constructed this diorama on a tabletop, complete with a drawing in the background, as well as a drawing on the ground plane. So it's important to remember that I'm creating these dioramas to photograph them. Once photographed, the diorama will be taken down and the elements re-used and other dioramas after making some changes. Here is the final result. One of the most interesting and gratifying parts of a creative project like this is starting with a concept, generating ideas, experimenting, prototyping. But then to see it all come together, I think there's something very beautiful and dreamlike about this piece. And of course, dreams, by definition, occur inside the mind. I think I may be hitting the aesthetic that I was hoping for to give a sense of what it might look like inside someone's mind. So of course, this is very subjective, but this is a decent representation of what it feels like inside my mind. The combination of texts and images makes it mysterious, but it also seems allegorical, is if there's some deeper meaning to be deciphered, again, very much like a dream. So let's take a look at another piece. Even though these appear more finished, I still consider these prototypes. These are my first attempts at bringing all of these elements together to see how they interact with one another, to see the effect they have as a whole. Now of course, I don't know what you think about these pieces. I don't know if you like them or dislike them. I don't know what they make you think and feel, and that's okay. The goal of this course is not that you've liked the artwork that I'm creating. It's much more important that you see the creative process in action. It wasn't too long ago that all of this project was, was a brief description of a few sentences long. But by going through this process, look at what we have. For me. I do think these pieces have achieved the overall effect I was hoping for. They seem both playful and mysterious, and they do seem to depict what the thought process might look like inside the mind. Of course, I won't know for sure until I present the work to others to see what they think. So if you remember, I also wanted to experiment with stereoscopic photography. I've photographed each diorama from two different viewpoints, one slightly to the left and one slightly to the right. Using a stereoscopic viewer, these two photographs can be combined to create a three-dimensional image. So of course, I cannot show you that 3D effect in this course, but I will tell you that after a few days of prototyping, I got the stereoscopic photographs to work, and I now have three-dimensional photographs of these dioramas. So one thing that really strikes me about the prototyping phase is that it often seems like we go through weeks of conceptual work. And then in very short period of time, we go from concepts and sketches to something much more concrete. So for the first three lessons of this course, everything was taking notes and scribbling out ideas. But in the prototype phase, we are approaching something that appears to be more finished. But we would not be able to arrive at more finished work without all of the conceptual work or of course the prototypes. So I hope this video journal has been valuable. I hope you have a sense now of how many different ways prototypes can be used in a project and how powerful it can be to have an idea, a simple idea, but to take it through this creative process, to generate new ideas, to select some new ideas, to prototype your ideas, and then to arrive at something more concrete. At the beginning of this course, I literally did not know what these pieces we're going to look like. And I followed this process that we're working through. Here we are, we have something that is more finished, something that has its own mood anesthetic. And it's this process that I've been working through that allowed me to get here. I hope this has been valuable for you. So I hope to see you here in lesson five when you're going to learn how to get feedback from your work. How to get feedback from the work itself, but also how to present the work to other people and get feedback from them. So I hope you'll join me for less than five, getting feedback. 10. Getting Feedback: Welcome to lesson five, getting feedback. So in the previous lesson, you made a number of prototypes. These prototypes will allow you to get to different kinds of feedback. First, there's feedback you get from the prototypes themselves. Now for many projects, these prototypes will be the first time that you're seeing your work in reality. Even though the prototypes aren't finished work, the prototypes will give you a sense of what your work looks and feels like in the real-world. And this is so much more valuable than just having an idea in your head. So by creating prototypes, we can actually see our work in reality and react to it to see what it makes us think, to see what it makes us feel. Now the second type of feedback that prototypes help us get is feedback from other people. And that's what this lesson is going to focus on. When we begin a project, everything is in our head. We visualize the work, we fantasize about it. But when the work is just in our head, it's very difficult to know how other people are going to react to it. Prototypes allow us to show our work in progress to other people to see how our work is actually impacting them, to see what our work actually makes people think about or feel, to see if our work engages people or not. We get to see if our work is having the impact on other people that we hope for. And if it isn't having the impact we want, hopefully through getting feedback from others, we can find clues to help us bring our work closer to our vision. What we want to avoid is waiting till our project is complete and out in the world only then to discover that it is not having the impact we hoped for. That it's not connecting with people, that it's not engaging people. We want to know as early as possible whether or not our work is having the impact we hope for. And if it's not, we can adjust it along the way. So in this lesson, you're going to learn how to present your work to other people and how to get feedback. Now the feedback you'll get can vary wildly depending on the type of people you get feedback from. So let me share with you a few considerations. Selecting the right people to get feedback from can be very challenging. If you seek input from close friends or family, you're likely to get a lot of compliments, but not a lot of constructive feedback that will help advance your project. Close friends and family will usually just want to be supportive. They'll often try and make you feel good about your work. While compliments are nice, they're not particularly useful. Well, we're looking for is constructive criticism of our work. We want to know where our work is having the impact. We want, where it isn't, it what we can do to improve our work. You want to select people to critique your work that have a track record of being honest with you and telling you hard truths when necessary. You want to get feedback from people who will level with you, who will be honest with you if your work isn't having the impact you desire. In fact, some of my best and most useful critiques have come from rivals who are looking to tear my work down. But in doing so, they revealed all kinds of areas where the work could be improved. Remember, when you're seeking feedback, you want criticisms. You want to know where your work is not holding up. You want to know where your work could be improved. That's the entire point of getting feedback to improve the work and to improve the work, we need to be able to identify areas that are not working yet. So beyond friends and family, you can also get feedback from other creative professionals in your field, or if not creative professionals, at least creative practitioners, if you're a writer, seek feedback from other writers. If you're a painter, seek feedback from other painters. Getting feedback from other practitioners in your field will allow you to solve technical problems in your work. If you're a painter, other painters will help you solve issues related to color composition, perspective, materials, and even presentation. So hopefully you can see why getting feedback from creative professionals or practitioners in your field is very different from getting feedback from family or friends. But here are two considerations. First, getting feedback from other creative professionals are practitioners is great, but they will often critique your project as if it were their project. Now while this can be interesting and occasionally useful, we want to get feedback to help us create our vision for our project. So that's something to watch for when you're getting feedback from other creative people. Another consideration is that the earlier you are in your project, the more you want to present it to creative professionals who can help you with technical problems. But the further you get in your project, the closer you get to being finished, the more you want to present your work to other people who are not in creative fields. If you're only getting feedback from other artists, designers, or other creative professionals, you're going to create work geared toward that audience. This is one of the reasons why so much contemporary art does not connect with most people. When artists only get feedback from other artists, they create work that only other artists like now, if you are creating work solely for other artists, that's great. But if you want to connect with other people who are not creative professionals, who aren't artists or designers, you need to get feedback from people who aren't in those fields. So this begs the question, who is your audience? What kind of people are you hoping will enjoy and appreciate your work? The closer you get to finishing your project, the more you want to get feedback from people who are representative of the audience you're hoping for, whether it's a niche audience or mass appeal, it's very useful to get feedback from people who are representative of your desired audience. Now the final thing I'm going to say about who you should get feedback from is take who you can get if you don't know any creative professionals in your field, that's okay. If the only people you have available to give you feedback or friends and family get feedback from friends and family. It's much better to get feedback from somebody rather than nobody, even if they're not the ideal person to get feedback from. Now that you have a sense of the kinds of people you should get feedback from. I want to address one of the most difficult parts of getting feedback. Now many artists and other creative people have remarkably thin skin. But if we want to create work and put it out into the world, we need to get comfortable with having people not like our work. It doesn't matter what you make. It's not going to connect with everybody and that's completely fine. So to help you get a sense of how to deal with criticism when getting feedback, here's a way you can think about it. The aspects of your project that aren't working yet, or where you're going to learn the most. It is completely unreasonable for you to assume that your earliest attempts at your project are going to be lauded in praised the vast majority of the time. There are improvements that can be made and getting feedback is an essential part of that process. It's an essential part of improving the work when somebody is honest with you and tells you that an aspect of your project is not working or not having the impact you wanted. They are helping, they are supporting you, the people who see your work and just compliment you or praise you, they're actually hurting the work, or at the very least, they're not helping. So it helps to get in this mindset while you're getting feedback. Constructive criticism is a form of respect and support. Praise and complements tend to be pretty empty and useless. At the very least, it's not going to help you improve the work. Now I know this may be a challenging mindset to adopt for some of you, but it's essential if you want to be able to put your work out in the public eye. Constructive criticism is what we want and the people who are willing to be most honest with you about where your work is flawed. Those are the helpers. I tend to judge the value of a feedback session by how much feedback I'm getting. I want a long list of improvements I can make. I get very skeptical if I'm getting more praise than criticisms, doing creative work is a process. When we started, we don't know much about the work. We learn more about it and we make small improvements along the way. The more constructive feedback we end up getting, the better the work is going to be in. Once you get into this mindset, you will get excited when somebody points out an aspect of your project that isn't working yet, you can feel grateful when somebody says, hey, this isn't working the way you thought it would. And you can be confident that the more criticisms your work gets, the better it's going to be in the end. In just a few minutes, I'm going to teach you how to run a feedback session, how to run a critique. But the final thing I'd like to address before we do that is the difference between constructive criticism and nonconstructive criticism. Constructive criticism focuses on where something isn't working and how it can be improved. Nonconstructive criticism includes insults, personal attacks, discouragement, or cruelty of any kind. You want to be able to focus the people you're getting feedback from. You can let them know that praise and complements are fine and appreciated. But what you're really looking for are areas where the work can be improved and potential solutions to help you improve the work. How do we prepare for a feedback session? So when getting feedback from your work, you're going to need to present your work. This means that you need to prepare a presentation when presenting your work to others. You want them to experience her work in its native format. So what I mean is if your work is sculptural, you want people to come and view the actual sculptures, not just photographs of the sculptures. If you're designing clothing, you want your feedback participants to be able to see the work in the round. If you're designing work to be viewed primarily online, then you can do with digital presentation. If you're designing a book for print, have a printed copy of your book. It doesn't need to be professionally done, but you want something people can hold in their hands. Now I understand this is not always possible. If you're designing sculpture, it's better to get feedback from people who have only seen photographs than to get no feedback at all. But this is just something to consider when presenting your work to others. You want to try and give them an experience of what the final work will be like. So you'll want to make sure you have work available to be viewed by your participants. Whether that's the physical work, digital photographs or some other format. Next, you need to tell people about your work. You want to share a bit of the story behind your work. Now there are no hard rules with what to tell people about your work. But generally speaking, you want to give them a sense of where the project came from. You want to give them a sense of your process, what goes into the work. You may want to give them a sense of what your goals are. If you're looking to sell work or not, or have it displayed in a particular way. You want to share any information that you think might be useful to your participants when they're giving feedback. So here are some questions you may want to answer during your presentation. Why did you make this work? Where did your ideas come from? What are your goals with this project? How did you make the work? Who are you influenced by? Who is the work for? What audience are you seeking? What makes this work unique? And what kind of feedback are you looking for? What problems are you trying to solve with the help of feedback from others. So you don't have to answer all of these questions, but this is just to get you thinking about how to present your work to other people. You want the participants of the feedback session to have some background and context regarding your work next, and this is one of the most important tips I can give you. You want to write down the impact that you want your work to have on viewers. Now you're not going to show this writing to the participants of your feedback session. And you're not going to tell them what to think or feel about your work, but you want to write down what you hope they are going to think and feel about your work. This could include thoughts that you may want them to have. This can come in the form of a list of adjectives you want them to use when describing your work. Hopefully you've started that list of adjectives earlier on in this course. Are there any phrases you hope people use to describe your work? What do you want people to think and feel when they experience your work? I want you to take time and write out the impact you want your work to have on others. But I want you to keep this information private. What we're hoping for in the critique is that you hear people use the adjectives you want or describe your work in the way that you're hoping for without you having to tell them. This is so important because ultimately, when your work is out in the world, most people are not going to have the benefit of your presentation. You can write an artist's statement to accompany your work, but most people aren't going to read it. Your work must stand on its own. If you want to have a specific kind of impact on your audience, the work has to do it all by itself. If you want people to describe your work as playful or thoughtful or mysterious or whatever it might be. You don't want to tell people that at the outset. You want them to tell you that that's what your work is doing, that That's what your work is making them think or feel. You want them to choose to use the adjectives that you hoped for all on their own without you having to tell them. So I hope this idea makes sense to you. This is the best way you can assess whether or not your work is having the impact that you want. Next, you need to be prepared to record your feedback session, or at the very least, take notes. You can record the session using video or just audio. It's up to you. Or you can simply take notes while you're getting feedback. The final thing you need to do to prepare for your feedback session is have a list of questions that you want to ask participants. You want to know what kind of feedback you're looking for. If you're looking for solutions to a particular problem, you want to make that clear to your participants. So before starting your feedback session, you want to have a list of questions that you want answers to your feedback participants are going to help you answer these questions. But if you don't know what kind of feedback you're looking for or what kind of questions you need answers to your unlikely to get the help you need during a feedback session. So you need to be prepared to focus the feedback you're getting. The best way to do this is to have a list of questions that you're going to ask your participants. So with all of this in mind, let's get you to your task for this lesson. Your task for this lesson is to present your work to others and to get feedback. Here are the specific steps I'm going to ask you to take. First, you need to select participants. You need to select the people you're going to get feedback from. These can be creative professionals. They can be friends or family, they could be coworkers. Hopefully, you can find a collection of people that are most likely going to help you solve the creative challenges that your work has. But if your selection is limited, just get feedback from whoever you have available. So your task is to get feedback from at least one person, but hopefully you can find more people. So once you've selected some people to get feedback from, you need to schedule a feedback session, or what many people call a critique. If you're getting feedback from more than one person, you can get feedback from them individually, or you can get feedback from them as a group, the choice is yours. If you're new to getting feedback, try both. I wouldn't say that getting feedback from an individual is better than getting feedback from a group or vice versa. They're just different. Getting feedback from an individual will often be more intimate and you can go deeper into specific ideas. But getting feedback from a group can be interesting because people often disagree with one another, and that can be very revealing. But ultimately, it's up to you to decide whether you want feedback one-on-one, or from a group of people. If you're getting feedback from multiple people in one session, you want to make sure to schedule a time that works for every, ideally, you want your feedback session to be about an hour or so. But remember, if all somebody can give you as 20 min, take it, you want to get feedback from wherever you can, even if it's not ideal. So here are a few considerations. Are you going to schedule a critique in-person or online using video conferencing. I've even done critiques where I've emailed somebody images of my work and had them email me back. So there are all kinds of ways you can schedule the critique. You just want to make sure that it works for whoever you're getting feedback from. Once you've selected participants and you've scheduled a session, now it's time for you to prepare for the session. Do this, you need to provide a brief description of your work and give some background and context. You want to have questions prepared so you're likely to get the information and feedback you need to advance your work. And finally, you want to privately write down the response that you're hoping for. You want to write down the adjectives you hope people are going to use when describing your work. You don't want to share this with your feedback participants. What you're hoping for is that all on their own, they use the words and phrases that you're hoping for without you telling them what they should think or feel or how they should describe your work. Next, run the session. During the session, you're first going to present your work. Hopefully you'll get some genuine feedback about it and you'll be ready with your list of questions to focus the feedback you're getting. Your participants know that you want them to point out and focus on the areas of your project that aren't working yet. You want your participants to understand that the best way that they can help you and your project is by giving honest and constructive criticism of your work with the focus on where it can be improved and how, and finally, be prepared to record your session, or at the very least, take notes. So the last thing you need to do is show gratitude to your participants. During the feedback session when somebody offers you constructive criticism, thank them. This is what you're hoping for. For many people, it's not easy to give criticism even when asked for it. There are different ways you can show gratitude. Often, I'll include food or drinks if the critique is in-person. Now this is not necessarily the focus should be on your work, but it can create a nice environment and make people more comfortable giving you feedback. So to sum up, you want to select your participants. You want to schedule a session. You want to prepare for this session, and you want to run the session after the session, you want to find a way to show gratitude to the participants. These are your tasks for this lesson. Now I know I've given you a lot of information here, but if it's helpful, feel free to go back and review the lesson to make sure you really understand the process of getting feedback. So I hope you have fun getting feedback. It's a fascinating process. And remember, Be brave and presenting your work. Be hungry for criticism because that's the best way that you're going to improve your project. Hopefully, you've been watching my video journals where I'm going through this process with you. Now for this lesson about getting feedback, I'm actually including two video journals. I'm going to be getting feedback from two different individuals. So you're going to see me present my work to other creative professionals and good feedback. So I'm really looking forward to sharing this with you. So I hope you can watch those videos after seeing me get feedback for my work. I hope to see you in lesson six, we're going to learn how to incorporate feedback. 