Transcripts
1. W1 intro: Hi, everybody, and welcome to a week one. And this week we're going to change our mind set. We're going to get ourselves ready to achieve success in. The main thing that we're going to focus on this week is we're gonna figure out what we want to do. It's very important to figure out what we want to do, what we want to accomplish in order to eat, utilize what we learn every other week to achieve that goal. So now you're gonna have to dig deep, dig within yourself and figure out what it is that you want to accomplish. So kind of in this week, we're gonna learn some keys to success, and some things will help us out to achieve success along the way. We're going to discover what are unique superpower is. So what makes us different, what our strength is and how we can differentiate ourselves from everybody else. You're gonna learn about what I call the foresees, which are the different kinds of people that you're going to encounter within your our career on. This will kind of help you along and change your mindset of how you you think how some people you think may be competition are actually not competition there. Actually there to help you out. We're gonna figure out where we're starting from. So we're gonna take stock of everything that you already have and where you are now, including your websites, your background, your education, all that kind of stuff were going to compartmentalize that stuff and figure where that is, because it's easier to figure out where we're going once we know that where we're actually starting from, Uh, we're gonna figure out who's the boss now. Ah, lot of people are going into this thinking about the whole freelance thing and everything being about freelancing and that sort of thing. But the reality is, is some people don't want to do freelance. And some people don't realize that getting freelance jobs is exactly the same as getting a studio job. Um, just with freelance, you do it in war with the studio job. You basically do it once, and then you have a job, and then you can you want. Whereas freelance, all it is is exactly the same. Except you're stacking on more and more and more more. So some people end up going through this and after doing soul searching are gonna end up wanting to get a studio job. And that's cool. Uh, this What stuff will help you out as well. We'll talk about that and then last but not least, we're gonna figure out what we are. Worse. Um, it's kind of talking about kind of a dollar value of what your time's worth and what your abilities air worth. But it's more thinking about what you're worth and what does that mean to the client or your custom or whatever it may be, it's not as easy as saying, Oh, you're worth 50 bucks an hour because you went to university or, um, stuff like that. Okay, it's ah, it's a lot more in depth in that, So we're gonna get right into it. I hope you enjoy everything. As always, leave a comment down below. If you haven't kind of figured out yet, each week, they're gonna have a set of videos for you to do a sort of worksheets for you to fill out in this week. Particular the worksheets come at the very end. If you want it down with them now and put the mo and start looking at them before you reach the other videos. That's cool. You can do that totally. And you can start thinking about stuff or start jotting stuff down. What? You're doing the videos. Um, you'll also find the files down below where you can take the files with you. So if you want to listen to this whole thing as kind of like a podcast or something like that, you can download the audio files, take it with you on a bus or streetcar or whatever you want to go. Put it on your head phones. Listen to it. This is yours to listen to and do as many times you want. So it's not just a one shot deal. You can do it many times as you want. This content will be here for you. Um, I really would love it if you guys, if you like what you're learning and all that stuff, please leave a comment. Don't let me know if you have any questions. Please feel free to get in touch with either myself or Mitch again. I hope you enjoy everything. I hope your duty ass stick and I will see you in the next video.
2. W1 Keys to Success: Hello, everyone. In this video, I'd like to offer you a few key pieces of information that will not only help you in this program, but in your career in general and even in your day to day life, I hope you enjoy it on. Let's get right into it. Hello, everyone. And welcome to the first video of week one. This one is all about the keys is success. And these are little tidbits that I'd like to give out so that you can help you achieve success not only in your career and in this program, but you can use it in different parts of your life to these things. Kind of go for everything of little tidbits that you can incorporate into what you do to achieve success. So in this video, what we're gonna do is we're gonna learn how to set a proper goal to achieve success. So there's a big difference. A lot of people what they think is the goals and actually having a dream of goals a little bit different. I classified a little bit different, so we're gonna talk about those differences and we're gonna learn how to pick a goal that we can not only achieve but will help us achieved to the next level and set more goals as we go along the way. The next thing we're going to talk about is the difference between being professional artist and being an amateur hobbyists artist. There's no positive or negative here. Everybody has their own idea of what they want to actually do, and and I'm only bringing it up because there's kind of differences between how the to actually work and whatever to you Choi, whatever your choices and what you want to do, that's great. Your choice is your choice on. I'm just going to talk about the differences later on when we're talking about certain things that you know what I'm talking about. When I mentioned professional versus a hobbyist, are there that sort of thing? They're just kind of the terms that I like to use. The next is we're gonna learn how to get out of our own way on and go before we're ready. If you're like me, I always think that I'm not ready and my portfolio is not good enough, and I always had that mindset. But the reality is, is you're probably more ready than it is before you think you're ready. So we're gonna learn some key aspects to that sort of thing. Teoh. Help us get it a little closer to our goals and achieve things a little faster. And last but not least, we are going to learn that there's more choices for a career than we could possibly imagine . There's lots of things that we overlook that we can do with our career and lots of aspects of the art world that we don't usually think about when we kind of put the blinders on. Just look straight ahead at what we want to actually accomplishing, not seeing the shades of gray. Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna learn how to set proper goals to achieve success. So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to decide what kind of career you want. What do you looking for? So you can say, Oh, I want to be, ah, excess sex bull artist, or I want to be a successful concept artist or, you know, whatever it is, whatever your career is, I want you to write it down. Ah, and then we'll move on and we'll keep building on that to set the proper goal. So now that you know what you kind of want to do, I want you to visualize what it actually is. So the best thing that I find you can do is the find example of somebody who's already accomplished that and kind of used them as a model to visualize what it is. And I want you to start recording every aspect of what that career is. Um, you know, and started getting in the specifics we'll talk about theres in a sec, e. I really want you to get specific with this and what you want to accomplish and just be laser focused and know exactly what it is you want to do. So, you know, if you say all I want to be a successful artist, Well, what kind of artist do you wanna do? Do you want to work in books? Do you want to work in comic books? Do you want to be a medical hardest? Do you wanna, you know, do Children's books or whatever it is you want to kind of be as specific it focused as possible. That way, we're not wasting a lot of time doing the things that we don't want to do. We are specific and start taking steps did move forward and do achieving what is we actually want to do? This is a great salary test for looking at our daily things that we do each day and seeing if they align with the goal that we wanted a cheese. But they don't really help you get any closer to what that is. Then you know, you have to ask yourself whether those air actually worth doing or not. Now, what I want you to do is I want you to take all that and I want you to add a quality metric to it. So you say you want to be, ah, book artists and you want to, you know, do Children's books. Well, that's great. Now we start asking what it is you that you want to do. Do you wanna, um, you know, have 1000 new likes on Facebook? Do you want toe achieve a certain salary? Do you want Oh, you know, make $50,000 a year. $100,000 a year, whatever it is, Or do you want just the respect of your peers And how do you quantify that? So what I want you to do is actually add, ah, way to qualify. What it is that you want to do This allows you to not only have something to shoot for, but a health has somebody something to measure your success against. So you can even use, you know, things like Facebook likes are for things like that. If that's the metric that you want to actually use, um, we'll talk a little bit about it later, but it just is an aside when I ask people what what it is they want to dio. I've asked this to hundreds of students that I've I've taught. I can usually put each thing into three different things. It's either that they want make a certain amount of money. They either want, um, you know, people to like their work. Or they want respect from their peers, usually every gold that people say usually get fit. And one of those 3/4 categories. So whatever one makes more sense to you, she's a metric that meets that that you that you actually want to achieve, and next, I want you to set a timeline. So you know, it's great to say that you want to be a successful artist, but that doesn't tell me what do you want to accomplish that within the next six months? Within a year, Two years, 10 years, 20 years? It doesn't really get specific. Enoughto say that you've actually achieved it or you haven't achieved it. So what? I really want you to do it at that time aspect to it, and that'll give you something to shoot for as well as something the measure for especially if you're trying to get towards something, you'll know whether you're actually accomplishing it or not. Maybe that will give you the kick in the butt. You need to get to the next level. And lastly, what I want you to do is I want you to set a consequence. So there's nothing that gets you moving toward your goal more than knowing that there some repercussion that you're not going to achieve your goal. Great things for this is, you know, makeup that with somebody, make it bright with your brother or sister is saying you know I'm going to get, uh, 1000 likes on art station. Or, you know, I'm gonna make $50,000 or I'm going to give you my X box, or I'm gonna donate