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mind hack

Are you a hack or a primadonna?

by Palle Schmidt 1 Comment

hack-or-primadonna

How do you decide when a script or drawing is finished? When is it good enough and when does it need more work?

At my old studio, we used to joke: When is a drawing really good? When it is done!

We sometimes continued to come up with alternatives, like: When the invoice is sent!

While it sounds like a shallow hack remark, there is a level of truth to it. Because just as you can do sloppy artwork just to get something “done”, there is also a great risk of spending to long on something and ruin it in the process. Besides, life is short. You want to get more than one drawing done, so you shouldn’t keep obsessing over one piece of art, trying to make it “perfect”!

The perfect drawing does not exist. Because you will change, however unnoticeable, as you are working on it, and that will change how you look at the drawing.

But how do we know when something is “done” or “good”?

That is a hard question to answer. Wether it be a piece of art or a manuscript, you just need to pass it on at some point. Get a second opinion. To judge something yourself, you need a bit of distance. You don’t always have the opportunity to put something in a drawer for a month or two. You might be on a deadline.

But there is a skill to deciding whether the thing you’re working on is good enough or needs some more work.

If it’s paid work, you also need to take money into consideration. What would be the hourly rate if it takes you ten hours to do an illustration? If the answer makes you cringe, perhaps you need to be spending five hours instead. It all depends on the situation.

A work of art should be judged not only by it’s artistic merit, but also by the circumstances under which it was made.

As artists, we walk a tightrope between being lazy hacks and overly self-critical, meticulous primadonnas. Too little self-critique and you stop growing as an artist. Too much self-critique and you might end up quitting art altogether. Because it’s just too damn hard.

Whenever you find yourself in a place where things are really, really hard, remind yourself that’s because you are growing, improving, learning.

Somewhere in you, between the hack and the primadonna, there is a humble, realistic and self-aware professional waiting to get things done. Stop getting in his way and let him go to work.

Filed Under: News, Pro Tips Tagged With: drawing, improving as an artist, mind hack, pro tip, self-critique, working methods

Writing tips for scatterbrains

by Palle Schmidt 3 Comments

Working on five things at once can be good for creativity!
Working on five things at once can be good for creativity!

What is the best method for working on a story? Digging in and camly solving every problem as you come upon them? Or just jump to the next project and find energy in the constant creative flow?

For many years I suffered from the delussion that “real” writers worked from page 1 until the book was finished. This resulted in many a stranded story for me. When I finally gave myself permission to go ahead and skip to the ending or the middle, if I had an idea for that, my creative juices really started flowing.

These days I’ve also allowed myself the luxury of jumping from one project to the other, and I find it works the same way for me. Instead of standing still, I go in another direction, keeping the forward momentum.

Every project is a learning experience, every story brings new ideas. I can skip from one story to another, using what I just learned for something else, perhaps as a way to get unstuck on a story problem or motivational issue.

The downside of working on multiple things at once, is that you can get the feeling you’re not going anywhere. That you are just spinning wheels when in fact you are moving forward.

The need to focus in certain phases can be neccessary

Jumping around is fun, but to finish something, you need some crunch time. I always seem to forget that stories and projects don’t push themselves into my work day. I have to put them there, block out time to work on them. If I wait until I get some free time or get “inspired”, I will take all these projects with me to my grave. Unfinished.

As Stephen King once says in his book On Writing:

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

My method of jumping from one project to another might not be for you. But as long as you finish them eventually, (see this post on finishing) I see no problem with working on five things at once. It might just spark that creative energy that keeps the creativity flowing instead of running dry…

Do you work best with one thing at a time or are you a scatterbrain like me? Let’s hear your story!

Filed Under: News, Pro Tips Tagged With: creativity, learning, mind hack, pro tip, pro tips, productivity, storytelling, tips for making comics, workflow, writer's block, Writing

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