11. Getting Feedback Video Journal Part 1: Hi, welcome to the video journal for lesson five, getting feedback. This video journal is going to be very different from the previous video journals you've seen so far. Instead of one video journal for this lesson, there are actually two. So in these two video journals, you're going to see me present my work to two different artists. After I present the work, they're going to give me their feedback. They're going to tell me what they think about my work, where they think it's working, and where they think my work needs improvement. Each of the feedback sessions you'll see lasted about an hour-and-a-half, but I tried to edit these feedback sessions down to their most important parts. Now at this stage, if you've been watching these video journals, you should be very familiar with my project. So I started each of these feedback sessions or critiques by presenting my work, I gave a shortened version of what you've learned about my project so far that I want to use the medium of dioramas and toy theaters that I want to make this work by cutting up my old drawings and collaging them together that I want to make work that asks viewers questions, that I want to make work that explores the inside of the mind to attempt to depict what the thought process might look like. In this video, we're going to talk to Scott Meyer. I've known Scott for a long time. Scott as a professional artist instructor and video producer living in northern Colorado. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He's taught at various colleges and universities for more than 15 years. And he is the author of a new book titled Sea, think, draw and easy guide, too realistic drawing and beyond. He also leads live stream to drawing lessons weekly. I was excited to have Scott take a look at my work because we've known each other for years. We've collaborated on projects. He's familiar with my work and I've always trusted his opinions. We actually both share a love of dioramas as well as artwork that explores psychology and the mind. So I thought Scott would be a perfect person to give me feedback about my work. To learn more about Scott's work as both a teacher and an artist. You can visit his website at Scott Meyer art.com. So let's jump right into the feedback session so we can hear what Scott has to say about my work. It's really awesome to hear all that because so much of what you're saying was my immediate reaction to the work. I think it's clear that you're really hitting, hitting the mark in so many ways. The aspect to it of the space of the mind, I think, is really a powerful one. And the fact that you pushed it to a three-dimensional, connecting it to a diorama that, that allows you to visualize the mental space and what's happening as you're trying to process these thoughts and questions. I think is really exciting. Also, the fact that you chose drawing specifically to convey so much of the information is really powerful because for at least for me, drawing. Drawing is the medium that has the closest connection to our thoughts. Alright, so I talked, I talked to my students about thinking about drawing as a seismograph where it's like you're processing information from the external world, is that electrical impulses, thoughts are traveling down your arm, into your hand, into the pencil, onto the surface. And it's just, it's translating all of that. And so, so many of the things that we resolve when we draw our mental more than physical. And so the, that aspect I think is just really powerful and it makes sense that you're choosing that and it's a really big, I feel like it's a really big challenge. In particular, because it feels like what you are illustrating is is the thought process. And there's something very meta about that. You're going through this thought process. You're creating the work that's representing the thought that you were just creating. But you're also reacting to the work as you're creating it. So the work is infecting the thoughts which is affecting the work and it's working in the cycle. And so, yeah, I think that's my really immediate thought is right off right off the bat. Just hearing you say that it's a yes, That makes a lot of sense in the work. So the finished product that I'm going for here are not dioramas that could be displayed. It's really the photographs of the dioramas. To me, that's the final product. And I really liked this idea that like a thought in the mind, these pieces are fleeting. Once they're documented, once the photographs are taken, they're gone. The work doesn't exist in that form anymore. So I really liked this idea of this fleeting work that existed for a short period of time, just long enough to be captured by a camera. Yeah, that's another thing that really became evident to me as well. I wrote down a note here that it reminds me of Andy Goldsworthy is work for some reason. It makes sense because he would go out into the landscape as the sculpture artist, you would only use the materials available to him to construct a work of art that is fugitive. It's only really appreciated by people who can view the photograph of it. There are some works that are a bit more permanent, but he really relies on the photography of it and that's part of the story of it that you can really appreciate. And that by the photographs feel like they're being used in a similar way by you and your work where it's like, I have this stuff in front of me. And instead of being in the natural landscape, you're in the landscape of your own mind. And again, playing with it. He's trying to connect with that very natural instinct that so many of us have when we go to landscape just to start building stick figures and piling rocks and things like that. You as an artist in the natural environment, in your head are playing with memories, past experiences, thoughts, questions, um, and all sorts of things to construct that reality. And it is temporary and it makes sense to me that that would be a part of it rather than it'd be really a firm and rigid kind of locked in place thing. So as soon as I connected this as being representative of the mind, Any question, those structures, it made so much sense because that's something that we do, whether we have internal structures that influence our thoughts and memories. There are external ones as well, but it's that tension between those. Some people have much more rigid structures and others. I think that was a really interesting choice. I think. Yeah, I think it really comes through that. That was your intention. They're great. Part of doing creative work. As you well know, there's so much decision-making within gray areas. There It's not like there's some precedent that I can go like, this is how to make a diorama that depicts the mine. I just follow the steps. We're inventing a visual language as we go with these kinds of projects. I loved the way that the printed text operated over the topography of the crumpled paper. And there was something really beautiful and interesting to me about that. Legibility is something to consider here, but it seemed to add an organic quality end. I liked the idea that the words are well-worn to some degree. When, once I started to crumble them, it wasn't like this fresh word out of a sense of time or history or use. Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I think part of it just from a visual standpoint, it, it breaks the rigid structure of the printed font. I think in an exciting way. It does make it integrates it into the three-dimensional landscape more directly. I definitely do think that's a step in the right direction. I think just from a design perspective, we're always looking for the balance between variety in Unity. I think when they're just flat, they just too much contrast there. They're jumping out and in an uncomfortable way, you're reducing that by now, making them as sculptural as other elements. So it makes sense that, that visually they would appear to work together. But definitely seeing now in future iterations, I feel like you're taking another step that makes him work. The thing that comes up for me though, as I feel like with the text integrated in such a powerful image, they're conflicting with one another rather than one supporting the other. Okay. I'm trying to figure out why and I think if I go back to what you were originally saying about this as a diorama. You mentioned at one point then the Essentially if think about it as a natural history diorama, the wildlife in there that the animal that's in the environment is being built around would be the words. And I think that's where in this case, it's like the words and the images are together. They're one. Because then it made me, it would make me think without understanding more of the background. Why do we need to see the words in the image if we could just have it as a title next to it, right? If that's what it's called and you're thinking about it and maybe projecting the words into it. And I don't know I don't know is if I if I have any specific suggestions, but that's something that kinda comes up that feels like there, there could be additional iterations to really find that from a thematic perspective, kind of hierarchical perspective, because you have those. Even that cube that's in the lower right feels like it's part of the environment that background sky is part of the environment that I and the railroad tie or like the primary subject, it almost feels like then the text is kinda hitting over the head with a question that should be evident in the images. But then that kinda conflicts with the question itself being the primary driver. Yeah, I guess there's just something there to consider and then also thinking about it, when I, when I think about the questions, it might be interesting to see what would happen with a less fully formed question. In that. If somebody asks me a question, I'll hold on to that. But if I'm interrogating myself, it will often take me time to arrive at really what is the most useful question here? And so what we're seeing is how, where you've arrived, it'd be interesting to see evidence of your editorial processes. You're arriving at the correct question, right? Yeah, I kinda think about it. And when I think about songwriting, e.g. you can listen to Bob Dylan's songs and you can, you can read the lyrics. But if you had access to the notebooks in which he was working through these problems, changing words and cutting versus things like that. It really opens up something to your understanding of how he's thinking, how he's processing these things that can be kind of an interesting thing to explore as well. And really pushing the boundary on the, the, the text integration to see how you're doing that so much in the drawings by making all these marks and pulling from memory and creating new stuff. What if the questions were developed in that same way, if that makes sense, what is most exciting is that we are in this landscape where all these symbols are kind of coming together, these textures, these spaces, the light in a way that makes me ask a lot of questions already. And the texts, it it feels so concrete. I guess. Maybe that's what it is. Like it is versus like, I guess, like magnetic poetry, you can just come kinda combined, combined random words and that would inspire all sorts of random thoughts. But I don't know if that's something that would work as well either. I'm wondering, like what would happen if they weren't necessarily a distinct visual element, if they weren't as distinct and whole sentence, but those words were still there, kind of involved and integrated into the environment as well. Rather than brought forward in space as main characters. Almost as like it's there. It's being treated equally. I mean, I think for about for myself. When I'm in engaged in the environment, There's all sorts of stuff and I'll bounce around to thinking about memory. And then I might be listening to something that takes my attention and there'll be reacting to whatever is in front of me. And then a word might be just repeating in the background on my head, right. I'm not. But my hesitation in that is that it seemed like a fairly key element and what you're describing as a motivation, like you're being prompted by these questions and then reacting in an abstract way to them and allowing all of these things to come up. And so that's just where I worry that what I'm doing is projecting my own way of thinking and processing information onto it. So all I'm really what I do is kinda just reflect back what I'm, what I'm seeing and see if it connects. But I don't know if it's necessarily a great and actionable critique. It's kinda, um, so just putting that out there, I think the one thing that we haven't really explored is that integration of color with your, your toned work, which I think is really an interesting thing, especially with the just the slight would tone from the scaffolds. But I think I really respond most to this. What would justify my arrogance in that energy? And you're talking earlier about the speed of the marks and the calligraphic thing. And I think this is probably the one for me that I really connect with the most in that I mean, it's very direct and those kind of explosive elements that you have. But I'm thinking more just below that on the surface where you really have scribbles and searching marks. And in that background where it looks like there might be some tracing marks and like a masking tape, some areas that were masked. I just think the variety of the marks here as something that I really resonate with. And then to have the figure in there that is really working in that space. Somehow, you'd think that it's dangerous that it would just be too different. But if somehow is really working, and to me I feel like visually, this is the one that stands out as being the most cohesive and direct. And I think probably when we look about the word, look at the words there. That ravens head or the crows head is so dynamic, especially with the figure that is like, that feels like that's the main character with the texts being secondary and maybe functioning more like what we were saying earlier about kind of softening it, putting it in into the background of the mind a little bit more. Yeah, I guess the text does make me think I can't imagine work without it. I feel like it's such an important part of really conveying the sense of the thinking mind, the space of the thinking mind and words is so important to that. So I feel like even though there are still areas to resolve there, it's an essential part of the work and feel what it feels like. Just some degree, every work of art is just another iteration, just a prototype for the next one. So you'll move this along and you'll get another another stage along the way and it'll feel finished. But I think there's something really important in the practice of setting the intention of it being a finished work. Moving beyond the prototype thinking into the finished work, thinking to see how it plays out in the real-world. It's just like when you're creating a car, you can create the prototypes. And you can create the design and say, it looks awesome, but you've got to make it, see how it works. Yeah, I just feel like this is like an iteration and I think it's I think there is somehow figured out how to make it look finished. It's such a hard thing to do. There is a visual distinction between the prototypes and the finished work. And it feels very intangible to me. But I feel like you've cracked something there that is important for the next iteration of this. Whenever we talk, I always feel like we could just go on for hours and I really appreciate you taking this time, so yeah. Again, thank you so much, Scott. Thank you. I appreciate it. It's an honor to be invited and to check out your work. So thank you so much. 12. Getting Feedback Video Journal Part 2: Hi, Welcome to the second video journal for lesson five, getting feedback. So in this video, I'm going to be getting feedback from gigi. Gigi Chen is a well-known painter and teacher. He was born in China and raised in New York City. She attended the Fiorello La Guardia high school of music and art and performing arts. She then went to the School of Visual Arts to get her BFA in traditional animation. Her aesthetic evolved out of combining animation techniques with old master techniques. She uses the dreamlike imagery of magical realism to touch upon complex feelings about family, belonging, safety in glove. I was excited to have GG take a look at my work because both of us may contemporary work that has aspects of magical realism and Surrealism. We both try and make work that is rich with symbolism, meaning in narrative. Now, even though we both make work that is more contemporary, our work is still rooted in the traditional craft of the old masters. Her craft being painting in mind, being drawing. I didn't need GG until quite recently. Gg wasn't really familiar with my work. She's also a very different kind of artists than me or Scott. So my hope is that she will bring a very different viewpoint. So to learn more about Gigi, go check out our website, GG chen.com. So let's dive in to see what feedback Gigi has for me regarding my project and my prototypes. The fact that you have some very white against black like these eyes. You have these foods you have there so starkly collage like they're obviously cutouts. I think if you play with lighting, it would flatten it out and give the space more dimension. So if you're gonna do that, I would suggest you playing with what Joe lights. I would suggest you're playing with higher life cast shadows. And even I was looking at some of the pieces. And I think something that you could even do is even like some of the backgrounds, they're all very opaque paper, right? I was looking at some of the pieces. In one of the pieces. I was thinking it would be really interesting if you tried using like a translucent velum, lighting it from behind and seeing what happens like just like playing. Because right now everything is either like you have these ladders, you have these cutouts, but everything is opaque, opaque or peg against each other. And you have, it looks obviously like cutouts, which is fine. It's an aesthetic. But if you're gonna do that, you're going to have to figure out how to integrate it in a more, I like more subtle way. Because right now they do look like paper cut on top and then put together and there's obviously nothing wrong with that. But if you're gonna be leaning into photography, we should lean into photography. Unlike play with texture is a little bit more like. That's, that's kinda what I thought when I saw them because finding out that that was the endpoint changed the way I looked at it. And I at first thought, oh, he's making these dioramas. So they're gonna be, we think of dioramas is dioramas like dioramas are its own thing. Photography, it's clearly its own thing. You have to figure out how to lean into that. If you're gonna do that, you have to play with texture and space, right? I was even thinking with some of the pieces you could even like two pinholes and light it from behind the colored lights and you don't like, really lean into that. I mean, if you're gonna make less work, which I guess this is what this is, right? I would