certain amount of charity or or things like that. You want to find somebody that can keep you accountable and kind of kick your butt into actually achieving your goal. I always suggest everyone to get a mentor. Mentors there. Great, even a coach to help you with certain things, reach out toe people. Teoh, you know, kind of answered some questions for you and actually help motivate you and see, you know, push you along because if you try and sit around and do this by yourself, you're probably not actually gonna accomplish your goal, especially if you don't tell anyone what it is. You want to achieve that, then you're more likely to just push it to the side and be like, Oh, well, no one knows about it, so they don't know if I I did it or I failed. Um, there's a resource down below that I really want you to check out if you, ah are kind of don't want to bring in any of your friends or family or anything into this whole thing. It's Ah, it's a website called Stick. What it does is it allows you to set goals, and you can post on those goals and trying to achieve those goals. If you don't, you can actually set it up to Dio a monetary donation, Teoh charity or something of that nature. But another thing that they office kind of cool is it's actually you can set it up to donate amount to an anti charity, so it's basically a charity that's has the complete opposite views of what you have. So you know it's going to kick your butt a little bit more because you're going to be like , I don't really don't want to give those people money like I really do not want to give those people money. So I'm gonna do everything I can. Did not fail Michael, and that's what you really want to do is you want to make sure that you set a goal that that's probably just out of what you think is reachable. That way. You push yourself a little further than you need Teoh and something that you know, they you don't want to Not dio. So that way you you're not constantly pushing that goal back and back because we've all set goals where it's like, you know, I want to lose £10 by ah month from now and then a month from now comes by and you haven't done. And you're like, OK, we'll do that next month. That's what You don't want to do that with your career. You want this to happen. You want this to happen now or at least start moving towards that goal now? Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about is professionals vs your amateur hobbyists. Artists, Um, just right off the bat. What I classify the is a professional is someone to basically makes their whole living off creating art and the amateur professionals. More people that you know, want to do art in their free time. They have another job, and they they want to make money on their free time through art. So it's not basically basing your whole life on actually creating are and there's something to be said Teoh as starting as an amateur heart copyist and then moving towards professional, But what I really want to get across is being a professional to me, as a state of mind. There's lots of different classifications that people have of what it actually being a professional is whether it's, you know, actually making any money of what you're doing are having school credentials or anything of that nature. But to me, being a professional is you sitting down being like I want to do this. I want to be a professional artist. I want to do this. Let's do it and you making that connection in your head saying I'm going to do this because reality is you don't have to go to art school. You don't have to learn from other people. You don't have to do any of that stuff. You just have to decide that this is what you're gonna dio and start moving in that direction and start doing it. Um and then you are actually that so if you want to be professional, be professional, that's all there is to it now. One of the differences between the two is especially when it comes to our is professionals show up and do the work because they have to. There's a lot of times where you know you can show up one day and you're not feeling creative. So if you're kind of a hobbyist or amateur, you could say, you know what? I'm going to come back to this and and, you know, try it tomorrow or whatever. You know, this piece isn't working for me. I'm just gonna kinda put it to the side for a while and come back to it when I feel more fresh because we all started drawing for ourselves and we'll started just doing the creative process for ourselves. So for some people, they can't they can't do the connect wears when your professional and you have work to dio , you got to do that work and you're not gonna get paid, which means you're not gonna eat, which means you're not gonna pay. Your bills are, you know, feed your family, especially if you have people depending on you, that sort of thing. So you have to find ways to get through the work and do the work, whether you're feeling in the mood or creative or not. So that's one of the big differences is you know, you may not feel that that touch of creativity that day. But you still have to show up and you still have to put in the work, and you still have to move forward and and put out a decent product. The next thing you want to do, they're being professionals. You want to act a professional on everything you do that includes sending her emails. Um, you know the word, the way you talk to people, the way that everything you have a set up should look professional, shouldn't look amateur. Whether it's your website, you know, your email address or on any of that stuff will talk about the specifics of it later. But, um, you know your email address if you're trying to get work, shouldn't be Nirvana Lover 78 at Gmail. If you want to be professional and you want to be taken seriously, the professional and get paid is a professional than all that stuff needs to be in line, you know. So like Facebook and Twitter and all that stuff, it may seem dull, but all that stuff is taken to account specially Now it's very easy. Look cool somebody and find all that stuff. So if you want to be taken seriously as a professional, you gotta start acting like it. And that means acting like in everything you dio. But again, it's a mindset. It's do you saying Hey, I want to do this. The next thing is, um, I talked about this a bit briefly. This is the money, respect or fame thing. Um, so when you kind of like Seo what I wanted what I want to accomplish with my career, you can have all three, or you can have one. But everything kind of fits into at least one of these categories. Um, which is great. But what I say is, and less money is one of the options. Then you're probably not going to be able to turn your career as a professional artist. You could have money and respect. You could have money and fame. You can have money, respect and fame. But if you just have respect and fame, or just respect or fame, um, you're not paying the bills, so respect and fame are great, but they don't pay the bills. So what you kind of got to do is you gotta, um, if you want those things. If you want the respect or you want the fame, you have to find a way to parlay that into theatrical money aspect. So you know, it's it's kind of a weird thing to turn art about money. But if your art is gonna be your career, you really have to think of it as a business and have it actually generate money. So maybe use your fainted to get people to buy into your projects that you're doing are even down to like donating money on patri honor. You know, that sort of thing are getting grants are that sort of thing. There has to be a money aspect of it. It's sad that that's the way our world works, but that has to be there, or you really don't have yourself as any sort of professional business or career e. I always like to say, um, make our today make money tomorrow, So that's one of things that I think about is being a professional is all the art that I create needs to find a way to kind of generate money from that heart? Um, or it's kind of more of a hobby piece so if I'm just creating art for myself, that's great. But if I'm going to actually create something, I'm always thinking about how that will actually. How how can I use that to make money later on? So if I I dio you know, some are work for myself. That's kind of like a pet project, I say. Okay, can I turn that into a T shirt to turn that into a poster? Connects turned that into a print? Um, came the brushes that I made for that project. Can I sell those somewhere Or, you know, can I make a tutorial of me creating the start? You always want to think about different ways of making money from the work they're doing to maximize your time. And last but not least, I always like to say that time plus work in the commitment to it equals success. I don't know at for anything that you do. If you don't put in the time of the work and commit to it that you won't achieve some sort of success from it. If you have asset, you're going to get half s results. So always put your best work in always commit the time to it. If you only have, you know, three hours of your day to to commit to it and commit those three hours of the day to it and really focus on what you're actually doing. Just like doing these videos. I really, really focus on what it is and not just like, you know, I have this on in the background and whatever. I want you to really focus in on this stuff and put the work in, because then you're going to get the results. So maximum effort gives maximum results. Okay, this is kind of one that I like toe get out there because I find a lot of people that I talked to, um are ready to go on are ready to start working before they actually think that they are. They think that they may still be, you know, not good enough to start getting work because they're kind of aiming too high. And they don't realize that there's actually work out that they could be getting and they could be learning and progressing while they're doing that work. So I find that most people that I talk to you, they actually are probably ready todo in their portfolios. They're probably up to snuff. Before, I would say a few months before they actually try getting work. There's a lot of time where I'll see someone's portfolio and I'll be like, Oh, you must be like working already in there. Like now I don't feel like I'm ready yet. Teoh, start getting working. I'm like, Well, you could probably be, you know, making enough money now in learning from those jobs and those jobs. Excuse me, will give you mawr work for your portfolio or that sort of thing. So you always want to kind of go before you ready? The best thing to do is ask somebody else. Ask your winning your appears if they think you're ready. That sort of thing. Don't ask Mom. Your daddy, you're you know, somebody who has a vested interest in you because they'll either tell you you're not ready or they'll tell you that your work is great and it might not be good enough. The best is again is to find a mentor, find somebody you trust, find somebody who works in that industry or knows what they're talking about. That sort of thing, Um, and Nasstrom. Or better yet, ask a few people because everyone kind of has their own opinion. On on what? You should be in your portfolio. They'll tell you that thread that shouldn't and other people will tell you the complete opposite. So, um, you know, find a couple people that you trust find a mentor