Okay here's the list. I spend some time on this. If you have any specific questions, let me know:)


***

On Composition:

Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies - Dennis DeSantis
Amazon Link
This is a fantastic book. Each page has a general idea on boosting creativity, workflow, and designing sounds and tracks. I recommend you read and digest one of the tips per day and really think about applying them.

Music Theory for Computer Musicians - Michael Hewitt
Amazon Link
Really easy to digest book on music theory, as it applies to your DAW. Each DAW is used in the examples, so it is not limited to a specific program. Highly recommend this for someone starting out with theory to improve their productions.

Secrets of Dance Music Production - David Felton
Amazon Link
This book I recently picked up and so far it's been quite good. It goes over all the different elements of what make's dance music, and get's quite detailed. More geared towards the beginner, but it was engaging nonetheless. It is the best 'EDM specific' production book I have read.

Ocean of Sound - David Troop
Amazon Link
Very well written and interesting book on ambient music. Not only does David go over the technical side and history of ambiance and musical atmospheres, he speaks very poetically about creating these soundscapes and how they relate to our interpersonal emotions.


***

On Audio Engineering:

Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio - Mike Senior
Amazon Link
In my opinion, this is the best mixing reference book for both beginners and intermediate producers. Very in-depth book that covers everything from how to set-up for accurate listening to the purpose of each mixing and mastering plug-in. Highly recommended.

Zen and the Art of Mixing - Mixerman
Amazon Link
Very interesting read in that it deals with the why's more than the how's. Mixerman, a professional audio engineer, goes in detail to talk about the mix engineer's mindset, how to approach projects, and how to make critical mixing decisions. Really fun read.

The Mixing Engineer's Handbook - Bobby Owinski
Amazon Link
This is a fantastic companion book to keep around. Not only does Owinski go into great technical detail, he includes interviews from various audio engineers that I personally found very helpful and inspiring.


***

On the Industry:

All You Need to Know About the Music Business - Donald S. Passman
Amazon Link
This book is simply a must read for anyone hoping to make a professional career out of music, anyone wanting to start their own record label, or anyone interested in how the industry works. It's a very informative book for any level of producer, and is kept up-to-date with the frequent revisions. Buy it.

Rick Rubin: In the Studio - Jake Brown
Amazon Link
Very interesting read that is a semi-biographical book on Rick Rubin. It is not so personal as it is talking about his life, experiences, and processes. It does get quite technical when referring to the recording process, but there are better books for technical info. This is a fun read on one of the most successful producers in history.

Behind the Glass - Howard Massey
Amazon Link
A collection of interviews from a diverse range of musicians who speak about creativity, workflows, and experiences in the music industry. Really light, easy to digest book.


***

On Creativity:

The War of Art - Steven Pressfield
Amazon Link
This is a must-read, in my opinion, for any creative individual. It is a very philosophical book on dealing with our own mental battles as an artist, and how to overcome them. Definitely pick this one up, all of you.

This is Your Brain on Music - Daniel S. Levitin
Amazon Link
A book written by a neurologist on the psychology of music and what makes us attached to it. It's a fairly scientific book but it is a very rewarding read with some great ideas.


***

On Personal Growth and Development:

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Amazon Link
Although this seems like an odd book for a music producer, personally I think this is one of the most influential books I've ever read. Knowing how to be personable, effectively network, and form relationships is extremely important in our industry. Whether it be meeting and talking to labels, meeting other artists, or getting through to A&R, this book helps with all these areas and I suggest this book to all of you.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey
Amazon Link
Similar to the recommendation above, although not directly linked to music, I assure you reading this book will change your views on life. It is a very engaging and practical book, and gets you in the right mindset to be successful in your life and music career. Trust me on this one and give it a read.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Amazon Link
You know the feeling when you're really in the groove of jamming out and all worries tend to slip away for those moments? That is the 'Optimal Experience' according to the author. This book will teach you about that experience, and how to encourage and find it in your work. This is a very challenging, immersive, and enlightening read, which deals with the bigger picture and finding happiness in your work and life. Very inspiring book that puts you in a good mindset when you're doing creative work.

The Art of Work - Jeff Goins
Amazon Link
A very fascinating book that looks at taking your passion (music in our case) and making the most of it. It guides you on how to be successful and turn your passion into your career. Some very interesting sections touching on dealing with failure, disappointment, and criticism, yet listening to your intuition and following your passion. Inspiring and uplifting book to say the least.


***


Phew. That was a lot of work. Hopefully you guys get some usefulness out of this list. This is put together after years of reading dozens upon dozens of books on these topics.