say that word isn't throw that word around a lot or an art. If you're going to make contemporary surrealism, you have to be able to play with the imagery and you need to really kind of like push it. I think you can also play more with space. Like I think sometimes I think you have a lot of ideas. I think it's really great and you have the words, you have everything, but I think you need to lean back a little bit and edit just a little bit more. And what's great about these is that since everything is movable, you can just take it out. I think sometimes if you're going to do photography, if you are going to even just use these like initial pieces as sketches for what the envelope will look like. Play with composition and spending more time with that. I know you want to put the words and I think sometimes the words can be very intrusive and it can become it fights the image a little bit. Like I feel sometimes like I, I'm, I'm like, what am I supposed to look at in a piece of the words? Am I looking at the imagery? Everything is competing and years no room to breathe. I think I'm using texts can be very tricky and art, because I like the questions that you're asking whether or not it makes sense with the images. I mean, I was even thinking when I was looking at them, wouldn't it? If they're going to become photographs? Like you could just read it on the bottom and have it be a part of the artwork. If that's something that's important or just have a text on the side. I feel like, yeah, I mean texts is really tricky. I don't know that many artists that I would say like makes amazing texts work. If the work is about sex, it's about, but if you're going to be having all these beautiful images, it's, it's distracting and I'm not quite sure sometimes like what what you're trying to say with it. And that was a bit of issues that I had with it. I mean, yeah, Texas tricky. Those like the way I feel about them generally. And what does it mean to make a phrase? What does it even mean to title case? Sometimes people just want to look at the work and be with it and it's okay to have. And then if you sometimes I look at a piece and then I see a title and I go, Oh, that's great. That's another way for me to rethink it. But I don't ever get to the title if not interested in the piece. That's me. That's also very particular towards me. Like not, not saying that all people, artists are not artists like we will do that. But tax tends to reconceptualize work and it tends to force it. And that can be uncomfortable. And that can also be unnecessary, Right? Yeah, I think these are really great points. My hope, and I'm not saying the work is doing this yet, but my hope is that the text does add some element where it does make sense. I know I have a lot of work to do to close that gap. I'm hoping that the texts and images play off one another to give the sense that There's some allegory behind there that the images are adding connotation, a sense of story or a sense of mystery or symbolism. And the texts and images to me, There's some relationship there, but I didn't want to hit, hit viewers over the head with a particular meaning. I just wanted something to add context, add some connotation there, and to allow the mind to bring in these other thoughts and images with the hope that it might resonate a little more, it might linger a little longer. Your images are strong, you should have faith in them. I think that when you are making something that is semi surreal, people already kinda commit to it. And you should have faith in that commitment. You know, when people look at it, Dali painting, they know what it is. There's no, You don't need to push it. Even adding a title to it. You don't really need to push it. Like adding a title to it only adds to it. Yeah, I think that's a great comment. Do you think the work would be stronger without the text? Most of them what I mean, if you're going to have texts, I think you need to rethink how you execute the test. I think if you aren't gonna do it, they're so big. And obviously I know these are these are like photography sketches, but you don't have to you have no rules right now. You know, you don't have to have roles that yeah. I can do like 20 of them and some of them will follow the rules, but those will be your strongest pieces maybe like, but you have to your best cases there was that like let the images breathe a little bit and you should just let them breed. And if you aren't gonna do lettering, you should figure it out in a way where it's integrated more, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well great. This is, this is fantastic so far you have so many unique and interesting reactions to the worst. I really appreciate all of these. I mean, you do sculpt. I mean, have you thought about doing little sculpted elements? Are adding objects. So I know this is not an ideal way to show these, but I did these projects where I've taken drawings and kind of intersected them to create. Get them. I really like that. Yeah, I thought these could be, this is a really rough one. This was an early model that I did, but it's colored paper. And one of the bigger ones. So TopHat, a bird. I love that. I thought these things like this kind of these sculpted. Again, they're not sculpted per se, but it's taking drawings and intersecting them to create these three-dimensional elements. Yeah. I, I kinda think that actually there's so many things. I mean, there's so many, so much potential to it because you are at this like you're not at the birthplace. There's just like at this very interesting, sort of like, you know, kinda what you wanna do. But there's so many ways that it can go. The first time I brought these elements together into some of these first attempts at something a little more finished. You, there's this excitement like, Oh, I actually like, I'm really responding to this. I think it's really beautiful. I think it's really interesting. I started to get excited because you have these ideas in your head. You don't really know if they're gonna look like and then you pull everything together and you see it for the first time. And there's the simultaneous excitement. But also feeling of overwhelm like This is cool but it's, there's so much to be explored. And it seems like every decision opens, rather than narrowing down. Every decision seems like it opens up new possibilities in many ways. I think it's very exciting, but yeah, it's a lot to think about and experiment with. Editing is the hardest part. Editing is like once you kinda do it, film it or whatever, our photograph that you've kinda bring it back. You gotta do it again. It's like doing something over and over and over again. Eventually makes it to what you're trying to get to. More than anything, the end point has to be something that makes sense to you as a totality. When you make a series of work, It's like creating coherence is the hardest part, right? Remember why you did it to begin with? From beginning to end, all the way to the ends. Sometimes I'm halfway through a project and I'm like, why was, what was the point of doing this? Right? Heel back. Everyone will have a zillion suggestions for you. Some of them, you're just like throwing them out the window, That's a crap. Or sometimes they'll try it and it would work, sometimes it won't. And that's what it is. Like. I can make suggestions, but it doesn't have to mean that a lot of it will make any sense. Yeah. I, I'm looking at it in a contemporary surrealist type of way. Like how would I put together my work? And I feel like a lot of familiarity to the kind of stuff you're doing right now. I think when you are creating something where you're creating a different universe, you have to know the rules, but also know that there are no rules. And that is the trickiest part about how does it, how do you make something surreal but not look like it's just shoved together, right? That is the hardest part when you're making surrealist work. And that's something that I see when I see student work. Sometimes DO they shove a bunch of elements together thinking about surreal. But it has a meaning. And I think you're striving for meeting because you are mature artists with lots of ideas, developed ideas and develop career and with like when you're developing your work in which you are creating your own universe, you have to pay respect to that universe. Um, have you thought also, I think so some of the imagery could also be pushed a little bit more. I mean, you, you draw super well. I think that I mean, I mean, you can draw it anything and play with that. I don't think you should just stick with paper. I think play with the weight of things. Even drawing our cardboard. Even like I was like playing with cardboard today. Like it's just cutting it off in my head of like edges like your Should. I think. Even drawing unlike Canvas and ripping things apart and letting things be like having more texture like with poly, even photograph really more interestingly, you shouldn't, you shouldn't really push the drawing part if you're really going to do it, you know, like, I know some of them are a little more sketchy. But what if you had more elements that were very realistic and really fully developed to be a part of this universe. There's so much you can do that can really create something more cinematic. If you're really going to be pushing like this idea of photographs and dioramas and letting them have their own life. It's about creating a balance and creating like, what are you trying to say? Are you, what is the feeling you're trying to make? So maybe in your case, I would say you should just make more elements and play with those, right? You have all of these elements, you have your memories and your story is like I think that you should make them more personal and having, having these questions. Sure, they are personal questions. And how do you bring in all of your personality and yourself is really like, seems like a really fit person, like very, a lot of great things, interesting things. You're interested in. A lot of things. You could burn all that and then you should bring all these things in. I think that, that also takes practice. You can do anything with it. And that is what I really want you to get. The odd what you have just shown us. Like you, you're so good at so many things. And you can bring them all into this. And you don't have to make You don't have to rely on like wording and you are like, you can make this something really cool and completely your own. You can go and try anything and sale and do it again because this is not since these are not permanent objects. That's actually what's that like, the beauty of your piece. It's not permanent. You can keep doing it and then like to make a different photograph out of them like it. I mean, really, in a lot of ways, drawing and drawing and painting is limited because of the permanent settlement. And you should embrace that. You know. I mean, I kinda think it's exciting. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I really want I'm excited for you. I think it's really fascinating your process. And I also think that it's a wild think brave of you. Just set it. And also, I don't know how critical Scott and I'm a pretty critical person. I'm very hypercritical of myself. You know, I'm saying always like don't, you shouldn't do this one thing because you're more lazy. That's what I say to myself. I'm like, I shouldn't just because you don't feel like working out at anymore. You have to finish it and you have to push yourself even for one more day. And I always tell that to myself. I tell that to my pseudo partners. I say that and I kinda go and they've always said it's me. It's like they're like You're a good painter but you could do better. It's fine. Yeah. That's funny. It's a funny thing and I always tell that to myself. It's like you can do better. And I think that they're just knowing that about myself because I'm so harsh on myself, like so harsh on myself that letting learning even when to let go of it. Because at some point you just have to like, you know, like I think what's great about you showing us this project at this stage is that it's all potential. And that's kind of magical. Yeah. Like this stage is so naturally. Yeah, Well, you've done a fantastic job with this critique. I really appreciate all of your thoughts. You've given me so much to think about so many ideas and I'm very confident that this experience will improve the work considerably. So thank you so much. And maybe in the future I could even get you to take a look again when the work is more developed or no. Well, I would love that so much. Actually. This is really fun for me because I also think it's really nice when someone does value my opinion. As like when artists to another and also to your students. It's really important to find people you can trust to ask questions. Like that would be my advice to all of your students. And this is something we had talked about with Scott previously, is that you have to know the context of who you're asking. Like not everyone is going to have not that anyone would really have the right answers for you. But you need to talk to people who are like, Hey, they know what they're doing. They don't articulate what they want with how to tell you what to do. And not someone who's just gonna be like, Oh, you don't you never trust the person who tells you to quit like ever, you know. Yeah. Well, thank you, Brad. This is this has been fantastic. This is this has been such a great experience. So thank you so much. 13. Incorporating Feedback: Welcome to lesson six, incorporating feedback. So far in this course, you've selected a project to work with. Next, you generated ideas for that project and explored possibilities. Then you created prototypes to test your ideas and to see how they operated in reality. You then presented your prototypes to other people and God feedback. Now it's time to take what you've learned from your feedback and incorporate it into your project. There are two types of feedback I want to talk about. First is the feedback you get from the work itself as you are creating your prototypes. As you create prototypes, your work begins to take shape and you get to experience the work in reality, even though it's in a nascent form, prototypes allow you to see how your project will operate in the real world, which is often quite different from how we think it will operate when it's in the ideation phase. Now for many projects, these prototypes will allow you to see your ideas put into practice for the very first time. So as you're creating your prototypes, you will be reacting to your work. You'll be able to see what it looks like, what it feels like, what it makes you think about. You'll also get a sense of how your materials are working. It's very common for an idea to seem like it will work when it's in a sketch book or in a drawing. But when you actually build it, it doesn't work as well as you thought. This is particularly common with materials like wood, fabric, or clay, any materials that require a good deal of skill. So the other kind of feedback is feedback that you get from other people. So at this point, hopefully you've presented your prototypes to at least one other person and hopefully to three or more people. Now incorporating feedback from other people can be incredibly challenging. It's possible that you've gotten different feedback from different people. It's also possible that you've gotten feedback that you don't agree with. Sorting through the feedback you get from others and deciding what and how to incorporate it into your project is the focus of this lesson. One of the most powerful strategies I've discovered for incorporating feedback is to reflect and write about the feedback you've received. Now it's important for you to understand that the writing you'll be doing is for your eyes only. Don't worry about whether the writing is good or not. This writing is simply an opportunity for you to sort through your thoughts, to organize them, and to figure out which feedback you want to incorporate into your project. To start this process, I recommend asking yourself questions and then reflecting and writing your answers. Here's a list of questions you should consider regarding feedback from the work itself. The feedback that the work transmits directly to you as you are creating your prototypes. What did you learn when creating these prototypes? What aspects of the prototypes worked as expected? What aspects of the prototypes worked better than expected? What aspects of the prototypes did not work out as expected? What was your initial reaction to the finished prototypes? What did you learn about your materials? What is your finished prototypes make you think? And what is your finished prototypes make you feel. Now of course, this is not a complete list of questions, but this list should get you started. It's a way to reflect on your experience creating the prototypes and to gauge your reaction to the finished prototypes. Remember, this is your project. You want to make your vision for your project. So hopefully, upon seeing your prototypes, you'll learn a number of things and you'll figure out if the project is going the direction you want. This is incredibly valuable information. Next, here are some questions to consider regarding feedback from others. What feedback do you agree with? What feedback do you disagree with? What aspects of your prototypes elicited the response you intended? What aspects of your project elicited a different response than intended? What gaps or insufficiencies of your project were revealed? If you got feedback from multiple people, how is it similar? How is it different? What will you explore further? What changes will you make to your project moving forward? What will you add to the work? What will you subtract from the work? And finally, how will the feedback you received change your project moving forward? Now remember, this is your project. Ultimately, it's up to you to decide what feedback you want to incorporate, if any. But these questions will help you start to consider what kind of feedback you've received, both from the work and from other people. By reflecting upon and writing about these questions, you'll be able to make distinctions about the feedback you received and figure out how you want to incorporate it into your project. It's all too common for creative people to destroy a unique project by attempting to make it fit into other people's preconceived notions. And when getting feedback from other creative professionals and practitioners, it's very easy to be taken off track and to incorporate ideas that you don't necessarily agree with, but you feel pressured to. Ultimately this is where experience comes in. You need to go through this process of prototyping and getting feedback many times before you get good at sorting through feedback and figure out how to successfully incorporate it into your project while still maintaining your original vision. You don't want to get stuck making somebody else's vision for your project. But you also don't want to disregard feedback that's not flattering. Don't assume that you always know better. Ultimately, knowing which feedback to incorporate, in which feedback to disregard requires experience. And this is what I'm hoping you'll get from this lesson. So before we move on, I want to call your attention to a very important idea, overlapping feedback. Often when getting feedback from multiple people, you will receive similar feedback from more than one person. Pay close attention when this happens. When multiple people identified the same issue in your work. This is a very strong signal that it should be addressed. Once you've considered all of the feedback you've received and decided what feedback you want to incorporate into your work, you have a decision to make. Should the next iteration of your project be another round of prototypes? Or should you move on to the final product? I call this decision iterate or commit to. Iterate is the act of repeating something with small changes with the hope of getting closer to your desired outcome. Do you use prototypes to go through another iteration of your project? Or do you commit to working on the final version of your project? So here are a few considerations. At this stage of the creative process, I usually go into what I call a feedback loop. I tend to go through three rounds of prototyping and getting feedback before I move on to finished work. Now of course there's no correct number of times you should iterate with prototypes. But I try and find a balance between getting as much feedback as I can, but not so much feedback that the project is taken off track or stalls at some point, we just need to get on with the work. So when do you know when you're ready to commit to the final version of your project, this is a tough question to answer, but at some point, you'll have enough experience with your prototypes that you feel comfortable with the material you're working with. You're excited with the results you're getting from your prototypes and the feedback you're getting is mostly positive. So ideally, that's the place you'll get to you before beginning the final version of your project. But of course sometimes you have a scheduled to stick to and you just need to get on with the work. