What oil painting via iPad Pro taught me about patience & understanding your individual growth trajectory
Why putting more time into the intermediate steps in our growth path matters, self-awareness of our personalities is pivotal to growth
Oil painting has been a coping mechanism for me to tackle a lot of my own impostor syndrome creating for 3D platforms or VR/AR.
I’ll be really honest, and say that it took me at least 3-4 years to really say: “Wow, I feel comfortable and can do 3D confidently at a professional level”, but there were a lot of huge road blocks. And I mean huge.
A lot of the 3D authoring tools require a very strong “mechanical” state of mind. Meaning, a high level of comfort with pressing a lot of buttons on Unity/Unreal, Blender/Maya, etc. Moving your eyes back and forth between different code bases.
Like building a bridge, your brain has to take an approach of making sure all the gears and wheels are put together - a very mechanical state of problem solving.
This has been a huge contradiction to my own personality, and many industry colleagues I know in the VR/AR space, many of which have film producing backgrounds, theater/production design, music/media, user experience design, etc.
The type of problem solving approach in more artistic professions requires leveraging elements of visual aesthetics, building audience rapport - which are far less mechanical and make the most of emotional intelligence.
I’ve been spending a bit of time on nights and weekends on the Procreate iPad app working with oil painting brushes.
Unlike 3D software, where all the elements of value, gradients, hard edges/soft edges, saturation can be done with the click of several buttons:
Oil paints require at least 3 to 5 or 10 different painstaking brushes, a shit ton of mixing, a shit ton of waiting, a lot of scraping and smoothing, a lot of texturing via different bristles - no wonder it’s such an expensive profession.
Thank God I was doing this all on the iPad lol.
Sitting down and playing around with the different brush strokes, trying to achieve hard/soft edges, applying the appropriate metallic/roughness textures using the right specific brush, did teach me one thing:
If we want to hit the top 10-20% of our craft, we cannot ignore all the intermediate steps that we need to take in order to get there.
I think in this highly social-media saturated landscape, there’s a very strong temptation to skip all that, or pivot into something else because somebody else achieved the same thing faster.
While it makes sense to pivot to a trajectory that might align more with your lifestyle, we have to acknowledge that if there is a specific trajectory you feel very strongly about, achieving greatness comes from those intermediate steps we’re willing to take to be good at what you do.
It’s why self-awareness in one’s own personality matters a big deal.
For some crafts, you can’t “force” yourself to go faster.
Yes, you can be more efficient and more productive. You can change your environment/ecosystem to amplify your impact.
But, I’m making a very distinct nuance.
Intermediate knowledge gives you the muscle memory and problem solving abilities to tackle more complex challenges.
Going back to 3D, my muscle memory for creating environments in Blender/Unity, or working on lighting/color/composition is much better, but it took me a long time to be comfortable.
I think one thing I’ve learned is that for very important crafts, you have to be comfortable with understanding success is not linear, if not immediate - it is an exponential function that requires years to see the fruits of your labor.
There’s going to be a lot of hours building recognition for your work or “DM-ing individuals directly to talk about your work”. It’s not overnight. It’s scary shit, but those micro-steps need to be done.
But your growth trajectory won’t be exponential unless you take those micro-steps.
This has been true for me.
A lot of tasks that seem mechanical like pressing a lot of buttons to do 3D on Unity feel more fluid now.
But man, I had to just get good at pressing buttons, recognizing workflows, repeating it from memory, applying the same buttons across different software. After 10 different versions of Unity this feels way more smoother to me.
The thing is there’s no real good course that teaches you how to get good at this.
It’s something I had to do on nights and weekends, banging my head on the wall, taking 3 hour afternoon naps, running furiously on the treadmill.
On rural art studio financial trajectory goals
Going back to oil painting, at some point when I’m in my 40s or 50s, I would like to have a nice rural oil painting studio out in a rural area somewhere, where I have energy to do more physical pieces.
Not because I’m deliberately choosing laziness per say. But rather -
Oil painting is an incredibly difficult task, where the means of problem solving of light, color, value, composition and form are more mental challenges then anything else. It is a mental form of resilience and adversity, and a legitimate craft.
I specifically say rural since you have far less distractions to focus on.
It may not have the crazy white-collar intensity of a finance or tech role, but it is a craft and real profession.
I think growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where you see a lot more engineers, you never see jobs like art curation or fine art painter as a legitimate profession. We often trivialize the level of effort needed to create good art - it’s very hard.
I remember visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is considered the 3rd largest art market in the United States. Seeing such high prices for art made me realize this is a very viable route.
You’re not paying for the oil painting itself, but rather the ability for the artist to craft a vision of the world that doesn’t exist now but he/she crafted through years of both technical draftsmanship and storytelling ability.
But that artist had a lot of years building up recognition. It’s years of work. You only see the surface.
Those intermediate steps you don’t see, because we trivialize it, especially more in social media.
We should talk less about the outcome, more about the intermediate steps it takes to get there. The journey.
Oil painting is a metaphor in of itself to respect the intermediate steps needed to get good at what you do, no matter what craft you decide to do.
No matter if the craft is a job, a hobby, running a family, raising kids, being active in politics, philanthropy, public interest / social impact projects.
"If we want to hit the top 10-20% of our craft, we cannot ignore all the intermediate steps that we need to take in order to get there." -- This! Many of us get stuck here. Glad you brought it up. Similar to Steven Covey's view of creating habits, just getting out of the atmosphere is the biggest fuel usage. Once you're our in orbit, it's much easier.