that you really trusted that sort of thing. Um, you know, you can even shoot me an email, and if I got time, I will. I will write you back in and give you my input, that sort of thing. Or better yet, ask somebody in the community, join their discord group or, you know, posted down below. And I have a question say, always my stuff, ready to go where that sort of thing. And you know, you get some feedback in and know if you're ready to go. If you're even considering that you're ready to go, you're probably actually ready to go. Next thing I want to talk about is that hearing. No, it's not failure just because you send your portfolio to somebody and they say, No, we don't work for you or that sort of thing that doesn't mean that you just give up and you say, Oh, you know, I'm never gonna work for anybody, cause I'm not ready. That's not true. Um, you're gonna hear no, a lot in this industry. You're gonna, you know, send your portfolio at any. Sometimes you can send your portfolio 200 people in here, No, from all 100 of them. But what you really need is you only really need one person that say yes. Um, I always like to say that you only really need to 2 to 3 clients to you to survive and keep you going. That's a month. If you get two or three clients, you know that each pay you 2 $3000 a month. That's, you know, $15,000 a month just from those clients. And that will definitely keep you going if you know, for the most part. So you really only need two or three people out of however many there are that you you connect it, actually say yes. Um, so you know, you got to get a thick skin. You're gonna hear no on. That's fine. Everybody here is no nobody ever. Just Here's Yes, all the time. It just doesn't work that way, especially in a creative career. So I don't think that your failure, because you do here no, keep moving, keep going forward. And it's not a one shot deal. Don't think that you have to get ready. You know, pull the trigger and you have your one shot. And if you don't take your one shot, then he your done your failed. Everybody's gonna remember. You know, if you had a bad piece in your portfolio, they're going to remember that that piece, because they're really not, um, it's not a one shot deal. Everybody wants to see everybody progress and that sort of thing. Um, in this way that you know that Eminem song is wrong. It's not. It's not your one shot in Whether you take it or or lose it, um, you know, you're gonna stumble, you're gonna make some mistakes, and and some people are going to say no. And, you know, maybe your stuff's not ready yet, But, you know, you keep moving forward, you keep getting better and progress and get better and better. It's better. It actually show people your progression. So they may be. See your portfolio on. There may be a bad piece in this time and then, you know, month or two down the road they see it again and they could see the improvement. And it's actually mawr impressive to see that. Oh, this person's improved this much and and the span of a month, I wonder what they're going to be like. You know, if they work on my job or that sort of thing. So So don't worry about that stuff again. You want to be professional and you want to be up to a certain standard. But don't be scared. Teoh again go before you're ready. Um, you don't have to be 100% sure of what it is you want to dio. I can I can tell you a story about me. When I first start going into school, I started taking animation and I was like, for sure, I was like, I wouldn't work for Disney and I wanted to do animation and that sort of thing. Um and then within a week or two, I was like, uh, I don't think this animation things Not for me. I can't just draw the same thing over and over and over again. Eso I switched and then I took a illustration and got in the technical illustration and I start drawing, you know, exploded views of of machine parts. And I started with doing medical illustration and working with cadavers and stuff like that . And then, ah, I got a job doing that. And I was like, You know what? Uh I'm not really enjoying enjoying this as much as I should, and I kind of be in the break. And, um, I moved on to some other jobs. Everything was always with an art, And I was, you know, because I really knew that I wanted to draw, But I wasn't quite sure why. I wanted to focus my energy. And then I thought back Teoh to being a kid and what it was that actually energized me and and what I really loved. And it was always like comic books and that sort of thing. So then I started getting into concept art in comic books and and all that kind of stuff, and that's kind of what I love doing. But I still do technical illustration and still do all that stuff on the side, But, um, when I'm in my you know in that mode and I'm and I'm happiest, it's it's doing the other kind of work. So again you don't have to be 100% sure what it is you specifically you want to do. You just kind of want to aim in a direction, and you can, like, wiggle yourself left or right to whatever it is you want to do. But as long as you're moving forward, you're always going to achieve Your goal might just not be a straight line, so don't think that you have to know everything and you have to be like 100% right now. Being like this is what I want to do It's great if you have that. I don't feel that you absolutely have that or it's a waste of time and you can't move forward again. I don't want you to just like waste your time just because you like aren't 100%. Don't waste your time again. Keep moving forward. Keep taking one step in front of the other. You can always change direction but continue to move forward. Don't go backwards and try and go a different direction, always just kind of veer off to the side or or that sort of thing, Can you kind of know what you want to do? So just again, aim for that. Start moving forward. And if you need to adjust, adjust. Okay, The last topic of the week is going to be, um, there's more traces for your our career than you know. Ah, lots of people always just think of the big option. So if you want to work in comics, you would have worked for Marvel or DC or image or dark horse. But there's like thousands of other ways to do it. There's even publishing your own book, that sort of thing. So don't limit yourself to have just what you know. I want you to really dig deep and research a lot into what it is you want to do again. This is your career. Um, you want to, but as much time and effort into it and figuring out what your options are as possible. So please during this week's spend some time and research and fall down the rabbit hole of what the different jobs are when you're doing this stuff before I even gotten the college and into school and into the illustration program. I didn't even know that being a technical illustrator, what that waas or, um, if there was even jobs for that all kinds of stuff I just recently started doing connect the dot books were for adults. I didn't even know that that was actually a career. You look at all kinds of things, even Thean instruction manuals for I care products or things like that. There's so much artwork out there. There's so many different our jobs. Um, you need t kind of open your eyes and and see the different options. And don't just nearer yourself down, Teoh. I need to be, ah, concept artist for movies or oh, I need to be a Children's book artist or, you know, and those are my only options. There's so many more options out there for, you know, creating products or Diz izing user interfaces or whatever it is nowadays. There's so much more out there because this is your life from your career. I want you to do something that you absolutely love and stop wasting your time doing everything else. There's nothing better than doing something you love and that your energized for and you know, you wake up every morning and you love to do so. I want you to really focus on what it is you love to do, not necessarily what you're good at, but what you actually love doing. You know, it's that time where you're like, for me. It's when I'm drawing and I'm working on a piece and I I look at the clock and I think it's like 1/2 hour later, and it's really, like, four hours later that it was so into it that the time flies so so fast. It was just so energized by it. Um, that's kind of the feeling I want you to have. Also, don't be afraid to make your weakness is your strength. So if you really want to do something, say you want to be, ah, character concept artist. But your life drawing really stinks. Um, take the time to make your life drawing better, really. Focus on it. If that's what you want to do, invest yourself into that. Don't say Oh, I can't do that because I can't, um I can't draw. I can't be an artist because I can't draw while I'll tell you right now, the the drawing aspect isn't necessarily the most important aspect of it. The morning of the most important aspect of it is the creativity I've always liked. Teoh tell my students and stuff that Ah lot of them was like, Oh, I you know, I can't I can't draw that or am I can't draw hands or whatever. And it's reality is I can teach you how to draw and most people can be taught how to draw. That's just kind of putting in the time Teoh to learn how to actually draw it. You know, whether it be the fine motor skills in your hands or or like different techniques on how to see it on draught or whatever. It's the creativity that you can't really teach. So if you you love doing it and you have so many ideas for for what it is and you're just maybe not able to execute it to a certain level yet, take the time and learn and teach yourself how to execute it to that level. Trust me, you're gonna think yourself in the end. So again Don't be afraid that if you're not good at something that you can't do it, Uh, because you're not good at it. And you want to do it. Make yourself better at that again. You don't have to be 100%. Um, sure of what your future is. So, um, you know, I want you to kind of a ballpark now and decide what that is. But you don't have to be 100% sure what you want to do. I want you to start thinking about it. So what I want you to do is I want you to start taking action. So, um, after this module, your first step to take action is you can start downloading the pdf, Um, and we're going to talk about it a little bit more. We're gonna work through those, Um, But what I really want you to do is I want you to leave your goal and the comments down below throw it out their throat. Oh, for the community. We're all going here to support each other and help each other our achieve our goals faster or better. If you have a question, please leave it in the comments down below or leave a message in the discord group. And we can get that answer for you either through myself, for someone else in the community again. We can complete the exercises right away. I wanted to do things when it's fresh in your mind goes for all the videos each video doesn't necessarily have. Ah, corresponding course. So start working through this stuff and, you know, everything will kind of unfold as it goes. So again, let us know your insights And, uh, what you plan on doing to to start achieving those things, leaving in a comment down below. Next up, we're going to talk about discovering your superpower or what I mean, where your superpower, I mean what it is that make you unique and different than everybody else.