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. That kind of pressure can often inspire people to create good work. You have a deadline to hit and you're not feeling confident about your work, that's okay. Make the best work you can with the current experience and feedback you have. And remember, there's always another project and everything you've learned from creating this project can be incorporated into your next project. Your task is to incorporate feedback into your project. If your time and schedule permit, I recommend taking your project through at least one more round of prototyping and feedback. But if you need to move on to the final project, That's okay too. Just remember to incorporate everything you've learned so far into the final version of your project. So to know which feedback to incorporate, in which feedback to disregard. First, reflect and write about your experiences making the prototypes focus on the following questions. What did you learn when creating these prototypes? What aspects of the prototypes worked as expected? What aspects of the prototypes worked better than expected? What aspects of the prototypes did not work out as expected? What was your initial reaction to the finished prototypes? What did you learn about your materials? What is your finished prototypes make you think? And what is your finished prototypes make you feel. Next, reflect and write about your experiences getting feedback from other people, focus on the following questions. What feedback do you agree with? What feedback do you disagree with? What aspects of your prototypes elicited the response you intended? What aspects of your project elicited a different response than intended? What gaps or insufficiencies of your project were revealed? If you got feedback from multiple people, how is it similar? How is it different? What will you explore further? What changes will you make to your project moving forward? What will you add to the work? What will you subtract from the work? And finally, how will the feedback you received change your project moving forward? Now, of course, you don't need to write an answer to each and every question. This is just a list to get you started. And you may identify specific questions that you need to answer for your project that aren't on this list. So this is not an exhaustive list of questions. It's just a starting point. Feel free to add or subtract any questions that make sense for your project. If it helps, feel free to play this video as you reflect and write, pausing the video after each question and taking time to write out your answer. Once you're done writing, hit Play so you can hear the next question, then pause, write, and repeat. By doing this, you'll figure out what feedback you want to incorporate into the next iteration of your project, whether it'd be more prototypes or the final version. As always, I hope to see you in the video journal for this lesson. When you're going to see me go through the process of evaluating the feedback that I've received and figuring out what feedback I want to incorporate into my project. So I hope you can join me for that video journal. After that, I will see you in Lesson seven when we're going to develop a plan that will take us through the rest of the creative process for our project. 14. Incorporating Feedback Video Journal: Hi, welcome to the video journal for lesson six, incorporating feedback. So in this video journal, you're going to see me think through the feedback that I've gotten, both from the prototypes themselves as well as the feedback from Scott in GG. So hopefully this will give you a sense of what this process looks like when deciding what feedback to incorporate. It's really an intellectual process of thinking through what you've learned. Now I've had a lot experience presenting work to other people and getting feedback. But if you're new to this process and you're feeling a little overwhelmed, don't worry that it's completely normal. The more you present your work and get feedback, the more comfortable you'll get, both with receiving criticism and with figuring out how to incorporate feedback into work. So I'm going to begin by reflecting on my reaction to my prototypes. Now if you'll recall, at the beginning of this project, I really didn't know what the work was going to look like and I didn't know how to make it. So seeing the prototypes was the first time that I got a sense of what my ideas we're going to look like, how they were going to operate in reality. Overall, I was pretty excited. I felt immediately that the prototypes had a strong aesthetic. They had a very unique style. They looked contemporary and experimental, but they also maintained a high level of drawing. I wanted the work to find a balance between experimental art while still maintaining a high level of technical craft. Now of course, all of the prototypes were rough. There were no pieces that I would consider finished, but I'm excited because seeing all of the elements brought together, seeing dioramas made from my drawings created a mood and a visual experience that I thought was very exciting to even though the work is rough and it needs a lot of refinement, I certainly feel that roots are there. The raw material for a compelling finished product are there. And of course, I was able to solve so many technical issues through the prototypes, the scaffolding and screens ended up working as I'd hoped, to stand the drawings upright. And if you remember, that was one of the bigger technical challenges for this project. So again, I have a lot of work to do to create finished pieces of art work. But after seeing the prototypes, I feel confident that after creating more prototypes and getting more feedback, I can bring this work to a high level of finish. So now I want to talk about the takeaways from Scott's feedback. Overall, I felt Scott's reaction to the work was quite positive. He seemed to feel that the diorama was doing a good job representing the interior experience of the mind. He thought the drawings were working well and he thought the aesthetic I created was getting it what I had hoped for, depicting what the thought process might look like inside the mind. So that was good to hear. But one of Scott's biggest criticisms was that the text was not yet incorporated into the work. Often thought that text was fighting the images. He also felt the text appeared to concrete and monumental and that I should explore ways to make the text appear more like the way a thought might arise in the mind. He also felt that he needed to refine the relationship between the text and the images or the images supposed to be illustrating the questions? Are they adding additional meaning? So my read on Scott's feedback is that he thought the work was heading in the right direction, but I needed to be more intentional with the relationship between the images and the text. So now I'll focus on my takeaways from GG is feedback. Gigi also felt the text was two dominant and was not incorporated into the work. In fact, GG thought that work might even be stronger with no text at all. Gigi had two suggestions for further exploration. First, she thought I should experiment much more with light ink instead of just lighting the dioramas with one or maybe two studio lights, she encouraged me to explore multiple lights using gels, backlighting the dioramas and being much more intentional with how the elements and the dioramas are. Lit. Gigi also recommended that I explored the photography aspect more. So as you know, the dioramas are going to be created, then photographed, but then taken down. So the photographs of these dioramas are the real finished product. So Gigi encouraged me to research photography more, to take a look at how other photographers are lighting these kinds of setups and getting photographs of them to play more with depth and space as a photographer might. Gigi also encouraged me to be more intentional with the meaning behind the various elements. It seemed the GG often felt the images were compelling, but they didn't always make sense to her in terms of meaning. Gigi also felt that there was a lot going on in these pieces. And then I may need to edit. She felt that at times the pieces were too chaotic and they lacked a primary subject and area of focus. Now if you're not used to having your work critiqued, this may sound like a lot of criticism, but I want to remind you, this is exactly what I asked them to do because of their honesty, because of their criticisms, and because of their feedback, my work is going to improve. And in that sense, these criticisms don't make me feel bad. They don't make me feel like I've failed. They make me excited for the future of the project, being honest with one another about what's working in our projects. And what's not is how artists show respect to one another. I didn't go into this process looking for compliments. I went in looking for criticisms. It's gotten GG helped me find the areas of my work that needed improvement. And for that, I am extremely grateful to them. So in less than six, I gave you many questions you can use to reflect upon the feedback you've received. Now I'm not gonna go through each and every one of those questions here, but I want to focus on a few of them that I think are the most relevant for my work in the feedback I received. First, I want to talk about overlapping feedback. Scott and Gigi are different kinds of artists, but they both immediately identified that the way I was using text was not integrating into the work overall, Scott seemed to like aspects of the texts, G, G naught so much, but they both agreed that the text was not yet working. So remember, when you get overlapping feedback from multiple people, you must pay attention to it. It doesn't mean that you have to make the changes that they suggest, but you should seriously consider why you're getting similar criticisms from multiple people. Now, I happen to think that Scott and g, g are both right. And of course that's what we should expect. This is my first round of prototypes. As GGE said, these are more photography sketches than attempts at finished work. But we can't figure these things out without making prototypes to see what they look like. These distinctions are nearly impossible to make without making something first, I think the text is interesting. I think there is a way to include it, but I have a lot of work to figure out how to incorporate it more naturally into the pieces. And of course, the way I'm going to figure that out is by experimenting, is by making more prototypes. And I will almost certainly present the work to Scott and G. G again. Now Scotland, GG, both provided extremely valuable feedback that I think will improve the work considerably. But that doesn't necessarily mean I agree with all of their feedback. Now remember, at the end of the day, this is my project, not theirs. And as much as I appreciate their critiques and feedback, I am not obligated to adjust my project to meet their needs and desires. But you at least want to consider the criticisms, especially when multiple people are giving you the same kinds of critiques. But that doesn't necessarily mean I agree with all of their feedback. So what feedback do I disagree with? Well, it's important to note that both Scott and Gigi, our traditional painters, they both rely heavily on old master techniques, and both of them are interested in classical ideas of composition. That a composition needs to be balanced. That there should be a clear subject, that everything in decomposition should have a specific function or meeting. Now, I think those classical ideas of composition are so important in so many types of artwork. But as you know, I am trying to depict what the thought process might look inside the mind. And so often the mind is chaotic. So often we have thoughts or images pop up in the mind and we don't know what they mean. Often in the mind we have ideas competing with one another when we can't figure out what we think about something, or when we're struggling to make meaning out of something. So I'm not sure that pieces that are attempting to depict the thought process that goes on inside the mind should be tied down to classical ideas of composition. Now, I'm not saying Scott and Gigi or wrong. In fact, I still may be wrong. But again, the only way I'm gonna know is by creating further prototypes, is by experimenting further. Now, what I think Scott and Gigi we're both referring to is that the pieces don't appear finished yet, they don't appear resolved. So it's up to me to figure out how to create pieces that have the aesthetic that I'm looking for, even as they break compositional rules while still creating pieces that look resolved, that looked finished. If I want to create pieces that hinted the chaos that sometimes occurs in the mind, I need to do it in a way that's not sloppy. It's not just about throwing things together. I need to figure out a way to create chaos, but have a piece of artwork that's still looks finished, that still looks intentional, that still has a result composition, even if it's breaking compositional rules. So I thought the feedback sessions with Scott and GG were fantastic. They both gave me so much to think about. And of course, you only saw segments of the critiques. Each of those critiques lasted over an hour-and-a-half. So I tried to edit that footage down to the essential moments. So the important question now is, how am I going to alter my work according to the feedback I received. What feedback am I going to incorporate into the work? So here's what I've decided. I'm going to expand and refine my lighting skills. I'm going to experiment with more lights. I'm going to experiment putting barn doors are snippets on lights to see if I can isolate elements with light, I may try colored gels. I may see what happens when I light my pieces by candlelight or with flashlights. So I'm committed to further exploring lighting. Next, I'm going to continue to experiment with texts with the goal of integrating it more into the work. This will probably mean making it less dominant. And I'll probably need to explore different methods of getting texts into the work. Next, Speaking of text, I think I'm going to remove the requirement that every piece contain a question. Gg thought that the images were quite strong. So I think I may explore some dioramas that are just images without the text. Now additionally, I'm going to research artists who do successfully incorporate texts into their work because so much of our thought process happens in words. I think words and texts are an essential element to include in these pieces. I need to find people who are using texts in a way that I can learn from. I'm going to seek clues and how I can incorporate texts into my work in a way that does depicts how language might arise in the mind. Next, I'm going to deepen this space of these dioramas. I'm going to expand the types of objects and images that I'm using and put more space in between them. So the dioramas themselves are much deeper. This will help add to the three-dimensional quality, particularly in the stereoscopic photographs. And finally, I'm going to incorporate some of my intersecting drawings into the work. If you remember, Gigi asked me if I didn't need sculpture. And I pulled out some of my intersecting drawings, sculptures that I created. And you know, part of this project is turning drawings into three-dimensional objects or spaces. And I already have experienced doing that with other projects. So I think my intersecting drawing sculptures would be a perfect addition this project. And I think they might be a great metaphor for how ideas intersect and come together to form new meanings. This is the feedback that I'm incorporating. I have chosen a number of new things to explore or refine. I've selected some new elements I want to add and I have some new skills I need to learn. So now the question is, will I iterate or commit? Will I create new iterations of my prototypes, exploring my ideas further? Or is it time to begin work on the final products? So as I mentioned in the previous lesson, I tend to go through a minimum of three rounds of prototyping and then presenting the prototypes to other people to get feedback. Each iteration of the prototypes, I am making changes and experimenting and creating more and more iterations of the work to see how these changes affect the work overall. Are they improvements or not? Again, prototypes are the best way to do this. Or do I think I now know enough to begin work on the final project? Now of course, even if you begin work on the final project, you can incorporate the feedback you've received. I could just take what I've learned to decide that the next round of dioramas and photographs are going to be the final pieces. But I feel with this project that I have so much more to learn. So I'm going to continue to iterate. I'm going to continue to make new prototype that explore these new ideas. With each new iteration, I will have something new to show people to see what their reaction is in both Scott and Gigi have graciously agreed to take a look at my work later on. Once I do some more prototypes, I learned some new skills. I try out these new ideas. I'm going to bring the work back to Scott and Gigi to see what they think. They can tell me if I'm getting closer or further away. Now with the next round of prototypes, in addition to showing Scott and GG, I will probably begin showing it to non-creative types. My goal is not to make work that only appeals to other artists. I'd like to appeal to a wider audience. And in order to do that, I need to expand the type of people I'm getting feedback from. I know that this video and the last one had been a lot of talking, but I just wanted to show you how I think through these ideas, how I evaluate the feedback that I've received in how I decide which feedback to incorporate into my work and which feedback I can disregard. I've shown you some examples of feedback that I agree with. And I've given you an example of some feedback that I don't agree with. So I hope this process has been illuminating and remember, the best way to get more comfortable with receiving criticism and figuring out how to use that criticism is to go through this process of prototyping and presentation over and over again. Every time you do this, it'll get easier and easier. Every time you go through this process, you'll get better at receiving feedback and criticisms. And you'll get better at figuring out what to do with that feedback and how it can be leveraged to improve your project. And that's what this process is all about. Well, thank you for joining me in this video journal. I hope to see you in Lesson seven where we're going to create a project plan that it's going to take our project all the way to completion. 15. Designing A Project Plan: Welcome to lesson seven, designing a project plan. In this lesson, you're going to reign in your creative explorations and design a project plan that will define the intention, process, and schedule for your project. The goal of this lesson is that you design a plan that is detailed and specific enough to begin work on the final version of your project and bring it all the way to completion. Now hopefully in the previous lessons, you are able to create prototypes for your project presented to others to get feedback and then incorporate what you've learned. You may have even gone through another round of prototyping and feedback. The cycle of prototyping, feedback and further iteration can go on for as long as you need it to or as long as your scheduled permits. But at some point, you need to begin work on the final version of your project. This lesson is going to help you create a project plan that will help you do just that. One of the most important differences between the project plan we're going to be making in this lesson. And a more traditional project proposal is that the goal of this project plan is not to get permission from somebody else or to seek funding. The goal of this project plan is to help you direct your habits and actions to ensure the successful completion of your project. Now the specifics of a project plan can change dramatically depending on the type of project. Every project has its own unique needs and elements that need to be addressed. But in this lesson, I'm going to provide you with a project plan template that you can adapt to meet the specific needs and elements for your project. It's important to note here that this course is not intended to teach you how to market or monetize your project. That is a completely different topic that's outside the scope of this course. The goal of this course is the creative process. The process that's going to allow you to conceive of a project and to work with it all the way through to completion, and hopefully with a high level of quality. So the goal of this project blend is to help you create incomplete, high-quality creative work. So although every project plan, we'll look a little different, there are some common elements that nearly every project plan will contain. So let's start there Focusing on the essential elements of a project plan. The first essential element is the project description. So this should be an updated version of the project description that you started earlier in this course. But now you're going to updated with everything you've learned from prototyping in feedback, remember, a project description describes what your project is. It's a functional description of your project. Next, you want to write a description of your desired audience. Who is this work for? It is a fool's errand to try and please everybody. So you want to ask yourself, what are the attributes of the people that you want your project to connect with? What are their interests? Where might they find your work? Now we've touched upon the idea of a desired audience earlier in this course, but now it's time to get specific. You want to describe your desired audience with as much detail as possible. This is important because, you know, you can't please everybody. So while you're creating the work, you want to keep in mind the type of person that you want to connect with. And you want to know whether you're trying to appeal to a niche audience, or whether you want your work to have mass appeal, either are fine, but you need to go into the creation of your project with your eyes open. You want to know what kind of people you're trying to connect with. I'd like to remind you here, as you're creating your project, you should seek out feedback from Representative members of your desired audience. That's one of the best ways to make sure that