Reply To: Your CG routine – how do you keep up the pace ?

[Don Newman]

I started off the year deciding to learn Blender. I wouldn’t call it in a New Year’s resolution, just something I decided to do at that time. The decision actually came about December but with the business of the holiday and traveling I decided January would be my start time. So I started with trying to work through Zacharias Reinhardt’s Mastering Sculpting course as sculpting is what I was really after. At the same time I tried working through Sculpt January. Realizing I needed some more basic training I also signed up for a year of CGC. That was all fine for the first few days before going back to work before I realized I had bitten off way more than I could chew.

In the mean time, I had come across Andrew Price’s video on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Artists and had committed myself to the first habit, Daily Work. I’ve watched it a few more times and shared it with everyone I knew. Combined with his fourth habit, Conscious Learning, I scaled myself back to just working through the fundamentals on CGC. No matter what, I make a point of coming on here to at least grade new exercises.

The thing is, they are habits and habits take time to develop before they just become second nature. Sure, some days I might only come on here and grade a few exercises, but most days I’m watching lessons and then on weekends when I have more time going back to do the exercises.

The result has been its own motivation. Friends and coworkers continue to encourage me and find it hard to believe I’ve only been doing it for a few months. Many of them are artists themselves that went to school and now do it professionally (I work at a marketing company but creative design isn’t my job, I’m a software dev by day).

Another source of motivation has been looking at portfolios and demo reels. Not just of established artists. That can lead to telling yourself “but they have been doing it for years, I will never be that good” but also of student compilations from different art schools like Gnomon. Sure, they have access to some tools like render farms that I don’t, but seeing what they pull off as just students feels much more attainable.

Because of seeing the work others are doing has shifted my goal from wanting to just sculpt things for 3D printing to something much bigger. I’ve now set a goal to create a full animated short forcing me to learn how to do the whole pipeline. And that has all come full circle back to helping me be better at creating characters for 3D printing.

Building skills has reinforced other skills. My biggest regret was waiting until my 40s and getting cancer to realize how much time I wasted wishing I was artistic before doing something about it.