3. W1 know where you are starting from: the next step is auditing yourself. So now that our brains are thinking on what we want to achieve, let's take a look at where we're starting from. We need to take stock of every asset. We have to figure out what's the best course of action It is for us to take to reach our goal. This lesson. It may seem like a short lesson, but the information is vital, and pulling everything together requires a lot of time, so don't brush it off. The more time and effort you put in here, the more dramatic the results are in order to build the foundation for getting new clients and fans in all the new work and most of all, generating more income, it's to figure out every outlet we have and maximize the value of each of them, so that this will also give us insight. And what is the best business model is for us to utilize our given talents. So the first thing you want to do is we want to take stock of everything we have. If you don't have some of the things yet start thinking about them now, even if it's not on list at it again. These are things that can separate from competition. Here's a list of stuff in just some A few examples are your website, your online portfolios, what you use for invoicing and bookkeeping. Any award you have any groups that you already have, whether it be Facebook, things like that. Any gallery showings you've done any conventions, you go to any conventions you want to go to. Just start listing is much information as you possibly can. These are just a few of the things that you need to take stock of. I would suggest using the Pdf down below and start listing everything that you have. You can even start gathering it together physically or digitally. I recommend ever note or something like that, Or Google keep, um, is a good option, too, for bringing everything together and starting to organize this stuff. In the coming weeks, we're going to evaluate and crossed themselves and our processes and our brand to be better in position to get the jobs that we want, generate income and work more efficiently to maximize their value. Again, this is very time consuming work. Dig deep
4. W1 WhatRUworth: what are you worth? Or more importantly, how much is your time worth? This is gonna be a short video, but I thought it was so important that it deserved to be on its own. I personally feel like there's so much misinformation and conflicting information out there and also self doubts in people's heads that people are devaluing their true value of what they have to offer. We're going to get into specifics in another video, but I want you to think about this is your true value $10.20 dollars, even $100 an hour for maybe your true value is what your clients gain from your work. We're not going to get in specifics in numbers, but I just want to throw an example out that for your sake, say you do portrait of people and you do watercolor portrait and you charge people. Now you charge them $50 to dio a water color portrait. Now what if Apple comes to you and ask you to do a water watercolor portrait of Steve Jobs ? Do you still charge $50? Now what if they take that watercolor portrait and they use it in their next ad campaign, and that campaign generates millions of dollars worth of sales of iPhones. Is that a piece of art still worth 50 bucks? Think about it. Really? Think hard about it again. We're not gonna get in specifics right now of how much is your charges? Because every job is different, every person is different, and you have to start to figure out how you need to price thes jobs and what the actual value is Now. A lot of people say that. Well, what happens if the client doesn't want to pay me that? The value that I think that work well, you say no, you can always say no. You're the artist. You're in control. You're the boss. You can say no. You can spend all your time that you would be spending on this job, making no money to finding a job of somebody who will pay you that what you're worth, the choice is yours. You need to change your mindset to realize that you are the one that's in control, and you should be getting paid the value of what your
5. W1 whos the boss: Are you built for freelancing or is the studio job more up your alley? Let's decide. All right, So who's the boss? So one of the main things you need to think about when you decide to turn your heart into an actual career is who's gonna be the block? So you're gonna be the boss or you gonna work for somebody else? You know, there's no riel. I mean, there's pros and cons to each one. Whatever you decide, whatever fits you and your lifestyle and what you want to do with your career eyes great. I'm just gonna lay out some some pros and cons and some things that I've known along the way from both working freelance for myself and, um in studios and that sort of thing I'm gonna keep it is unbiased as possible and let you decide for you because everybody has a different idea what they want to do with their career and how to go about it. So I'm gonna throw it all out there and let you decide and start talking about person cons . There's mawr information, and I'm sure you condone find people who have their own take on it this is I'm just kind of throwing out the basics out there. So to help you decide, cause there's some people out there that don't know the difference are don't have a feeling on which way they want to go. So in this video in a turn, determine how the best business model is for unique gifts and talents, how to best make money, whether that be freelance or that sort of thing. We're gonna learn the pros and cons of work king in a studio and the pros and cons of working freelance. Pretty simple. Um, we're gonna throw it out there, So the first thing we want to do is we want to determine what the best business mom was for us and what we want to actually do. You know, there's certain jobs out there that you have to work in the studio. If you want to make video games and stuff, it's very hard to to do that on your own. You need to work and collaborate with a bunch of people. All everything about art is actually about collaboration, especially from a business standpoint. If you are creating art and there's no collaboration in it, you're probably not working in a professional setting. You're probably working and more fine art setting where you're creating work and then just selling it. That sort of thing. And the other is Teoh. Actually, you know, create work with other people and collaborating, that sort of thing. And that's kind of what illustration and working in studios and freelancing is all about. So first thing you want to the talk about is, is who is the boss, Whether you want to work in the studio or you want to to be your own boss and and be an entrepreneur right off the bat. I always suggest, if you're just starting out, you're just finishing school or you're just starting out. I kind of suggest people, too, to go the entrepreneur. It's scary to go the studio. Being an entrepreneur is hard. There's a lot more to you, basically, are running your business. Aziz. Well as being an artist, where is working in the studio is great because you can just show up and do the work and learn and just focus purely on being an artist. There's a lot of pros and cons of will get into a little bit more, but I wanted we want you to start thinking about who is the boss. A lot of people I find don't even think about that until it gets to kind of the end. Just, you know, assume that they're gonna go work in a studio, are or that sort of thing. You know, I've loved both have done both at different points in my career. I've even, you know, headed up some studios to do certain work. And I love both, So we're going to move on a little bit and talk about it. So when you're deciding on what your business model is going to be for your business, if you're going to be freelance or even if you're working in the studio, you've got to decide whether you're going to sell products or service, because everything you do is probably gonna be a product. So what does that mean? One is actually selling your time. So you someone hired you to create a certain piece for them. That's selling yourself is the service on? Usually there's some sort of our hourly rate accompanied by that are per project rate that goes along with it that you're actually paying for your So you're actually paying for somebody service for their time and that sort of thing, Whereas a product is you create something for somebody, whether it be T shirts or books are even creating a piece of art, you just create the piece of art and saw that piece of art thing. You're actually selling a product. So, you know, you kind of you've got to kind of pick which way you want to do. There's pros and cons again to both, and we'll talk about that was a little bit later on in this program, but you don't always have to think about just one or the other. It's probably not one or the other you can actually do both on, and you can really maximize the value of what you want to do by doing both, which is gonna be great. We're gonna talk about doing that with our personal projects a little bit later on, which will help maximize the value of everything that you do, which is I find it to be really great. One thing I won't tell you right off the batter than want you to take control of your own career. Don't expect others to do it for you or don't expect others define U. S. O. The number one final thing I find people do is they put up a website like I want to be an artist that get to get their portfolio when they put up a website and then they sit back and say, Why's the phone not ringing? Why is no one coming to my website while you gotta actually put the work? And you've got to get out there and you gotta start pounding the pavement. People won't find you, especially if you're starting off your haven't established yourself or, you know, you don't really have any credentials that there are people I haven't started working with . You are senior name around or anything like that. Um, I remember when I graduated, first thing that my teachers did then was they were like, Okay, you're gonna make yourself some postcards with your your work on it, and you're gonna mail those two people like art directors. And I was like, OK, great. So I did that and that was it. Like nothing happened. And I was like, I really am not gonna put my whole career on. You know, I'm sending out a postcard to somebody and hopefully they call me eso. I really like revamp to what I did and and took the reins of my own career. And that's when my career started to take off. I started to get a lot more jobs in that sort of thing. So I want you to take control. I want you to try and get your work in front of the people that you want to, um, to get the work that you want to do. And I want you to be proactive instead of reactive, just waiting for other people to do it. Even people they're like, Oh, I'm gonna, you know, take your work and show the blah, blah, blah Oh, you want to take control and you wanna you wanna be able to, you know, get it in front of as many people as you can and that sort of thing. So you wanna really just, you know, try and be a part of it and try and try and send things out, make phone calls. One thing I always say is, never do never do by email, which you couldn't do on the phone. Never do on the phone what you could do by person. It's always great to have that personal connection with people because it's really hard. Teoh get work with people without having existing relationships and building relation ships with people eyes. Well, we'll get you continued work. You're fun to work with and you know, you do good work and then you're gonna get more and more work from those people and one more thing that we're going to talk about and I just want to keep it in your mind right now . We'll talk about it in a few weeks, more in depth. But I wanted you to think about how creating their own intellectual property can maximize the value of your work. So if you're actually producing, work it here just straight up working for other people, most of that stuff is probably gonna be locked under non disclosure or they own that existing work. So basically, they pay you for the work as a service and you get from the work, and that's the end of it. That's done, that sort of thing. What I want you to do is I want you to think about creating your own work. And what happens is you own at all the rights that that works. And you could use that work for whatever you want, so you could make T shirts from it. You could sell it his prints. You could make books, you could do calendars. You could do tutorial videos, whatever it is from that piece of work, you can use that work in, like, 20 different ways in generate income off that work in 20 different ways, which will help you not only generate mawr income for the less amount of time, but it will actually help you get the jobs that you want because people will see examples of the jobs that you want through your own intellectual property and working even to the point where seven you know, somebody may want to work with you and your intellectual property and produce it for you and help you out that way. So let's talk a little bit about programme content studio life. So first pro is stability. Now, having a studio life job is kind of like going in 9 to 5. Most of the time, it won't be 95. You know you're gonna work extra hours. That's one thing. But you have stability. You have a paycheck that you know is coming in on a certain date for a certain amount, that sort of thing. A lot of places