your work is connecting with the type of people you want to connect with. Next, what is your project intent? What is your intention with your project? If the project description focuses on what your project is, then the project intent should describe what you want your project to do. What is the purpose of your project? What impact are you hoping it will have? What do you want people to think about when they experience your work? What do you want them to feel? Reactions are you looking for from your audience? Now the project intent is also a great place to define what success for your project looks like. Does success mean sales? Does it mean reviews? Does it mean a certain number of likes or followers? How do you define success for your project? Next, you need to lay out the tasks that are necessary for you to complete your project. Now to me, this section is the most important. It will detail the specific tasks that you need to complete in order to finish your project. You also need to order this list of tasks. So you always know what you need to do next and what you've already accomplished. A well-crafted, an ordered list of tasks will ensure that you always know how to move forward with your project. Now if necessary, this list can include prototyping and feedback. Now this list of tasks will probably be the longest section in your project plan. This list is also one of the most variable elements of a project plan. A list of tasks for somebody writing a children's book will look completely different from the list of tasks. If somebody designing a video game, anything and everything can go in your list of tasks. There's no task too small that it can't be included in this list. Now of course, it's up to you to figure out how granular you want to get with this list. People work best with a broad outline of tasks. And underneath each task there's a list of subtasks. So it's up to you to figure out what list of tasks is, right for your project. And remember, you can always refine your project plan as you move through it. But remember, the goal of this list of tasks is to describe the steps that are necessary for you to bring your project to completion, which brings us to the next essential element for our project plan, a completion date. Now, although it's okay for a project to move forward without a completion date, I find that it's best to hold yourself to a schedule that will help you focus your time and efforts and keep you coming back to the studio. I find that a completion date creates a positive pressure within me. Even if the deadline for a project is self-imposed, it's still something to shoot for. And without a desired completion date, you may feel like you have an infinite amount of time to complete your project. In my experience, this tends to result in a lack of urgency. I know for me without a completion date, I tend to procrastinate and put off getting into the studio because why not? If I don't have a completion date, there's no sense of urgency for me to manage my time. Now in the next lesson, we're going to explore some strategies that will push you to show up in the studio again and again to make sure your project is finished. One strategy we're going to talk about is the idea of announcing your completion date publicly. You're more likely to hold yourself to a completion date if other people are expecting you to. But in order to publicly announce a completion date, you need to figure out what that completion date is. This completion day should be based on your best estimate for how long your project will take, you wanna be able to find a balance between giving yourself enough time to make high-quality work, but to not push your completion dates so far out that you procrastinate, your completion date should give you a sense of positive pressure. So once you have a list of tasks and you have a completion date, then you can create a timeline. Timeline will help you figure out how much time you have to complete each task on your list. And of course, your timeline needs to account for all of the tasks on your list. Now one quick note here regarding your tasks, your timeline in your completion date. If you get to choose the completion date based on your schedule alone, than once you've figured out your tasks, you can then select your completion date by how long you think each task is going to take. You can create the timeline for your tasks and base your completion date off of that. Now, some people have a very limited amount of time to work on their creative projects. So if you only have a month or two to bring a project to completion, you may need to base the whole project plan around that firm deadline. A deadline may define the scope of your project as well as the tasks necessary to complete it. So these three elements, tasks, timeline and completion date, should be developed in relationship with one another. So these are the essential components of a project plan. I think that nearly every project plan should contain these essential elements. But as we talked about before, the specifics of a project plan can vary wildly depending on the project. So let me take you through a few additional elements that you may need to incorporate into your project plan. Many of these will not be irrelevant for most projects, but I at least want to cover them so you can start thinking about whether or not you need to incorporate them into your project plan. Now if some projects require money, which means you may need to think about your budget. Creating a budget will help you best use the financial resources you have. It will also help you figure out if you need to seek additional funding for your project. Now the process of seeking funding, whether it's through crowd funding or grant writing, is a bit out of the scope of this course. But in the event that you do need to seek additional funds, that should absolutely be included in your project plan. So if you have a limited amount of funds with which to create your project, you should plan for that. Want a wisely use the financial resources that you have. You don't want to run out of money. So one final note here. If you are seeking funding for your project, then your project plan can be used to persuade others to provide that funding. Many grants require you to submit a project proposal so they can evaluate whether or not the project is right for them to invest in. This project plan can be adapted for that purpose. Next, you may want to include a section about materials. If your project is heavily dependent on materials, you need to plan for that. E.g. if you're creating furniture or clothing, you may want to consider putting that into your project plan, particularly if the materials that you need are rare, specialized, or time-consuming to get even more simple projects require you to have the right materials. I regularly need to check my stack of paper and pencils. So if you think it's necessary, you may want to include a section about materials in your project plan. The materials section should focus on what you need and how and when you're going to get them. Next, skill acquisition, I find that the type of projects I do often require me to learn new skills. Learning new skills can be time-consuming. So during the creation of your project, you may discover that you need to learn new skills to create your vision for your project. This is incredibly common. It could be lighting, it could be video editing, it could be photography, it could be public speaking. There could be some form of construction. It could be a new tool. It could be learning how to use a new type of paint or Canvas. The list is nearly endless. So if your project requires you to learn a new skill, you need to plan for that. You need to plan how you're going to learn that skill. And of course, how long it's going to take you in your project plan. Skill acquisition can be its own section, or it can be a subsection of your task list and timeline. But it's just one more thing to consider as you're creating your project plan. Next, collaborators. Now in this course, I'm assuming you're working on your project by herself. But many projects require collaborators and some people just enjoy collaborating creatively with others. If you're working with collaborators, you're not just creating a project plan for yourself. You're creating a project plan. So multiple people know what they're doing it every step of the way. Now I highly recommend gaining experience, completing creative projects on your own before you bring in collaborators. Collaborators can be great. They can be so helpful, particularly if they have skills that you don't, but they can also bring additional challenges. Collaborators will bring with them their own sets of needs and desires, their own vision for a project and managing collaborators and working within Teams is a skill in and of itself. Now if you're working with collaborators, you also need to figure out who's doing what, how are you going to divide the responsibilities of the project? This should be reflected in your project plan. The goal of a good project plan is so that everybody working on the project knows how to move forward. They know what to do at every step of the way to complete the project. This is true if you're working on your project by herself or if you're working with a team. And finally, you may want to think about your project launch. Obviously, before you worry about putting your work out into the world, you need to have completed some work. And that's the focus of this course, bringing creative projects to completion. But once you gain experience completing creative projects, you need to think about what you wanna do with them, how you're going to get the mountain to the world, how you want to launch your work into the public sphere. So designing a project launch means deciding what happens with your work once it's completed. This could include gallery openings, publication articles, podcasts, marketing, social media, monetization, all kinds of things. So again, my goal in this course is to help you complete your vision for your project. But for most projects, not all, but for most of them, people want to get their work in front of the eyes of other people in designing a project launch will help you do that. Now of course, this is an incomplete list of potential project plan elements. Depending on the project, there's a wide range of other elements your project plan might need. But hopefully, I've started you thinking about what your project plan needs to include and how you can use a project plan to figure out what needs to happen for you to complete your project. So with all of this in mind, let's get you to your task for this lesson. So your task for today is to create a project plan. Your project plan should include a project description, writing about your desired audience. It should define your project intent. It should contain an ordered list of tasks that are necessary for you to complete your project. It should include a completion date and it needs a timeline. Your timeline should include how long do you think each task will take? And remember these final three elements, tasks, timeline in completion date should be developed in relationship to one another. And in your project plan, they can appear in any order that works best for your project. If necessary, your project plan can include additional elements, including costs or budget, materials, skill acquisition, collaborators, or a description of your project launch. And of course, your project may require additional elements that I haven't addressed. So you need to ask yourself what your project plan needs, even if I haven't brought it up in this lesson. So what I've tried to do is give you a basic outline for a successful project plan. And while creating your project plan, you always need to keep in mind the purpose of this project plan is for you to define the intention, process, and schedule for your project. A good project plan will allow you to consistently move forward toward the successful completion of your project. So I hope you can join me for today's video journal where I'm going to be taking you through my project plan. So you can see these ideas put into action and see what an actual project plan might look like. I'm also going to provide a downloadable PDF of my project plan. So if you're so inclined, you can really spend some time with it. And finally, I'm including a blank downloadable template that you can use for your project plan. It contains all of the elements we talked about earlier in this lesson. It also includes some blank spaces. You can craft your own project plan. Now of course, you're not required to use my template for your project plan. It's just a resource that's there for you if you want it. Well, thank you so much for joining me in this lesson. I will see you back here for Lesson eight, where you're going to learn how to design a studio system that will ensure that you get into this studio consistently. There we'll make sure you have the right habits in time management skills necessary for you to complete your creative projects. This can be one of the hardest skills for creative people. I look forward to seeing you there. 16. Designing A Project Plan Video Journal: Welcome to the video journal for the lesson seven. In this video journal, I'm going to take you through my thinking about my project plan. Now this is going to be a pretty quick video journal because I've actually shared my project plan with you as a downloadable resource. So if you're so inclined, in addition to watching this video journal, you can check out my project plan, or at least the project plan as it stands when I filmed this. Now one reason I say that is because it is possible that as I progress through my project plan, it may change as I create more prototypes is to get more feedback. I may need to add things to my project plan, or I may figure out that some things around the project plan really aren't going to work as I expected. I really tend to think of these project plans as fluid. It's important to remember that the project plan is there to help you organize your habits and your actions to ensure that you can successfully complete your project. But I also want to acknowledge that the creative process can be very messy. It can be unpredictable and plans change. And as you learn more as your project evolves, this should be reflected in your project plan. That being said, I do try and stick pretty closely to my project timeline. And in particular, the completion date. Once I start pushing back my completion date becomes less and less likely I'll finish a project. So unless I have a very good reason, I really try and bring my projects to completion on schedule, even if I'm the only one setting that schedule. So one more thing I'd like to share with you before we take a look at my project plan is how important writing is to the creative process, or at least to my creative process. If you took my becoming creative course, you know that I really encourage people to write about their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, their ideas, just to sort through them, just to organize them. Taking what's in your mind and bring it into reality through writing is such a profound experience. Thoughts and ideas can be so intangible. But seeing the mountain, the real-world, whether that's on a piece of paper or on a computer screen, makes them seem more real. We can actually grapple with them, change them, organize them, explore them, and add to them. This project plan is another form of writing. I've actually had projects where after I write a project plan, I really don't look at it again. But the act of writing it, the act of organizing my project for myself in some cases, is powerful enough that that will propel me through to the end of a project. So for me, creating a project plan is not just about having this document that I must follow. It's much more about the process of creating the project plan. To me, the process of creating a project plan is just as important as having a physical document after. Now that being said, for some projects, particularly if they're very involved or they're occurring over a long timeline, I will refer back to the project plan often. Once I'm satisfied with the project plan, I will usually print out one or two copies and post them around my studio. This way I run into them often and I can refer back to them easily by posting my project plan around my studio, I have a visual reminder that there is a schedule that I'm sticking to, that there is a process I figured out. And in the chaos of the studio that can be a great way to have some structure. So now I'm going to share a few thoughts about my project plan. So it starts off, of course, with a project description. This project description is a little bit different from the description that I created earlier in the course. This description is a little longer and I've taken out the requirement that every piece must contain a question. Additionally, I've tried to refine the wording a little bit to make it a little clearer, if for nothing else in my own mind, what exactly I'm trying to create throughout the course of doing prototypes and getting feedback, you're very likely to have made some distinctions that may very well change the description of your project that should be reflected in this project plan. The next element is the completion date. So I've actually selected a date that I want to have a specific number of pieces finished. So for me that number of pieces is six. I want to complete and photograph six dioramas by June 15th. So the completion date for this project is June 15th, 2022. There's a reason I selected that date. June 15th is about three months after I'm scheduled to finish filming this course. So I wanted to give myself three months to just focus on the work itself, to do any additional research, to learn new skills, and to learn how to make high-quality work. Remember right now, I have some prototypes that are starting to work, but none of them are there yet. So three months to me, sounds like the right amount of time to consistently get in the studio, experiment, make work, and bring a minimum of six pieces to completion. Now remember, I'm going through this process as I'm filming this course. So you're getting to see from lesson to lesson how I am actually applying these tools and techniques in my own studio to work on my own project. So the next element, my desired audience, people I'm hoping to connect with are people who are kindred spirits, who are curious. So I have a description of the type of person. I really want my work to connect with people who are curious, people who are interested in self-reflection and introspection. And I try and get as detailed as possible with my project intent, you'll find a description of the effect that I'm hoping my work has on other people. Now one thing you'll notice here is that I've actually divided my tasks into different phases. So for this project plan, I have 11 different tasks, and each task falls into one of three phases. Now, this isn't something you're required to do and I don't do this for every project, but it seemed to make sense for this project. So phase one is research and preparation. So the tasks in this first phase actually includes skill acquisition, research, and materials. So although sometimes those can be separate sections and a project plan for here it seems pretty natural default these into the tasks and timelines section. So remember, there's no single correct way to do a project plan. You want to be able to create a project plan with the sections and organization that makes sense for your project. So phase one of my tasks and timelines section is research and preparation. Phase two is all about creating the next generation of prototypes and getting feedback. Anytime I think I need to make additional prototypes and get additional feedback, I always put that into my project timeline. Both of those things take a lot of time and that time should be accounted for. As I mentioned earlier on in this course, as I'm getting feedback at this time around, I'm not just going to get feedback from other creative professionals. I'm going to try and seek out the type of people that I'm trying to connect with. So I need to get feedback from people who are not artists, but who I think might be interested in my work to see how it's connecting with them. Again, I need to make space for that and the project timeline because I only have three months and if I don't plan for that, I can easily fall behind schedule. So phase three is all about the fabrication of the final work. Now that section is pretty short for now, this is because I know I'm going through another round of prototypes and another round of feedback will likely learn more along the way. I know for my projects, I often have to add new tasks as I learn more and as I make distinctions. And finally, we have the project launch. Now, I've never created a course like this. I have not generated a project and then gone through the entire process on camera. And as I've mentioned many times before, I don't know how this project is going to turn out. You've seen me come up with ideas and start to work on them and bring them into reality. But at this stage, I don't have any finished work. I don't know if the finished work is going to be successful or not. So you've been through this process with me. You've been with me in my studio, is I've gone through the process of creating this work really from scratch. You were with me when I came up with the ideas for this project. You are with me as I create prototypes and you've been with me as I presented that work to others. Remember, if you're viewing this in the middle of 2022, the work is really not done yet. So here's what I've decided to do. So on June 28th, I'm going to debut a mini documentary that focuses on this project and shows for the first time the completed pieces from this project. So on June 28th, I'm going to be updating this course to include that documentary. If you're viewing this before June 28, 2022, then check back in with this course because on that date, I'm going to debut this mini documentary focusing on the finished work from this project. If you're viewing this after June 28, 2022, this documentary will be there so you can see how this project actually turns out. So hopefully you're interested in seeing the finished work from this project. Not only am I really excited about making this work, but I'm excited about sharing it with you, my students who have been with me through this process. So I hope you can check that out. The final section of my project plan is the additional notes section here I usually record any questions that arise as I'm creating the project. Any notes about things that are unresolved with a project, or any stray ideas that I might want to record but have not yet found a place in the official project plan. So I wanted to take you through some of the thinking behind my project plan as well as provide the plan itself. You could read it and just have an example of what a project plan might look like. But remember, this is not a rigid structure or format. Nearly every project plan I create, it looks a little different depending on the project. And I encourage you to adopt this idea of a project plan to whatever suits your project. So ultimately, my project plan is a document that is designed to help me get into the studio, into consistently move forward with my project. To every time I walk into my studio, I have a sense of what I need to do without a project plan. I contend to be unfocused. It's not like there's anybody here in my studio that's going to make me get to work. I have to do that for myself. And having a project plan is one of the most important tools I have that keeps me focused in the studio. Well, thank you so much for joining me in this video journal. I hope you can take some time and check out my project plan. And remember, I've also included a downloadable project plan worksheet that's there for you to use as a template for your project plan if you feel that would be helpful. Remember, that's just an optional resource. You are welcome to create a project plan in whatever way works best for you. So thank you so much for joining me here in this video journal, and I hope to see you in lesson eight. 