e1n:
“Why do the things I draw never look as good as they are in my head?!”
If you ever ask yourself this question, you’re not the only one; everyone does, myself included. But when I do, I remind myself of this quote by Robh Ruppel.
And in case you’re wondering who Robh is, here’s his IMDB page. Dude’s a beast (art director for Meet the Robinsons, Brother Bear, Uncharted 2 and 3).
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
-Chuck Close
Image from Wisdom
(Source: wearethedigitalkids)
“Animation is about creating the illusion of life. And you can’t create it if you don’t have one.”-Brad Bird
This applies to all forms of art. Your experiences in life help inspire you and push you as an artist. Positive or negative, they remain with you forever so the more you live your life, the more you have to draw from.
“We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us, the sooner we get them out the better.”-Walt Stanchfield
Along the same lines of the 10,000 hour rule, which states: If you spend 10,000 hours doing a specific task, whether that’s playing sports, studying a specific subject, writing, drawing, composing or playing music, and so on, you will become a ‘genius’ in that field.
Before you give up hope and say ‘that’s too much’, let’s do some math on how to reach 10,000 hours and beyond:
- One hour a day for 27 years.
- Twenty hours a week for 9.5 years.
- Thirty-five hours a week for 5.5 years.
Just 30 minutes a day gets you 182.5 hours a year. Considering a professional artist works an average of 40 hr/week, and a student probably averages about the same, 10,000 hours is not unreasonable. And if you’re doing what you love, the hours will fly by.