that benefits and things like that. You know, you're going to see certain people, and you don't have to worry about hustling to get jobs and that sort of thing. Studios have awesome environments. When you think about working in kind of a freelance, maybe you might be working from home, and it might kind of be a lonely experience, that sort of thing. So, you know, a lot of studios, half nice environment, you can talk to other people and, you know, Chatham of Game of Thrones are or that sort of thing, which could be really great, really helpful colleagues again, Studio life is great because you have other people around. You are like minded and do the same things. And you can always you know, if you get stuck on something, maybe they have a solution for you. They have an answer. They can help you other. You know, maybe they have a different way of learning something, her teaching something or doing something that you can pick up in London and get better and , you know, push your craft forward along the way, too. One of the big things that people don't realize and and people don't notice is if you're running a freelance business and you make a steak mistake, that mistake is on you. If you are working in a studio and you make a mistake than the person above you, it's probably going to catch that mistake and fix it. Or else If that mistake keeps going through, then you know it's not your fault because there's there's checks and balances a long way, and I'll give an example of this because a lot of people don't realize this. And I wasn't I never thought about it when I was in school or was just starting out, but running my own business and and I've never run into it personally. But I've heard the horror stories and and here's an example. So you're a freelancer and you do a job for somebody and you're creating say, you know, a pamphlet or a book or something, and they want 5 50,000 copies of it and you do it all up for them and that sort of thing, and you know, you're really happy with it. And maybe you didn't get sign off on it, but you sent it to print anyways and it got printed and there was a spelling mistake in it . While a lot of times will try and put that on you and you'll have to end up paying for the print run to print it again, which is going to cut out your margins. And I've heard horror stories of, you know, people like not having to eat the total cost of the job. So basically they were working for free under job because, you know, they made a mistake and screwed up. Well, if you're working in studio, you really don't have to worry about that kind of stuff. And if you're just starting off, you're probably going to make mistakes. Eso there's always that people there to catch those mistakes. But when you're freelance and you're being your own boss, um, you know some of those mistakes might slide room now. I don't want that to scare you off right off the bat, but it's just something to think about. If you aren't totally comfortable when you're doing, then you know it's kind of nice to have that safety. Another great thing is, for the most part, you can leave work at work. So you know when it's Friday and you're done and you go away for the weekend and you want to like, you know, hang out with your family or your friends. You can just leave work at work, that sort of thing. If you're freelancing and you running your own business, you'll find yourself, you know, sitting in front of TV, doing some work. Whenever you have downtime, you're just gonna, you know, finish up this last pager or whatever it has. So for some people leaving work at work, it's a nice thing. Another great thing about Syria life is you can really focus your time on creating and doing your our work and learning to get better artwork and stuff. Whereas when you're working freelance than ah, a lot of is all about, you know, billing and paperwork and hustling to get more work and and all that stuff. So when studio life, for the most part you don't have to deal with any of that stuff. You can just again just create your work. Some cons pay ceiling number one is you know, it can be a or or it could not be a con, depending on where you work. But I know most, most places when you're working for somebody else, your pay is kind of locked at a certain level. So you know, everybody in your your field makes a certain amount and you know, you get your raises in that sort of thing. But at some point, that just top. So you just stop, whereas freelance, you can really hustle, and you could make more money. Or if you don't want a hustle, you can make less money. Or, you know, you could make a ton of money in the 1st 3 months and then take three months off and then work for three months or whatever it is you want to do. It's all dependent on you and what you can generate when you can bring him. Where is in the studio? You know, your paycheck is set, so you do have the stability, but it's set to what it did actually, So there's kind of like a glass ceiling. What you can actually make another con for some people is gonna be inflexible time. So, you know, for the most part, you're expected to be there at a certain time of day and continue to work through this your time there, whether it's 9 to 5 or whatever your hours, maybe. And you have to put in a certain number of hours per week and that sort of thing, for the most part on you can't be like, Oh, I'm gonna, you know, take off at noon for the rest of the day because I got such and such to do our whatever. For the most part, you would get your you know, your two weeks vacation and have set out worse each day. So again you have the stability. But sometimes that stipulated can be inflexible. Another one a con, and this is for me. And some people might not care, but, um, projects sameness. So if you're working in the studio for some people, that studio is gonna have the same projects over and over and over again. Personally, I like Teoh switch things up and have a much fried It's possible. Um in the same. That's working on the same thing over and over again. I had mentioned it before when I was trying to be an animator. That just wasn't feeling that came really great on you sometimes. So it's up to you again. It could be con could not be, But something in the last one that I have is you gotta work on what's given. So, uh, in a freelance sense, if somebody comes to your job and you don't want to work on it, whether it's morally against what you want to do or you're just not feeling the subject matter, you know, you may not like the person that's trying to give you the work. You can always say no because you're the boss. So you know, you have to say yes to anything. You can always just say no, whereas if you're in a studio and you know the boss comes, you says, I want you to work on this project. You say no and they say, Well, you know, do you still have a job here? Knew? You know, that sort of thing. So you don't really have a say. You kind of have to work on the job that you're given, um, you know, which could not bother you if that's what you wanna do. Sometimes some people just don't enjoy that, so I have it down in the consulate. All right, let's move on to the pros and cons of freelancing. They're all kind of you going to be the opposite of of the other. So the 1st 1 it's the pro, is your control of your own destiny. Whatever you want. Jobs, you want to work on whatever you want to do. It's completely up to you because you are your own boss. So whatever it is you want to do, you can do. You have the flexibility to do that. You get to find your own work, so you get to work on projects that you want and you get to work with people that you want to work with. You not just told what it is you want to do. So for me that that's a big plus the variety of projects you could work one day on again, like one day I could be doing a photo editing for a romance novel. The next day I could be working on a connect the dots coloring book the next day, I could be working on a comic book. It's really all over the place in it. It really depends on what it is you want to actually do again, right off the bat. When you're starting out, you should really focus on one specific thing. But that doesn't mean you can't just do a number of our idea projects. If you really are kind of person that wants to do a variety of things, you're the boss you can do whatever it ISS Sky's the limit. Um, this is really in terms of how big you want to grow. If you want to run your own studio, you could have more people work for you, that sort of thing in terms of income. If you want to generate, you know more and more income. You're the boss. You can do that. You can bring in more and more job Say, you know, you don't want to sleep for a couple weeks and you'd rather work and then take a couple weeks off. You can do that here, the boss so that that's really an option for you again. Under the ability to say yes or no. You can take the jobs that you want. You can say no to the jobs that you don't want. Sometimes you say yes to jobs that you don't want just because you may need the cash flow at that point in time or you know you want to fill in something or you really want to work with with somebody because you know the next job they're going to give you is gonna be better. But you have that ability to say both Yes and no another's recognition. If you're working in a studio, you're just, uh, probably another person in that studio. And you don't really have any recognition that you did the artwork or that sort of thing. You're kind of just a cog in the wheels. When you're freelance, you get all the recognition for your work. So that's another great pro again. The last one. What you put in is what you get up. So the great thing about freelancing is, you know, the harder you work and the more effort time you put in in that sort of thing is, the more you're actually getting get out. But it's the same with everything, but because it's freelancing because of to you. And you're the boss. You know, it's a little bit more rewarding again. A con is what you put in is what you get out. If you're the kind of person that's not a go getter if you you know you're not gonna focus on doing this all day, you know, as a freelancer, yes, you can goto work in your underwear. But if that's what you're gonna do, then that's what you're gonna get out of it. So if you're not a hard worker and you're not a go getter, then you know you're probably not going to get the most out of it. You might be better off to showing up to a 9 to 5. Another big con is lack of stability. You know, it's kind of one of those things, whether whether it is more stable to be freelance than it is to not, you know, can be argued. But you have to be a little more conscious of things like cash lower or what jobs you have in that weaker or month versus the next month. It can be stable if you set it up properly. We'll talk about that a little bit, Um, or you could be riding a wave. A lot of freelancers talked about writing away where it's one month they could do really awesome in the next month, really have no work, and then it kind of goes up and down a za ways. There's ways to kind of level of that wave a little bit. We'll talk about that a little bit later on, but their lack of stability could be a little scary. For some people, it can be lonely. Freelancing can be lonely. There's lots of clients that I have even that I've never actually even talk to you on the phone or met in real life or in person. It's only been emails, so you can go whole spa, you know, amounts of time without seeing anyone. Creating artwork is kind of can be a lonely business. You know, your urine urine studio, working till whatever hours at night by yourself. Creating it can be a little bit lonely freelancing, so you know there's ways to beat that, and I always suggest getting out, going out with friends and talking with colleagues and getting out as much as possible, even walking you to coffee or whatever it ISS. So it's just something to think about when you're thinking about going freelance again. We talked to everybody before. Mistakes, mistakes air on you. So if you do makes mistakes going freelance, those are going to reflect on you and how you operate your work. Life balance can suffer. I touched on a little bit earlier. Basically, that means that, you know, you could be sitting around 11 o'clock at night doing invoicing or, you know, you know, you might not be able to go with your your friends because you have a job in our or whatever it is your work life balance. Sometimes for a lot of people, if they're not very disciplined, the work, and really take over the life aspect, it want to kind of keep that check. So I just put it on the list of cons because I have seen it take over some people. So, you know, it's just something to think about when you're going through this whole thing. Um, and lastly is your in charge of everything, so you you can be a little stressful for some people that you're in charge of all aspects of your business. So again, it's just something think about. If you are really energized by that, that's great. But some people just don't want to do that. So again, it's awesome to be in charge, but again, it can be a little overwhelming to be in charge of everything. All right, as always, I want you to take action. I want you to download the pdf, so I want you to do the exercises right away on start thinking about all the stuff we talked about. Start figuring out whether you want to be a freelancer or you want to work in a studio, that sort of thing. If you have any questions or comments, please leave.