17. Designing A Studio System: Welcome to lesson eight, designing a studio system. So for this lesson, as you can see, we are out of my office area and into the main part of my studio. I thought this would be appropriate because this lesson is all about making sure you get into your studio and you do the work necessary to complete your project. Many creative individuals thrived during the beginning of a project. At the beginning of a project there are no rules. Everything is at its maximum creative potential. But as you progress in your project, as you make decisions, the window for creativity begins to close. Now of course, to move forward in our projects, we have to make decisions. But every decision we make cuts off other creative possibilities. The more and more decisions we make, the less and less opportunity there is for creativity. And once the project has been completed, there are no other opportunities for creativity within that project. It's done. That project is closed and over. Now this isn't a bad thing. This is just what happens when we complete a project. This is the inevitable path of every creative project that gets finished. Although the opportunities for creativity in a particular project may come to an end, there are always new creative projects on the horizon. But as a project progresses, as more and more decisions are made, a project can start to feel less like creative play and more like work. And in order to complete creative projects, we need to be able to get into the studio and do the necessary work regardless of whether it's fun or not. So in order for you to not only begin creative projects, but to bring them to completion, you not only need to be creative, you need to be conscientious, you need to feel a deep sense of responsibility to complete your work at a high level of quality. And you need to be willing to do whatever it takes in order to do that. Many creative people assume that if they love their creative work, they'll just naturally make time for it in their life and that getting into the studio will come easy. But the reality is far more complicated. With most traditional jobs, you have accountability, you have a boss, you have co-workers, you have deadlines and expectations set by your employer. You have external pressure to work. You have positive rewards like financial compensation, prestige promotions, awards. And you also have negative motivators. Things like reprimand, ridicule, and in extreme situations, termination or even poverty. Many people pursue a creative career in order to rid themselves of these dynamics. But when you get rid of these external forces that compel you to work, you also get rid of many of the reasons you ever showed up and got any work done at all. We all like to think of ourselves as being able to work outside of these conditions. But let me tell you, this is one of the hardest aspects of having a creative career. So let me share with you one of the harsh realities of doing creative work. This may not be true in all cases, but it's certainly true in mind. And I think it's true for most people, nobody but you cares whether or not you make your creative work. No one but you cares whether or not you make it into your studio. In fact, you may get pressure from well-meaning family and friends to let go of your creative hobbies and pursue something more practical. You make it pressure to hang out with friends or family instead of going to the studio. Now I know this may sound a bit pessimistic, but you need to be prepared for the reality of creative work. So many of us do creative work when it's fun, when it feels like creative play. But as soon as it feels more like work, many of us abandon our projects. Beyond your own desire to do creative work. There are very few incentives for you to get into the studio, and you may experience an intense amount of pressure to give up on your creative passions and assimilate with the rest of society. This was certainly my story. So this lesson focuses on how to consistently get you into your studio to do the work necessary to bring your project to completion, whether it's fun or not. So now I'm going to share some strategies that have worked for me and that have worked for many other creative professionals. Now if you're already getting into your studio and completing creative projects, perhaps this lesson isn't for you, but I think for most people myself included, we could refine and improve some of our studio habits. So the first thing I recommend doing is assessing your current studio habits. How often do you get into the studio? How long do you tend to stay at the studio? What are the things that keep you from the studio tends to distract you in the studio once you're there. By assessing your current studio habits, you can be honest with yourself about where you are in your studio practice and you can hopefully identify some areas of improvement. Next, describe your ideal studio life. I want you to create a compelling vision for yourself. Describe how often you'd ideally like to get into the studio. Ideally, how long you'd like to be at the studio during each studio session. Ideally, how would you behave once you're there? What would your workflow look like? I want you to create a compelling vision of your ideal studio life. Something to inspire you, a vision that pushes you toward your best creative self. Now you probably won't be able to live up to this ideal, but it's important to have something to strive for. So once you have an inspiring vision for your best creative self, I want you to design a studio schedule. I think the best way to do this is to figure out how many days a week that you want to get into the studio, how long you want to spend it the studio during each session and why you want to accomplish while you're there. One of the reasons I think this is so important is because it's so easy for studio time to be leftover time. So many of us wait to get into the studio until all of the other aspects of life are handled. Whatever time we have leftover after everything else in our life, then we get to the studio. This means that our creative life is in reaction to every other aspect of our life. We want to reverse that dynamic. I cannot tell you how many aspiring creative professionals I know that complain that they never have time to get into their studio. But I also see them spending hours a week on social media or spending many nights a week out drinking with friends or clubbing, or they spend hours a week streaming TV shows and movies. All of this time, could be studio time. Now I'm not saying you can never do these things. I'm merely trying to suggest that at least some of the time you're spending on these other aspects of your life could be better spent at the studio. It's really up to you to figure out what's right for your life. But my guess is that you can identify some of your current habits that aren't ideal for your studio life. Ask yourself if somebody were observing your life. If they were watching how you spend your time and where you put your energy after observing you, would they determine that getting into the studio was an absolute priority for you or would they find that studio time was not as big of a priority to you? So if the majority of your studio time is just your leftover time, you're unlikely to complete creative projects. You want to have a studio schedule that you are committed to adhering to. At the end of the week, you can look back and say, did I get into the studio enough? If you didn't show up to the studio on certain days you were scheduled to or if you left early, you will know objectively that you're not getting into the studio enough, but you want to be able to be honest with yourself and find a balance. And at times you may need to choose between the studio and other things that are important to you. Now once you design a studio schedule, you can always adjust it to fit your life, but I think it's essential to have one. So you always know whether or not you are on track and adhering to your studio schedule. Now for some people showing up to the studio at all can be a real struggle. So if that's the case for you, Here's a strategy you can use after designing your studio schedule. The only thing you need to commit to is showing up at the studio on time at whatever days that you are scheduled to, to start. Once you're at the studio. You don't even need to do anything. Just show up on time on the days your scheduled, even if you only stay there for 5 min, once you establish the habit of showing up to the studio, you can build upon that. For so many people, The hard part is just showing up. So establish that habit first, then you can start to stay longer and longer in the studio and accomplish more and more things. But if you're really struggling to get into the studio, develop the habit of first just showing up. That habit is installed, built upon it. The rest will come. Never underestimate the power of starting small and building up to something. Next. Once you have a studio schedule and once you're consistently getting into the studio, I highly recommend having a daily task list. I try to never go to the studio unless I know what I need to accomplish while I'm there. So every morning when I wake up, I write out a list of tasks that I need to get done in the studio that day. I don't go to the studio until that list of tasks is complete. Now I may not complete every task on the list each day, but I always know what needs to be done. Of course, your daily list of tasks can be derived from your project plan. If I don't have a daily list of tasks, I can get very distracted in the studio, but with a daily list of tasks, I always know how to move forward with whatever project I'm working on. Next, you need to deal with distractions. Distraction is a huge obstacle in the studio, particularly in the age of the Internet. So I recommend attempting to strip your studio space of any distractions. Now I don't know what distracts you, but for most of us, it's the Internet. Now this creates quite a dilemma because so much of what we do now is on computers. So one thing that you can do is set up controls on your phone or computer only allow you to access certain websites at certain times. For many years, I intentionally did not have Internet at my studio just because I found it way too distracting. But of course, the Internet isn't the only distraction in the world. So you need to figure out what your distractions are and try and remove as many of them as possible from your studio environment. Now I know that if your studio is the corner of a room in your house, or maybe just a section of table or countertop. You may not be able to remove all distractions, but it's at least worth thinking about. Next. Always have a deadline. One of the most effective studio strategies for me is to always have a deadline that I am working toward. Even if it's self-imposed, this could be a feedback session. It could be an art opening. It could be a date that you need to get something to a publisher. It could be a commitment to post work on social media on a particular day. If you don't have external deadlines from a gallery or a publisher, make deadlines for yourself and endeavor to stick to them. Having deadlines will keep you consistently moving forward with your project. If you don't have any deadlines built into your studio life, you will almost certainly procrastinate. Deadlines create a positive pressure for us to work. Remember, a deadline doesn't have to be the completion of a project. It can be steps along the way. This is why it's so important that your project plan contains a list of tasks as well as a timeline. So deadlines are an incredibly effective tool to keep you moving forward toward the completion of your creative projects. Now this brings me to my next strategy. Be accountable to others. If you're only deadlines are self-imposed. No one but you will ever know if you fail to meet them. Most of us are much more comfortable failing privately rather than failing publicly. But we want to leverage this to our advantage. So instead of keeping your deadlines to yourself, announced them publicly, involve other people in your deadlines. Feedback sessions and project launches naturally bring other people into your creative process. So scheduling regular feedbacks can be a great way to have a deadline where you're accountable to other people in a public project launch is an excellent way for you to stick to a deadline. Then when I say a public project launch, it doesn't need to be anything dramatic, even if you only want your project to a few family members or friends, that's enough as long as other people have an expectation that you're going to accomplish something by a specific date, you will often feel more motivated to stick to that deadline so you don't keep your deadlines to yourself, involve other people, hold yourself accountable to others. So I've shared with you some of the most powerful strategies that have worked for me. But of course not every strategy will work for every individual. It's up to you to figure out what strategies and habits you need to adopt in order to get yourself into your studio to produce high-quality creative work and complete your projects. This may require some adaptation of these strategies and you may need to experiment to figure out what works for you beyond the strategies I've shared. But if you're struggling to consistently get into the studio and produce work their first, try these strategies as they are presented here. Then if you need to adapt them, you can, if you need to experiment further, you can start here with all of this in mind. Let's get you to your task for this lesson. Starting with the strategies in this lesson, I want you to design and implement your studio system. To do this, first, assess your current studio habits. Next, write about and describe your ideal studio life. Then design a studio schedule that you're committed to sticking to before each studio session. Create a task list so you always know what you want to accomplish once you're in the studio. Minimize the distractions in your studio. Remove as many distractions as you possibly can. Always be working toward a deadline. Once you have a deadline, make them public, hold yourself accountable to others. Feedback sessions and project launches will provide both a deadline and accountability to others. And finally, do your own experimentation. See what works for you. See if you need to adapt to these strategies. And if necessary, do your own research to find other strategies that may help you refine and improve your studio habits. Now we know this is a lot, but this is such an important topic and it's so common for creative people to overlook this essential aspect of creative life. Of course, in the next video, I'm going to take you through my studio system. So please join me for the next video journal where I'm going to bring you into my studio and talk about the specific ways that I apply these strategies to my studio of life. So I hope to see you there. And after you watch the video journal for less than eight, I hope to see you in the final lesson of this course, which will focus on how to bring your projects to completion and how you can adapt everything you've learned in this course to best meet your studio needs. And I hope to see you there. 18. Designing A Studio System Video Journal: Hi, welcome to the video journal for Lesson eight. In this video journal, I'm going to take you through my own studio practices to try and give you a sense of how I apply the skills and strategies that you just learned to my own studio practice. Now if you've taken any other courses with me, you likely know that I really don't share much about my personal life. I usually don't share much about my own personal story or how I got to where I am. But I think in this lesson, some of my story might be irrelevant and might be useful to you. So I'm going to guess that if you're going through this course, you're probably earlier on in your creative career than I am now. In addition to sharing how I'm applying the skills and strategies to my current studio practice. I'm also going to share how I have applied them earlier on in my creative career. I've actually used the tools and techniques that I'm going to share with you to build a creative career that has allowed me to support myself and my family. And in case you're wondering, I don't come from a wealthy family far from it. In fact, in my early 20s, I actually lived out of my car on the streets of Los Angeles for a number of months. I was technically homeless, but I was able to use the same skills and strategies that I'm teaching you to build a creative career. Now, I learned these skills and strategies the hard way through trial and a lot of error. So my hope in sharing with you some of my own personal story is that you can learn these skills and strategies without having to go through all of the trial and error that I have so that you can put these skills and strategies to use sooner in your life. I arrived at these skills and strategies by experimenting in my own life, suffering the consequences of trying things that didn't work. So what I'm trying to share with you here are the things that I wish that I would've learned sooner. I think my creative career likely would have been more successful earlier on in my career if I had known and have been able to consistently apply the skills and strategies that I'm trying to teach you. My path has not been a straight line. I have struggled considerably at many points in my life. I certainly don't want to give you the impression that I've got everything figured out. I don't I am a deeply flawed individual who has made many mistakes in life, but I have learned from those mistakes throughout my life. I've tried so many ways to make a creative career work. Some things I've tried have worked wonderfully, others have not worked at all. There have been times I've been so frustrated where I stopped pursuing a creative career, but I was always pulled back into the studio. And I think that's part of why I've been able to succeed in this field. This is what I've always wanted to do, and I have put more time and energy into building a career in the arts than anything else in my life. This video journal is all about developing strong studio habits and sharing with you how I have solved some of the same problems that you are probably experiencing. So since we're talking about my studio strategies and habits, Let's start here by talking about my studio. My studio is in a 2000 square foot house that I own. My studio serves as not only a place for me to create things, to draw things, to make things, but to also be inspired to learn to research. My studio contains a number of functional areas. I have two light controlled rooms where I do all kinds of photography, ranging from photographing models for my figure drawing, filming, drawing demonstrations, and of course, photographing the dioramas that you've seen me work on in this course. Behind me here you can see one of my drawing stations, an easel and iPad stand, and a number of drawing supplies. I also have a station for cutting and building things. Here is where I do everything from building models to cutting and matting drawings. Now in addition to these functional spaces, I also have some inspirational spaces. So my studio contains a pretty sizable library of books. Whenever I'm looking for inspiration or just to learn more about art, I spend a lot of time going through these books. I'll often go through the same books over and over again, looking for ideas, looking to see how other artists and designers have solved creative problems and trying to expand