6. W1 Discovering Your Super Power: Now you know that you want to be an artist, but do you really know what it is that you want to do with? And are there so many jobs out there? And do you actually know what your strength is and what you are happiest most doing? Let's figure it out. Welcome, everyone to lesson one. Discovering your superpower. Now, just to start off what I call your super powers, what makes you special? What makes you unique? What is your place in the art world? What do you want to do with your creative ability? As always, I'd like to start things off with a quote. This one's very long by Carl Young. It says any theory based on experiences, necessarily statistical, that is to say it formulates an ideal average, which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean while reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. Let me break this down for you. Basically, what this says is you need to blaze your own path if you follow somebody else's formula or what they've done, or how they've done it exactly. You're not going to get the same result they dio. There's other factors involved. Skill levels, all kinds of different factors involved. Not to mention that if you copy somebody else's formula or exactly the way that they did things, you may fall flat on your face. Best case scenario is you're probably going to be a second rate version of who they are. So what I want you to do is when you're going through this whole process, I want you to really think about what you want to do and who you are and what your special abilities are, because that is what's going to separate you from the thousands of other artists out there . They're competing against you. If you do what you dio, there is no competition. Your you there is only one of you in this whole planet. There is no competition. So in this video we are going to learn how to determine what your unique superpower is. So we're going to figure out what you want to do with your creative ability, whether you want to be an illustrator or concept artists, a graphic design or whatever it is, we're going to figure it out for you again. This isn't a blueprint. This isn't a cooky color. This is helping you determine what you want to do and blaze your path for you and what you want to dio next is how your unique abilities are. What can separate you from the competition? You are you there is only one you. Only you can do what you dio. People are going to hire you for your brain, your knowledge and your ability and skill. If you are unique to you and you are just doing what you do, then you don't have any competition with anybody else. If you are doing something that is just a riff off somebody else lose, then you're directly competing against them. I'm not saying don't get inspired by people or look at other people's work and be like, Wow, that's amazing and learn things from it. But deep down inside, you got to do what your heart says and what your abilities are and what you think is right . Next, we're gonna learn why your special ability may not necessarily be what you're great at. You could be really great at something, but at the end of the day. You don't love doing it. You're just good at it. There's lots of things in this world that you can be good at that when you do them. At the end of the day, you feel really drained really low on energy. What I think is your best bet is when you do something and you look up at the clock in its 34 hours later, you don't know where the time went. It felt like 15 minutes for you. You're energized, Your energy's high, you're raring to go. Even at the end of the day of a whole day of work. You just want to do more, more, more, more, more and more. That's where your sweet spot is. That's what I want you to aim for and figure out how the more you express your own vision in what you want to do and what's in your head and using your creativity, the more jobs you will get in line with that vision. But what it basically is saying is when you start projecting out into the world what you want to dio, whether it's your personal projects or whatever it is the mawr work, you're going to get in line with that. So the more people are gonna want to hire you to do that type of work. And lastly, we're gonna determine what the best business model is for your unique gifts and talents. Whether you're gonna be your own boss. What do you want to work in a studio? What do you want? To sell your own stuff or sell yourself? Is the service whatever that is, we're gonna figure out what best suits the direction that you want to go in. Okay, So let's figure out how to determine what our superpower is again. I want you to think about your superpower as what's your special gift? What do you do that's better than anybody else? What do you love the most? What do you want to dio? So your superpower is basically what piece of the art world that you want a car? Vote for yourself. What kind of job do you see yourself doing? You want to be an illustrator? Do you want to be a concept artist? What is it? Do you want to dio? I want you to be really focused and really dig deep into your heart and into your soul and figure out what it is you want to do and what makes you special. The thing about this day and age is anybody with photo shop and a computer can call themselves a digital artist. If you got a pencil, you got some paints, some clay, whatever it is any kind of media. You can call yourself an artist. The best thing about this day and age is anybody with a computer, and Photoshopped can call themselves a digital artist. I've seen tons of really talented people that haven't gone to art school or anything like that, have no quote unquote accreditation and do amazing work. So that's not a limiting factor anymore. Used to be that you had to go to school and learn all this stuff in order to accomplish anything. Now the playing field is leveled and you need to figure out what's unique. How do you make yourself stand out? So what do you do? So what I really want you to do is to figure out what it is that makes you happiest and most energized. I want you at the end of the day to do what you love to dio remember that this times when you were a kid and you were drawing and then you just looked at the clock and it's like, Wow, it's hours later or, you know you're doing anything and it's just time just flows by or when you're finished doing something and you're getting ready and you're getting in the bed and you're just like , Wow, you're just energize your just like vibrating with energy. That's what I want you to grab for me personally. If I'm doing illustration all day and I'm, like, ready to go and I quit, I can't I can't sit down. I can't just go to sleep. I even no matter what time, if I stop working at, like four in the morning and I tried to go to bed, I ain't going to bed. Takes a good hour good two hours for me to settle down. Enough calm down enough because my body is constantly just like thinking about the next. The next thing I want to do in this piece and what I add to it and details and figuring out every aspect of it, I just keep going on because they just love it so much that I just want to keep doing it, doing it, doing it. That's what you got to figure out? What? What makes you happiest. And what makes you most energized when you say you want to be an illustrator? There are literally hundreds a different kinds of illustrators out there. You need to really focus on what it is you want to dio. I'm not saying narrow down your life and make your life decision of all. I'm just only going to be this. I want you to just think of your options. Looking all your options. You need to really focus on stuff. So later on, we're going to narrow it down to what specific aspect you want to do so that you can differentiate yourself from the company, differentiate yourself from the competition. So right now, I really want you to use your Google really research in on on what you want to do. Maybe you want to be an illustrator and maybe you want to draw flowers well, Or maybe you want draw plants. Or maybe you want to Do you know something really needs something really specific? Maybe that's get you're going. That's awesome. Just write it down. Keep track of it. That's amazing. Just go with it. You need to find your niche and what you love and what you can do to differentiate yourself from everybody else. What makes you special? And I want you to list every single thing you possibly can because not only is this going to help you figure out what you want to dio, but you're also along the way. You're gonna find different people in different job titles of people that are going to be able to help you work and help you further your career. So while you're looking up different kinds of artists, you're also gonna end up finding different people are they're gonna hire you. They're gonna find different people that you can collaborate with work with all that sort of thing. So you really want to just list everything down? Don't just put in your head and walk around and think about it and you mull it over and trying to refine it in your head. You really need to get this stuff out of your head onto a piece of paper so that you can move on and build that list of all the different things that you could possibly dio. If you don't know what your options are, you're really gonna pigeonholed yourself and nearer yourself down toe only what you know and what you know is probably kind of limited at this point. Another option you can dio is to get yourself a copy of the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook . If you go through that, there's all kinds of different jobs in their in different ways to do anything. Um and it's a really helpful book. So I highly recommend that I'm gonna put a Lincoln the resources for you. Go check it out. After you have everything listed, I want you to pick a few things that can be very focused and very specific. And what I mean by that is say, you decided that you wanted to be an illustrator. Well, what is it that you want to illustrate? Say you wanted to illustrate book covers. Awesome. Let's get more specific. Say you want to illustrate fantasy book covers. Amazing. Even better, you can even probably go even more specific. You want to illustrate fantasy covers with ah, certain technique or ah, certain subject matter or something like that or say you want to be, Ah, concept artist. You're a concept artist that does why, oh, your concept artists that does environments. Oh, that's amazing. Because then when I need to hire somebody for a job to do environments, I know exactly who I'm going to go for. Swell, and I want you to do is I want you to be very specific and drill down and nail these things down. Don't just stay on the upper level. Don't just say illustrator whatever or technical illustrator, blah, blah, blah. Be very focused on what you want to do. The more you can focus down, the more you can differentiate yourself from other people. Now, when you come up with your list, you're gonna have many talents that you want to use. And I'm not saying that you just need to stick with one thing, and that's what you're going to do for the rest of your life. But starting out you need to be very focused. You could have many talents, but what you should do is either start focused and layer those talents on top. As value added later on after your established or use those talents and create separate brands for yourself. So maybe you have one brand where you just do book covers another brand Where you do, um, more vector are another brand where you do photo manipulation and you want to keep them separate. So you don't confuse your clients. Because if you have a mishmash of all three of those in one portfolio on art director, our client's gonna look at that and be like, Wow, I don't know what this person does. It's really confusing if you just focus on one and they say, Wow, that person does vector art. I love it. Next job I have for vector art Bam! That that's my guy. Okay, so you really want to focus on what one specific thing is for each brand, but that doesn't limit you from having multiple brands. Next up is how your unique abilities are, what can separate you from the competition? This is really, really important, and this is one thing that that's hard to embrace, but once you dio, it makes a lot of sense. So when you look out there and I know everybody, this is the ultimate artist thing, where you're out there and you look at all these other amazing artists and you're like, Wow, these people are so much better than me. Wow, I had wish I could create are like that. Let me tell you, no matter how long you're in the industry, you always will think that the key is those people aren't you. And those people don't do what you dio. You need to do what you do, so you need to embrace your uniqueness. Once you do, that competition becomes ill relevant because nobody does what you dio, that's the great thing about doing your own thing. And creating your own path is nobody can compete with you because it's a wide open field at that point, okay, competition becomes a relevant Nobody does what you do. No one has your background. No one has your specific abilities. No one thinks the way you think it's on. Lee. When you start to pigeon told yourself into ah, certain style or a certain way of doing things, that things end up being the same. It's like sometimes when you look at a lot of concept art, there's there's a general style to most of the concept art out there that a lot of people fit into. So when you would see it, you automatically say, Oh, that's concept are and then you move on and move on and you move on. But when you hit the something that's unique and somebody has a different style or a different take on it and they're really going after what they do, it really pops out when it really stands out. And that's how you stand out from those thousands of other artists is. You do what you do, because again, you're the only one on the planet that you and your different than everybody else. So what you gonna do end up doing is you're going to get your clients and all your fans and everything. They're gonna buy your stuff because it's you and it's what you dio Now. The morn issue are the clearer your target market iss. So the more you can narrow your focus down and figure out what you want to dio, the easier it is to find out who the people are that are targeted. If you just say I want to be an illustrator, while there's millions of people in the world that higher illustrators and you're competing with a 1,000,000 other illustrators. If you say I want to do technical illustration for instruction manuals or I want to do fantasy and science fiction book covers, well, that narrows down the number of people and the market that you need to go after. So you can spend your time on a small number of people nurturing relationships and been building those up rather than targeting yourself at millions of people in spreading yourself too thin. Being specific will also position you as an expert in your chosen field. So if you're portfolio is totally full of one specific thing and you just focus on one thing, then you automatically are going to be perceived as an expert in that field. So if you just have a whole portfolio that's of environmental art, like landscape paintings, people are going to know that you're a landscape painter, and if they have ah, landscape painting job that they need fulfilled, they're going to come to you and they know that they're going to get it right, and they're going to get a certain quality because all of your work is in that field and of a certain quality. They don't have to stay up all night wondering what kind of artwork they're going to receive in their inbox, whether it's gonna be right or whether something is going to be way off base. They can sleep soundly, knowing everything is going to be OK. And the number one thing that you want to do is, especially as a commercial artist is, you want your clients to feel OK in the feel, totally confident in your skills. That's the best way to further your career. That's the best way to build relationships, becoming the only option Now this is the thing that you do when you separate yourself from the competition. If you embrace your uniqueness and you do what's unique to you, there is no other option for other people. There's no price shopping. There's no nothing. It's just you. When you go to hire a certain person, you you getting exactly what you see from that person, and you're getting exactly what you expect from that person. You can use classical artists like van Gogh. When I go to Van Gogh, I know I'm going to get a van Gogh. I know it's gonna be awesome. Why would I go someplace else when I can go to to this person to get what they want? So if you differentiate yourself by doing what you do, that's unique, they will come to you and you will end up being the only option that they have to hire. You can backtrack and you can do it backwards. You can figure out exactly what they want, and you can make yourself the only option for what they want. If you specifically want to work with a certain company, find out exactly what they want. Find out exactly what they dio and you can just make yourself into that option. If that's what you really want to dio so you can come at it from both ways. You can come at it from front. You can come at it from the back. It doesn't matter. Whatever makes you happy, do what you absolutely love and stop wasting time with everything else. You're going to spend so much of your life doing this. You might as well love what you're doing. The more you love something, the more time and effort you're going to put into it the Morris time you're gonna want to spend doing it, the better you're going to get at it. Being an artist is one of those careers that if you don't love it in your hearts, not into it and you're not into it. 1000%. It's probably not gonna happen. It's hard. It's a hard job. Once you break through. It's one of the most rewarding jobs, but you have to love it. You have to love what you do. You have to be really into it, or I would highly recommend just finding something else to do. So when you absolutely love something, stick with it. Don't be afraid to make your weakness is your strength If it's something you love doing and you might not be the best at it, take the time. Practice. Learn what you need to learn. Do your research discover. Make it your strength. Say you want to be a comic book artists, but your strength is not drawing people. Make it your strength. Go to life drawing classes. Look at anatomy. Textbooks spend time drawing every day. Maybe Europe strength isn't drawing hands every day. Draw 10 hands. The end of the week that 70 hands that you've drawn the end of two weeks sets 140 hands. So on so on, so on. If you want to take something and make it your strength, spend the time and do it. If you really want to do something, don't be afraid to make your weakness is your strength. Don't limit yourself by what you know. Once you've exhausted all your resources, then you can make your decision. Don't just limit to yourself to the jobs that you know. Don't just say all I'm gonna be in a little straighter. Oh, I can only do this. There's millions of different opportunities in different ways to do things. You can be an illustrator and you can work on mobile laps. You can work in banks you can do working I Kia catalogs or instruction manuals. There are all kinds of different things. Don't limit yourself to just what you know. Do the research. If you want something stumbled down the rabbit hole, figure out what it is. Figure out the different option union do or make your own options. You don't need to be 100% sure of your future you're not deciding your whole life right now . You really want to do is kind of pick a direction. You want to go, start moving in that direction. And once you know whether that directions right or wrong, you can adjust yourself accordingly. I would never have known that animation wasn't for me if I didn't start to do it. If I just, you know, said, Hey, I'm just not going to even try it I would never have known that it wasn't for me and I always was, would have thought, Oh, maybe I could have been an animator. Once I tried it, I was able to adjust myself and do that sort of thing, even graduated. I graduated doing something, and then that's not even what I'm doing now. You don't have to be 100% locked into your future. You're not deciding everything right now. There's leeway. There's there's room to move, and you can adjust on the fly. But you don't want to waste your time either again, there's a lots of time in your life, and there's lots of time to pour into this. Don't waste your time doing something that you know isn't gonna work for you. So if you've listed all the things and you're like, hey, again, I'm great at this, but I really love this, But I'm just going to try and make money by doing what? I'm great and not really what I love doing. You're only You're basically you're going to create yourself a Band Aid 234 years down the road. You're gonna be like, You know what? I really should have gone the other direction. And then you're gonna have to do everything all over again to go back in that direction. Now everybody changes. Things happen in your life. May be your priorities change or what you want to do. Changes. That's fine. But at least you're doing what you want to do in your you're moving ahead with things, and again you can adjust the path along the way. It's not a big deal. It's not set in stone. You're just pointing out a direction. At this point, the more you express your own vision, the more jobs you will get. In line with that vision, you are more likely to get work in line with your portfolio than anything else. People are going to look at your body of work and know exactly what you do. If you want to draw flowers and you want to paint watercolors of flowers, that's cool. Put that in your portfolio. Don't put technical drawings in your portfolio or little drawings of mango characters or comic book are and say that you want to do book covers because there's really a disconnect and you're going to do a disservice to your clients and the people that view you, and they're not going to know what it is that you're actually do again. You're doing all this work to figure out what you want to do and what makes you special. So take the time and think about how you're going to portray that to the outside world. Art directors feel more confident they will get the best work from the artist's that love their work. If I'm an art director and I have a job for an environment piece of art that I needed a nice landscape for a nice fantasy landscape, maybe some mountains and forests and um, you know something very mythical I am going to look at people's portfolios toe, have things in line with that. Why? Because I'm the art director. I need to have this work on deadline at a certain quality, or it's my job that's on the line. Every time an art director commissions somebody for a piece of work, they're basically gambling on that person. What you want to do is you want to make sure that everybody feels totally confident in your abilities and what you are able to offer them in what you're going to give them. If you have quality work in your portfolio that matches exactly what they need, you are more likely to get work from those people. Most of the professional work you do can't be shown publicly, at least not for a long time. So you have to flush out your portfolio with personal work. It's just a given, so you're going to fill your portfolio with work that you want to dio. This is really great because everybody creates our work for themselves. That's what they love to dio. When you started drawing when you were in high school or any elementary score or anything like that, you weren't asking people. What should I draw you drew for yourself? You drew what you