my idea of what art and design can be. So I'm very fortunate to have a sizable studio with a lot of resources. But as I mentioned before, this is absolutely not how I started out. I had to work my way up to a studio like this for the majority of my life, my art studio, if it can be called, that was just a corner of a room or a section of wall where I could pin up a piece of paper and draw. They were only Studios in the technical sense of I made art there, but they were not dedicated art studios when I was living out of my car, the only place I had to draw was a small sketchbook. It was portable than I could bring it wherever I want it to go, but that was my studio at the time. I've had many studios throughout the years. I've worked out of spare rooms, converted garages. I've occasionally rented spaces and old buildings, and for a number of years I even kept his studio at a museum. But no matter where I was living or what I was doing with my life, I nearly always tried to keep a consistent place to work, even if it was just a sketch book and a few pencils that I carried around in my shoulder back. You really can accomplish wonderful things in very modest studio spaces. So don't get too caught up in the idea that you need a big studio in order to make creative work. If you are early on in your creative career, just make do with whatever space you have to work in. Make the best work you can with the resources that you have and work up from there. That's what the majority of creative professionals have done. So now that we've talked a little bit about Studios, Let's move to task lists. Now I wake up every morning at about 530. I'm the first one up at my house and it gives me a couple of hours to myself. So I get up, I make some coffee, and I immediately sit down to write. I write every single morning. Sometimes I write about events going on in my life. Other times I write about creative problems I'm trying to solve. Sometimes I write about ideas I'm interested in, but regardless of what I write about each morning, I always end my writing session by creating a daily task list. And my daily task lists are usually derived from the project plan of whatever project I happen to be working on in. I am almost always immersed in some ongoing project. So I've written every morning on and off for years, the times that I have not started my days by writing about my life and figuring out my tasks. I have not been great times in my life. It's amazing how such seemingly simple acts can provide so much meaning and structure. So right now in my life, I write every morning and I create a daily task list every morning. So this is a pretty simple concept and I cannot recommend it enough if you're able to try and start each day by writing about your life, you can write about any aspect of your life and conclude that writing session by creating a list of things that you want to get done that day. This has worked wonders both in my creative life and in my personal life. And it's so easy to adopt. So now let's shift to my studio schedule. Right now. I usually make it to my studio 9-10 am. I stay there until lunch, at which point I head home. I come back after lunch. I stay there until dinner time, and then I come back to the studio after dinner and try and spend at least an hour or two more there. I do this six days a week. All in all, I spend about 6 h at the studio each day. If I am in the middle of a pretty intensive projects, I can spend up to 10 h in the studio each day. So it really depends on when I have going on. But again, I think here my earlier experiences might be more relevant to more useful. So I got my first job when I was 15 years old and I've been pretty consistently employed since then. I've worked all kinds of jobs. Most of them have not been very glamorous. I've delivered pizzas, I've worked in warehouses. I've done telemarketing, I've done door-to-door sales. I even worked at Disneyland for awhile. The few years I spent in college, I actually had four jobs to make ends meet. And of course, because college is so expensive, even then I couldn't make ends meet. But despite almost always having at least one job, I've tried to find time to get into the studio even if I could only make it in an hour a week. Now, if you remember in the previous lesson, I talked to you about the idea of leftover time. You don't want your studio time to just be your leftover time. And the reason that I think this is so important is because I have had periods of my life where the only time I was getting into the studio was my leftover time. I did not advance in my career and I ended up wasting a huge amount of time. Which brings me to a pretty important concept when you're trying to develop a studio schedule. Sacrifice, building a creative career is a lot of hard work and most people don't make it in this field. So if you have any ambition of becoming a creative professional, you need to be willing to sacrifice. You need to be willing to get into your studio, even as you have friends begging you to come out drinking with them, you need to be willing to stay off social media unless it's absolutely necessary. You need to be willing to prioritize getting into the studio above nearly every other aspect of your life. Now, as hard as it can be to make sacrifices for your creative career. I will say overall, I felt better about my life when I was making sacrifices. I felt better about myself. I felt better about who I was becoming. The times when I wasn't making sacrifices, when I was going out with friends a lot more or engaging in other kinds of activities. I had more fun in my life. I didn't have as deeper sense of meaning and overall, I was just happy with my life. Now of course, you need to be able to find the right balance for your life. But I know at least for my life when I was not consistently getting into the studio, I felt a sense of guilt or shame. I knew that I wasn't using my time in a meaningful way. I knew that I was focusing more on having fun rather than getting into the studio and having meaningful experiences there. The reason that I've been able to build the creative career that I have is because of the times that I showed up to the studio consistently. And yes, it's hard, but it is absolutely worth it. Studio time must come from somewhere and until you have the creative career you want that pays the bills, you'll likely need to have a job that you're working to support yourself and the time outside of that job, you need to make a decision about what's important to you. And if getting into the studio is not as important as other aspects of your life, you're likely not going to hit a point where you can have a creative career that pays your bills and maybe that's not your goal and that's fine. But I'm just trying to give you a realistic sense of what it takes to succeed in the arts. So by having a studio schedule, a specific number of days that you get into the studio, and a specific number of hours that you stay there. At the end of each week, you will always know if you've spent enough time in the studio without a studio schedule, it becomes pretty easy to congratulate yourself if you only show up for an hour a month. Now, you may be at a point in your life where you really only have an hour a month to get into the studio. And if so, that's okay. But I'm really trying to get you to think about how much time you actually could spend in the studio if it was the most important thing in your life. When you work from that perspective, you may see your time in your schedule a little bit differently. So now let's shift over to talking about distraction. So like most people, my biggest distraction in the studio and in life generally is the Internet. I've tried to take some pretty extreme measures to limit my time spent online. So first, when I come into my studio, I actually drop-off my phone in the entryway, so it's not in my pocket constantly buzzing and calling for my intention. I also have some pretty strict controls that I set up on my computer that limit which websites I can go to and at what times. Now these controls are protected by a code that I don't have. I actually have to call somebody and have them come over to my studio to input the code. If I want to visit some of these distracting websites, tony takes a lot of effort for me to distract myself here. So when we're talking about social media sites and video streaming sites, if you don't already know this, you should. Sites like these are designed to keep you there as long as possible. These kinds of sites are killers of creativity in focus. Now hopefully you're already aware that social media sites in particular are highly correlated with increases in anxiety, depression, and even suicidality. Online saying you can never be on these sites. But again, it's worth considering how much time you're spending on social media platforms and how much of that time could go towards studio time. It's also worth considering how much of your studio time is interrupted by social media sites. Now, as always, it is up to you to figure out what balance you want to achieve in your life. But at least want to bring this to your attention and acknowledge how destructive our online lives can be in our creative and personal lives. So when I get to my studio, I've tried to strip away as many distractions like these as possible. My goal is that when I arrive here, there's really not that much to do besides learn or work. So that's what I do when I'm here. There's nothing else to do. So now let's shift over to deadlines and accountability. So as I shared with you in the previous video, I always have an upcoming deadline. My deadlines are usually either project launches or feedback sessions. So when I was just starting off in my creative career, one of the things I would do is go to every coffee shop in town and ask them if I could set up a day to display some of my artwork. Most of them said no, but some of them said yes. So I started off just hanging my drawings and coffee shops. Once I developed a good relationship with a particular coffee shop, let me show my work. They're pretty regularly. So this gave me a lot of experience creating work and finishing it by a deadline. And by having the public coming to view it, I could really get a sense of how they were receiving the work, what they thought about it, how it was impacting them. So art openings at coffee shops lead to art openings at restaurants. First it was more casual restaurants and then fine dining restaurants. From there I started getting some gallery shows and eventually I was able to show my work in museums. But again, I didn't start there. I started very small. I started off by just hanging a few drawings and his small coffee shop. So if you decide to go this route, you should know that I faced a lot of rejection. Most people said no. But at some point, getting your work shown is just a numbers game. The more people you approached to show your work, the more likely you are to get a yes. And it's great experience to bring your work out into the world, presented to people to see what they say. So even if it's a small deadline, you should always have one. You should always have some kind of a venue to present your work to the public. Now, if I'm being honest, there are deadlines that I failed to meet. I've taken commissions and my work was not well received by paying clients. These are experiences you're likely to have, but they're important experiences. Once you feel the guilt or shame of disappointing a paying client, you will do nearly anything to avoid that field. So it pushes you to create better work. So I don't look at these bad experiences as utter failures. They were instructive, they were difficult, but I learned a lot from them. And if you want to succeed in this field, you'll need to go through those experiences too. So another thing I've done is I've always had feedback sessions in the past. I've really enjoyed and fighting over a few close friends, supplying drinks and food and presenting my work to them. And these ended up being great night. It's, it's a really amazing thing to bring people together around your creative work, even if they don't like it, you can see how it impacts them and you will learn so much from these experiences. So hopefully this has given you a sense of how I apply these strategies to my own studio life and how I apply them earlier on in my career. So the last thing I want to leave you with is that these are the exact skills and strategies that I used to go from literally being homeless to having a substantial creative career that supports my whole family. These skills and strategies work. I'm pretty confident that I would have found success in a creative field much sooner had I known about these skills and strategies earlier on. Remember, I had to figure these out through trial and error, but you have the benefit of learning from my mistakes and my experiences. Now again, you may need to do some supplementary research to figure out what works for you. So if you want a creative career, you don't need to come from money. You don't need an expensive degree. You don't need talent, whatever that is, but you need is a good work ethic and goods studio strategies to keep you always moving forward, creating work, in getting that work in front of the eyes of others so you can see what impact it really has. Every project you complete, you'll learn and you'll know more for the next project. And if you keep with it and have a singular focus, you're far more likely to be able to build the creative career that you want, whether that means financial success or just being able to make the work that you love. Well, thank you so much for being here with me and I will see you in the next video where we're going to talk about how to complete creative projects and how to adapt this course to meet your creative needs. I hope to see you there. 19. Completing Your Project: Welcome to Lesson nine, the final lesson in this course. To start off, let me ask you a question. When is a creative project finished? Now, as it turns out, this is a very difficult question to answer. But in this lesson, I'm going to give you some strategies to help you answer it. Now the reality is that any creative project can go on indefinitely. You can drag a seemingly simple project out for years or even a lifetime. You can always find something that you want to change or fix or improve. So many creative people don t think their work is finished until it's perfect, until it's flawless. But the problem is, no creative project is ever perfect or flawless. Trying to achieve this, we'll just make sure your work never gets completed. Or on the other side of the spectrum, some people decide that their work is finished because they don't know what else to do. Or they just get bored or distracted and move on to something else. So I hope you can see that neither of these ways of approaching creative projects will yield high-quality finished work. So what I'm going to give you some strategies that will help you determine when your creative project is finished. So first, let's talk about criteria for completion. So often at the beginning of creative project, it's really not clear what finished means. We may not be familiar enough with the work to really understand what is required to complete it. But as you work on the project, a clearer vision usually comes into focus. We begin to sense when things aren't resolved and we start to develop some ideas on how to resolve them. We start to get a sense of when something needs further work or improvement. So as I'm working, when I make these kinds of distinctions, I always write them down. These are clues as to what finished means for a particular project. This list becomes my criteria for completion. So as I move forward in a project, I tend to add this section to my project plan. So these criteria usually fall into two categories, quality and impact. The quality section includes the technical standards to which the work is held. The impact section focuses on the impact that I want the work to have once my project meets the technical standards that I set for it. And it's having the impact that I want on viewers. I can deem it complete, even if it's not perfect. So let's explore these categories in more detail. Starting with quality. What are the standards to which your work will be held? Now as always, this can vary significantly from project to project. The standards of good work for a painting are very different from those of a book or a piece of clothing. Even if we want to focus in on a specific type of artwork like painting, still, the standards for quality can be very different when we're looking at an abstract painting versus a realistic painting. In a more traditional realistic painting, standards might include things like proper perspective, realistic light logic and color theory, or anatomical accuracy. Any of these things might come into play for a realistic painting. But in an abstract painting, none of these things are particularly important for an abstract painting. We're more interested in expression or dynamic brushwork. So setting the standard for quality for a completed project can be very challenging and it will differ from project to project. It's important to note that a project can be held to incredibly high standards for quality without being hamstrung with a notion of perfection. So one of the best ways that I know to set quality standards for a creative project is to select creative artwork that is similar to yours and use it as a model, use it as a guide. E.g. when I was writing my instructional drawing book, I selected a few books that I thought were of high-quality. They were interesting, they were beautiful, they were well-written, well-organized. My goal was to try to bring my book up to the level of quality of these three books. I chose books that I thought were successful examples of instructional drawing books. And I let those set the standard of quality for my work. Additionally, by having these books as a guide, I could always see how these authors were solving the same problems that I had in my book. I could compare my writing to the writing of these books to see if it was standing up to that level of quality. I tried to have my book B is beautifully and is interestingly designed as these books. Now I want to be very clear here. I'm not suggesting that you copy content, design, aesthetics, or anything else about the work you choose to guide your standards of quality. But what I'm suggesting is that if you find work that you really love and respect, you can use it as a model, as a guide to the level of quality that you want to bring your work up to, even if your work doesn't hit that level of quality. So important to have standards that you want your work to live up to. So as you're selecting work to guide your quality standards, you want to be realistic. You want to model your creative project after work that is at a high level of quality but not unattainable. You don't want to set your standards impossibly high, particularly if your earlier on in your creative career, you want to challenge yourself, but you also want to have the sense that you can achieve the level of quality you're after. So to sum up, when you're trying to set standards for quality for your own work. You can model these standards after the work of others. You can find work that is similar enough to yours that is produced at a high level of quality and adopt similar standards for your own work. One more quick note here. Sometimes when you're creating a project, you may have a very clear vision for what the finished work actually looks like. So if that's the case, and if you feel able to create your own set of standards for quality, that's great. But if you're struggling, this is a great strategy that will help you set standards for your work. So now let's move on to impact. Earlier in this course, I had you create a project plan. In that project plan was a section called Project intent. In that section, you describe the impact that you want your work to have on your desired audience. During the prototyping and feedback sections, you are able to put your work to the test to see if it was really having the impact you wanted on your desired audience. So in trying to figure out whether your project is finished, once again, you want to put it in front of Representative members of your desired audience. Just because the prototypes we're having, the impact you desired doesn't mean the finished work well. So you want to put your nearly finished work in front of the eyes of your desired audience to make sure that it is still having the impact that you want it to. Another reason it's so important to gauge the impact your work has having near the end of the project is because your goals may have changed. Remember, a project plan is a fluid document that is very likely to change as your project evolves. So what are the best ways to figure out if your project is complete is to write out the criteria for completion. So once your work is a rising to the standards that you set for it and it's having the impact that you want. Your work can be finished even if it's not perfect and that's the critical part. Almost no creative work is perfect. This is why perfection should not be our primary goal. We want to produce work at a high level of quality that has the impact that we want. But we need to let go of the project even if it's not perfect. So we can put it out into the world and move on to other creative projects. It's so easy to obsess over tiny mistakes in our work and some of this is fine. I don't want to discourage you from fixing mistakes that you see in your project. But I also want you to acknowledge the trap of perfection that a quest for absolute perfection will mean that your work will almost certainly never be complete. And it's much better to complete a project and get it out into the world. Even if it's not perfect, then to have it be hidden away in your studio, waiting for it to be perfect, because it won't be. As