loved. You created your own jobs. It's okay to do that. Now. It's okay to do that. This level. So if you want to do with Burke covers and you know you you don't have enough worker. You haven't worked enough to to flush out your whole portfolio of book covers. Go takes, take your favorite books, takes take some obscure books, asked some friends for some books and you as yourself, make it a job and designed some book covers for those for those books again. The work that you do professionally, some of those things I work on books that won't even come out from a year from now. So the work that I'm doing now, I can't even show a year from now in my portfolio the work that I'm doing now, it could be the best work that I've done yet I can't show it, So you need to take the time. Even when you're doing professional work constantly, you need to take the time to do your personal work. If it fills that need inside you, it makes you feel good. But not only that is the more stuff that you do for yourself. Maybe you have your own book that you want to do. Maybe you have your own posters or T shirts or whatever it is you want to do. The more you express that stuff in, the more you get that stuff out there, you'd be amazed at the more people that show up wanting to give you more of that work, creating your own and intellectual property also allows you to maximize the value of your work. Why? Because you own that work and you can do anything you want with it. So fan art and things like that. It's a really murky grey area. You really are testing boundaries and stuff. If you want to start selling that stuff for making shirts out of it or whatever it is, you're really I'm not going to say it's right or wrong. I'll let a lawyer chime in at that in some point. Aiken, maybe find it out for you guys, but I would kind of stay away from that. What you want to do is you want to create your own ideas in your own things because you can take that and you can sell it and use it in many different things. If you created your own piece of artwork with your own ideas, say you created your own book. You created your own graphic novel. You can take that and you can make that into a board game. You can. You can license that out to somebody to make a video game out of it. You can make a nap out of it. You can make you know you can sell. It is a print comic is a Web comic. Is T shirts That's flyers as three D printed coins. Whatever it is, the sky's the limit, and you could really milk that over and over again. One of the things that that I see happen a lot in, like the comic book industry, which is great. It's People start selling off the actual artwork so they'll sell off the pencils and then they'll sell off the inks, and then they can sell off prints of the colors or the actual books. So you're actually maximizing the amount of money that you make off each level. So one piece of artwork you're selling off each step, so you're actually selling that piece for for three times as much, which is really amazing. And it's really maximizing the value of the time that you put in the work you put in your not just getting paid for your hours. You're getting paid for your hours, plus the work, plus everything else and everything that comes from it. So it's really beneficial to you to work on your own intellectual property and work on your own stuff. So now what I really want you to do is I want you to start to figure out what the best business model is for you and your unique talents and what you dio. Everybody's different. Do you want to be the boss, or do you want somebody else to be the boss? Do you want to work in a studio, or do you want to be an entrepreneur and sell your own things and work for yourself or work freelance. Whatever it is you want to do, you need to write that down and figure it out for yourself again. Everybody's different. I can't give you the answer. Everybody is different. Lots of people will tell you if you're just starting out in your just cutting your teeth to get a studio job and use that as an income. I think that's good idea. But I also see the merits and starting your own thing and standing on your own two feet, you know, maybe workings in another job and starting off part time or whatever it is, the real key thing is you got to do what you're comfortable with and what's best for you. The other thing is whether you're gonna sell products or you're gonna Self service is what I mean by selling products is Are you going to sell your artwork? Are you gonna sell T shirts? Are you going to sell? Maybe some Photoshopped tools? They're going to sell tutorials? Um, whatever it is that you're gonna sell actual pieces or are you going to sell your actual services? So people are actually paying you basically for your creation of the actual artwork? Now there's pros and cons to both, and we can get into those a little bit later. Uh, I'll tell you, right off the top of the bat, that selling product is a lot more scalable than selling your services. Why your services air Based on your time, you only have a certain number of hours a day products you can scale infinitely, cause you can just always sell and make more product. I personally say, Why not both? Why not sell your services? Why not sell your products? Have both. Then you're can ride the waves of of freelancing and whether the storms of of the ups and downs when things were good. When things get a little bit slower, you have your own intellectual property and your own products to sell. It really sets a nice base for yourself, and you don't have to worry as much. The next thing is to take control of your career and don't expect others to find you. When I was just starting out, the first thing that people told me what to Dio was descend oh, postcards. And if somebody thought you were good enough, they would give you a call. I thought this was the most horrible thing in the world, but I went along with it because people who had been in the industry much longer than May said that this is the way it happens, and this is the way you do it. Then it became, Oh, you got to have your own website and you know, people will see it your stuff on your website. And then if you're good enough, they'll call you. Then it became Oh, you know, you gotta post your sweat stuff on the forums and people will see your work. And then, you know, people will find you, and then they will give you a call for me. I was like, Wow, so I'm just gonna put my whole career into somebody, Just happen to stumble across my work and be like, Oh, that person's good enough While think of it this way, when you just throw your stuff up out there and you hope somebody's going to see it you're basically living on a deserted island hoping that somebody is going to find you. I like to be more proactive. I like to go out there, find the people that I want to work with, find the people they're doing what I'm doing and connect with those people, build relationships with those people and use that to get more work. It's not about how many Twitter followers you have. It's not how maney Facebook likes you have. It's none of that stuff. It's about you connecting with the people that are doing the work that you want to dio. Once you have that, everything falls into place. You start getting more and more work. Word of mouth. People pass you along. You do good work. People pass you along to their friends. Lots of people in this industry, no other people in the industry and they all work together and everything works out amazing . So, again, personally, I think you should take control of your career. If you want something going, grab it. Don't expect others to come and find you. Don't expect others to t take you and push you forward. You need to go on, grab it for yourself. All right, take action. Now, down below, there's gonna be a pdf and not pdf is gonna help you do the things that you need to do to figure out what you're gonna do. So it's gonna have some questions on there. By all means, fill it some more stuff. But what I really want you to do is I want you to complete the exercise immediately. While this is fresh in your brain. Right now, you just sat through up just over half an hour of this. Your brain is probably swimming with all these ideas. I want you to really to focus on the exercise right now. Get the stuff out of your head. If you want to watch this video again and do the exercise again, by all means, it's just a pdf. You can print it off 100 times. I would actually recommend doing that, maybe doing it a couple times over the course of the next week before we get into next week's program indefinitely. Keep it and look back on it later on. Because things might change, things might develop, and it's always good to look at the stuff later. Ron, I hope you like this video. If you haven't already, of course, joined the discord group. Leave a common down below and let us know how you're feeling. And why don't you just let everyone in the group know what your superpower is? What is it that you are going to focus on and do best again? I hope you enjoy this and I'll see you in the Nets won
7. Recap: Hi, guys. I know your head, sir. Probably swimming with all the information. I hope you guys really got a lot of this week. I hope you guys really enjoyed in content. I hope things are starting to get a little bit clearer for you on what it is that you actually want to do. I think the hardest part of this full program is figuring out what you actually want to do . If you're struggling with that a little bit, you can ask myself for Mitch to help out a little bit. Are asked the community to help refine things and help differentiate yourself. Find your shrinks when I want you to do right now is I want you to download the products or the project sheets down below on. Get started filling the moat right away. They're kind of self explanatory, but I'll just briefly run through. So one of them is kind of an example of a master plan. So what I want you to do with that is I want you to come up with Oh, kind of all the ideas that you could actually do with your heart. What? You can actually do it. That way we could find the best choices for you of making money. There's kind of an example down there off one that I've used in the past, and you can expand on, add things or start limiting things that don't you know, Dr with what you want to do what you were thinking in your head. So follow through and definitely fill that out. You can use the program. I haven't linked that I used. It's called Ka Go. There's lots of different mind mapping programs out there, so if you have one of your own, feel free to use that. But it's really good. Teoh. Map that out, then you could hang it up in your student. It's good to keep you on track on. The other forms are finding your strengths. One is there's that. There's a male and female version when everyone you want to use, fill it out and start filling in as much. Information on the sheets possible really help, especially when we have our call Teoh define all the information that way we have so we can start paring it down, finding out what you're here, truth and the last sheet is one page business plan. It's quick and easy as questions. You fill it in and what's gonna happen is over the weeks and now we start building, building this vision of what it is you want, Teoh and how it's gonna find. So right now we're starting to think, loathe plan, starting to treat my working for success. But the truth meeting and work to get there is gonna happen in those later weeks. But again, if we don't know what we want on, it's hard to find a path to get to that point. So what? I really want you to do this because they spend time to figure out exactly what guys, I hope you like it. Please leave a comment and down below and just tell me if you like you thinks missing or something that you want to see. Just shoot me an email. There are posted down district guys, have a great week. I hope you enjoyed everything
Shane Madden, Illustrator. Educator. Creater