always, the more work you create, the more experience you gain, the better you will get at telling the difference between a mistake that needs to be fixed and an extremely minor flaw that no one is going to notice. But you. Next, let's talk about meeting deadlines. Having high standards for quality is great. But if we're working under a deadline, meeting our criteria for completion may be a challenge. So I'd like to start this discussion by sharing an old quote by Leonardo da Vinci. Vinci said that art is never finished, only abandoned. Now you may have already heard this quote. It's quite famous, but I find that there is a lot of truth in it. So if you have a deadline, particularly if you've made a commitment to others, you should strive to meet that deadline. This means that if you've committed to a gallery opening on a particular date, you need to do whatever you can to make sure that your work is on the wall in that gallery on that date. And very often your deadline will conflict with your criteria for completion. But in order to honor your deadlines, sometimes you need to let the work go even if you don t think it's finished. So I spent many years working at a small art museum in Southern California. I cannot tell you how many times we would have paintings arrive at the museum that we're still wet. I've also seen artists bring their paint or they're drawing tools into the gallery and actually work on finishing pieces minutes before the doors open and guests stream in on opening night. So I am not recommending this strategy, but I'm telling you this to illustrate the point that the work that you see on gallery and museum walls is often not finished in the eyes of the artist, they almost certainly would have made more changes if they had the time. So ultimately, we do the best work we can with the time and the resources that we have. Sometimes a work is done when it hits a deadline. That's just the reality of creative work. Now, although you can't increase the number of hours in a day or the number of days in a week. You can be smart about how you use them. So as I approach it deadline, I'll often go from working 6 h a day to working ten to 12 h a day, seven days a week. Now I'm not saying this is a healthy habit, but I am suggesting that in order to bring your work to a high level of quality, sometimes you need to push yourself past what you're comfortable with, even if it's temporary in the days leading up to an opening, all of my family and friends know that I am not available for anything. I will be in the studio working. Now, of course, you need to be able to find the right balance for your life. Maybe working 12 h a day of the week before an opening doesn't work for your life. That's understandable. Again, I'm not pushing you to do that, but you need to figure out what work you're willing to put into a creative project to bring it up to a high level of quality ball meeting any deadlines you've said, excellence doesn't count for a lot if you can't complete a project. But one of the secrets to creative work is that the more projects you complete, the more likely you are to produce exceedingly high-quality work in the long run. Remember, to make good work, you must make a lot of work. High-quality work is the product of high volumes of work. So to illustrate this, I'd like to share a story. Jerry usemin, a teacher at the University of Florida, ran an interesting experiment with his photography class. One semester, he divided his photography students into two groups. One, he dubbed the quantity group. Students in the quantity group would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. The more work they produced, the better grade they would get. The other group he dubbed the quality group. Students in the quality group were only required to produce a single photograph, but to get a good grade in the class, the photograph had to be nearly perfect. So the quantity group set to work making hundreds of photographs. They were constantly experimented with composition, lighting, subject matter, and anything else you can imagine. The quality group did a lot of theorizing in planning for their single photograph. So you want to guess what happened. The vast majority of the best work came out of the quantity group. Why? Well, they were constantly creating work. They were making mistakes and learning from them. They were making distinctions, figuring out how to refine their work. They were identifying creative problems and solving them. They made hundreds and hundreds of photographs. And with each one of them, they learned, they learned what it meant to make good work. And overall, their work got better and better. They gained an immense amount of experience and honed their skills. For the most part, the students in the quality group each produced a single mediocre photograph. Despite all their theorizing, they didn't have the practical skills to make good work. They didn't have the experience of putting their theories into practice. So this is one of the reasons that deadlines are so important. They force us to complete work. Even if a creative project isn't working well, a deadline forces it to come to a close so we can get on making more work in creating more and more work is the path to creating quality work. Remember, good work is the result of a lot of work. Quality work is the product of a large quantity of work. Good work is arrived at through a process of evolution. With every creative projects we do, we learn, we make mistakes, we make distinctions, we gain experience. And most importantly, we gain the skills and knowledge necessary to eventually create extremely high-quality work. So I often tell my students, when you do a project or even a single piece of artwork that doesn't work out the way you thought. Get excited. You are one-piece closer to a piece of artwork that will work. The lessons and experience gained from each project is then put to work in your next project, and so on and so on. That is the path to quality work. So to wrap up this lesson and this course, I'd like to talk to you about how you can adapt the creative process that I've been teaching for your own creative purposes. So as I've mentioned, the creative process can be messy and mysterious. And what I've taught you in this course is not a rigid system. I've tried to teach you how to use the elements of the creative process. But instead of thinking about this as a rigid step-by-step system, it's better to think of these elements as tools in a toolbox. You can use these tools to solve creative problems as they come up. E.g. ideation is a process you can engage in whenever you need a creative solution for any problem. Anytime you're stuck and you don't know how to proceed, you can engage in the ideation process to seek out new and creative solutions. In this course, we started off with the ideation process, but the reality is it can be used throughout the creative process. I use ideation right up until the very end of a project if I have something I need to solution for. So anytime you're stuck or you need a creative solution to a problem, you should engage in ideation, whether it's at the beginning of your project or near the end, you can use it for big problems or small problems. Now prototyping is a process you can use to test your ideas to see how they're operating in reality, which is a great place to start. Just like ideation, you can use prototyping throughout the creative process because prototypes can range so much in their size, their costs, their complexity, and their function. Prototyping can be used to solve all kinds of problems both big and small. So once again, you should be comfortable using prototyping at any stage in the creative process into test out any idea that you're unsure about. The same thing goes with feedback. In this course, I demonstrated going from ideation to prototyping to feedback. But the reality is, you should seek feedback at every stage of the creative process. In my experience, more feedback is generally better than less. You should seek feedback anytime you want to have a specific impact on your desired audience to test whether or not your work is having the impact you desire. So ideation, prototyping, and feedback are tools that you should use liberally throughout the creative process. Each of them has a function that will help you solve different types of creative problems. When creative problems arise, you have the tools to solve them. So if you are new to creative projects, I recommend going through the creative process as I have taught it here. But as you complete more and more creative projects, I encourage you to adapt to this process. Feel free to change the order. Feel free to add your own elements. Feel free to remove some of the elements that I've taught here if they don't work for your project, remember, the creative process is not a rigid system. The more you work through creative projects, the more you'll discover about how you interface with the creative process. And ultimately your goal is to create a process that works for you in your projects. Your final task is to use your project plan and all of the tools you've learned in this course to complete your project. Now, you may be weeks or even months away from your deadline. But whatever your schedule, you have the tools necessary to bring your project to completion. Now I've tried to pack a huge amount of information into this course. So I would encourage you to go back and review these lessons to make sure you have a good understanding of the elements of the creative process and how best to apply them. So as you know, this is the last official lesson in this course. The final video in this course is a short documentary about the completion of my project. In this final video, you're going to see the finished work for my diorama project and learn more about the process I used to create that work. My hope is that this short film will pull everything together that you've learned in this course and show you the final results of this creative process. It will address the ideas taught in this lesson and try and wrap up everything you've learned in this course. So I would love it if you could join me for this short documentary about the work that you've seen develop in this course. I'd also love to hear any feedback you have about my work. So after you've viewed the short documentary, I'd love to hear your thoughts. And finally, I would like to know how you put this process to work. So if you're taking this course on a platform that allows you to share and interact with me. I would love to see your creative work. So please post and share so I can see what you've created using this process and by sharing your work. This will also help other students to feel brave enough to tackle their own creative projects. Well, again, thank you so much for joining me here. It is truly been a pleasure and I hope to see you in future courses. 20. Phantasmarama Mini Doc: So I call these pieces Fantasm aromas. The word Fantasm aroma is a portmanteau of two words, Fantasm, which is a figment of the mind, and diorama, which is a three-dimensional model that depicts a scene. So these Fantasm, a Rama's attempt to depict scenes from the mind. And more specifically, I think of them as metaphorical depictions of the mind as it searches for meaning. So this project includes a number of ideas and techniques that I've wanted to explore, including collages made for my drawings, dioramas and toy theaters, question based work. And attempting to depict what goes on inside the mind to creating this work has given me the opportunity to really explore the contents of my own mind. And my hope is that it encourages and invites viewers to explore their own minds, to see how they seek meaning, to see how they construct their beliefs. I'm very interested, not in what people believe, but in how they come to believe it. And by investigating the contents of the mind, we have an opportunity to explore how we habitually think, what kinds of questions we habitually ask ourselves. And through this exploration, we have the opportunity to intervene and to alter the way we think and the way we use our minds. Our minds are constantly making pictures, were constantly engaged in conversations with ourselves. And I wanted to do a body of work that dealt with that, that explored that, that attempted to depict the phenomenon of this constant mental production. So everything I do, beacons withdrawal ink drawing is what I do. It's how I think. And as a draftsman, I now have thousands of drawings stored away here at my studio. These drawings are stored away in flat files, in stacks and portfolios. They're all over the place. Their practice drawings, they're demonstration drawings. Some of them were done just for the love of getting to know an object through drawn. None of these drawings are ever going to be exhibited, are sold, but it seems a shame to just throw them out. I wanted to give them new life in a new kind of work. So I began cutting these drawings out to see what I could make with them. So in cutting out a drawing, it becomes almost its own object. When you release it from the confines of the rest of the page, it becomes its own entity. It becomes a free-floating symbol. Now what's interesting about a drawing of an object is that a drawing of, say, an apple doesn't maintain the function of the real thing. You can't eat a drawing of an apple, but it does maintain all of the symbolic and metaphorical power of the actual object. In fact, in some ways, an image of an object makes for a more powerful simple because the function of the actual object is removed. So when we see a drawing of an apple, we don't think to eat it necessarily. But we might think of poisoned apples from fairy tales. We might think of Genesis and the tree of knowledge. Or we might think of golden apples in Greek mythology, we're left with the symbols, ideas, narratives, and stories that the image carries with it. On top of that, I'm drawing of an apple may bring up personal memories as well. So each of these cutout drawings operates like a symbol that has its own meaning, metaphors and narratives. When we start to combine these drawings together, the meaning seems to compound. We get meanings that are more than the sum of their parts. So these cutout drawings are at the root of this work. I started cutting out all of these drawings and combining them in numerous ways. And I was looking for combinations that seems meaningful or significant to me. In many ways, this process of collage mimics the thought process. This is what our minds are doing all of the time. We take our experiences, objects, we come into contact with people we see ideas were introduced to. We take all of these things and we structure them in a way that gives our life meaning, in a way that makes sense to us. Human beings are meaning seeking creatures. That's what we do. We attempt to structure the raw experiences of life into some cohesive idea or narrative in hopes that we find meaning in our lives. I think collage is a very interesting metaphor through which to explore that phenomenon. So instead of simply placing these collages on a flat surface, I wanted to place them within a 3D environment and dioramas seemed like a natural fit for this project. I've always been fascinated with dioramas, whether they be the types of large scale dioramas you see in natural history museums, or the kinds of small-scale dioramas that many of us make an elementary school. Now there's a particular kind of diorama called a toy theater or a paper theater. Now, paper theaters are literally theatrical sets made from paper, in which you have paper cutouts of the characters that you can stage and play act scenes from your favorite stories. In creating these pieces, I was very much thinking about them as mini toy theaters. But instead of depicting scenes from plays, your stories, I was trying to depict metaphorical scenes from the mind as it searches for meaning. So one of the challenges in this project was getting these paper cutouts to stand up so they could be three-dimensional elements. So this project is all about seeking meaning, which means structuring the raw elements of consciousness. And I liked this idea of structure as a visual metaphor. I started creating these wooden screens and scaffolding on which I could have fixed these drawings. These screens and scaffolds are used in this work literally to structure the individual elements and the individual drawings. These screens and scaffold to hold up the drawings and they hold them together, literally structuring these combinations. So instead of hiding them away, I wanted them to be apparent in the final work, I wanted the screens and scaffolding is to provide a visual sense of structure. Using the idea of dioramas in toy theaters meant that I also needed to have a ground plane and a background. And these two are made from drawings. Some of them are more abstract, some of them are more representational. But the effect that I wanted was that these were three-dimensional drawn environments. I wanted to give the feeling of a drawing that you could step into. Now, of course, thought just doesn't happen in images. We also think in language. And often as adults, we tend to think in language even more than we think in images. During the creation of this work, I tried to investigate the contents of my own mind quite a bit. I wanted to get a sense of how I talk to myself of the kinds of questions I was habitually asking myself. Now I've wanted to use questions as a focal point of work for a very long time. In fact, I've had a hobby for years of collecting questions, to have a document on my computer that contains hundreds, if not thousands, of individual questions. These are questions that I find interesting, challenging, compelling, important. For many years. I would often just select a question that struck me as notable or useful during a time of my life. And I would write in response to that. Some of these are questions that I've encountered out in the world. Others are questions that I've written myself because it seemed like they were questions that I needed to be asking myself. I wanted to include these questions in the work. I didn't want the work just to be a passive depiction of what goes on in the mind. I wanted it to be an active exercise in influencing the way that I think when you ask yourself a question, that's such an immediate way to wrangle some control over the chaos of the mind. So often asking yourself the right questions is an incredible way to impact and influence your behaviors and your beliefs. So part of what I wanted to do with this work was have a way to display my collection of questions to commemorate some of the more important or impactful questions that I've asked myself throughout the years. And my hope is that other people might find these questions useful as well. Not every piece has a question, but when thinking about depicting the mind, I knew I wanted to text, I knew I wanted language. And questions seems such a natural fit for this type of work. There's so much art out there that is prescriptive. Their wants us to believe something in particular that wants to influence our thoughts in a particular direction. But I'm much more interested in creating work that asks things, not that tells you things. So once these dioramas are assembled, I photographed them, and then I disassemble them so I can reuse the elements and new pieces. So there is no permanent physical diorama that exists once they're created, they're photographed and then they're taken down. I thought this was an interesting way to work because the dioramas themselves are fleeting. Just as thoughts are fleeting, thought is not a tangible thing. It exists and then it's gone. So I thought this was an interesting way to create these dioramas. They exist for a brief moment, just long enough to be photographed. And then like a thought, they disappear. And the elements in the diorama can then be reused. Again. This is how it works. We combine and recombine all of these ideas swirling around in our head. We combine them in different ways and that's how we come up with new ideas. So I photographed these pieces for both two-dimensional and three-dimensional viewing. So I hope is that I can come out with a collection that people can view using stereoscopic viewers. So that's currently in the works. But until then the pieces are available to seeing they're two-dimensional form. So it's important for viewers to note that this work is a complete experiment. So at this stage, I don't know whether this work is good or not. I'm just experimenting and exploring. Now of course, I love traditional representational drawing, but it can be somewhat limiting when it comes to creative exploration. So a project like this gives me an opportunity to take my traditional drawings and use them in new and interesting ways to be more creative with them, to use them to explore meaning and symbols, rather than just doing a drawing that looks like something else. So my hope is that this work might inspire people to investigate the contents of their own minds, to see how they're using their minds to see how they determine their beliefs and possibly to get involved, to learn to use their minds in new and interesting ways. By thinking about new things, by asking themselves different kinds of questions. To become curious about how they construct meaning insignificance in their lives and to challenge their current meanings. It's so easy to get caught up in thinking that what we believe now, we'll always believable, always be right. But I think for most of us, when we look back, this isn't usually the case. Most people don't believe now what they believed five or ten years ago. Beliefs change, they grow through time and experience, we realize our errors and I think to be to certain about our beliefs is ill-advised. I'm always looking for ways to challenge my beliefs, to grow, to change my way of thinking. And I wanted to create a body of work that celebrated that process.