Enjoy!

This is gonna be tldr;
Moreover English is not my first language so I am sorry in advance for any mistakes.

As most religions have taught in their doctrines, God is already sending revelation or divine revelation to every human being in the world every time, every day, and every second. Every time you hear or feel a thought to do good things and give compassion and love to others, or every breakthrough to your problems, God is already talking to you.

The most and important requirement for people to be able to have dialogue with "The Ultimate Source" or feel "The Divine Presence" or for the simplicity sake "God" for directly while is that you have to let go off your control, ego, selfish and childish desire so in the end you have to submit and surrender yourself completely to God.

The real question here is not "Is God too busy to spend time talking to me?" but "Are you too busy to spend time talking to God?"

The quickest and easiest way to do that is that people have to die in real world first so they could be in hereafter and unite with God himself in nirvana if people are managed to avoid hell.

However since I believe that you still do not want to die yet and you do not want to resolute to this extreme way, I know you are actually seeking another ways that are more plausible to talk with God while you are still alive on Earth. What you want is to experience what Moses a.s, Buddha, and Muhammad s.a.w had experienced. They all have received enlightenment on earth.

So far in my opinion based on researches and also from my own experience there are several ways to experience "Divine Presence" or talking with "God" directly whiles you are still alive.

• Near Death Experience (NDE).
  In this case you are only 'dead' for a while. If you are dead long enough you may manage to actually enter heaven and feel the presence and talking with God. Some people only manage to have O.B.E, entering the void, or only see 'The Light" at the end of the tunnel though since they wake up to live again or being told "It's not your time" before reaching heaven. But otherwise any NDE experiences, good or bad, could have resulted in positive view in life. Even the most atheist person will end up to be really religious and spiritual after having NDE. But this is difficult since of course you cannot expect if this will actually happen in your life. And if you are not lucky you could end up being really dead. NDE only happens by chance and I don't think experiencing physical injury can be considered desirable for anyone, so I don't believe you or anyone wants to go through this route intentionally. If it's intentional it's called a suicide then.
  
  
• Extreme despair.
  In extreme despair, desperation, suffering or depression, certain people could experience Divine and Nirvana. Their body is not physically dead yet but spiritually the soul is almost dying and really desperate to get help from God so in this case they are experiencing NDE-like event whether it's by vision, dream, or astral travel. I personally experienced Divine in dream through this route. I got words, vision, and knowledge. In my opinion words are such inefficient way to communicate. Words are indeed still useful and necessary to emphasize something important or to make ‘dialogue’. Nevertheless what really valuable are vision, knowledge and thought. People said a picture can speak a thousand words, while in my opinion a drop of thought can speak millions of words. Buddha himself was experiencing such extreme suffering in real life to be able to get enlightenment. Buddha was witnessing such despair and sadness of people on earth. He's intentionally walking away from his own wealth of his own kingdom and to live in such poverty. His spiritual journey to achieve nirvana was very though.In Islam it was told that before Prophet Muhammad s.a.w was able to go to 7th heaven to talk with God directly, he was actually facing such a despair situation at that time. He's being cornered by enemies that wanted to kill him, he's having financial difficulty and at the same time, two of most beloved people by Muhammad s.a.w, his uncle and his wife were passed away.Those people are facing such a great despair moment in their life but in the end they are still not giving up hope on The Divine. So God is finally revealed Himself in front of them. Intentional suffering combined with extreme meditation is practiced in modern days by monks of Buddhism or Sufi of Islam by leaving all material world and pleasure. However still, getting enlightenment on Earth is difficult. People could still be monks and Sufi forever but they still cannot get the Supreme Enlightenment. Moreover this kind life by entering monastery is usually are discouraged by most modern people.
  
  
• Extreme meditation.
  By doing extreme meditation you probably could have vision of God. I do not know the technicality of this meditation, maybe you could try search your own on Google. It's something like yoga, meditation, kundalini and stuff and stuff idk practiced mainly by Hindu. By doing this maybe you could skip the part of leaving your material world and pleasure. If your mind is really clear and pure it's possible yet it's still incredibly hard. People are reporting that they could have O.B.E, astral travel, having Divine Presence when they are doing this extreme meditation.
  
  
• Lucid Dreaming.
  In lucid dream, you are aware that you are dreaming. If you can master yourself in the world of lucid dreaming, you could probably try to ask anything about the meaning of the universe or ask for the presence of God himself. However remember the secret recipe is that you have to let go of your ego and control and just trust God to reveal Himself in your lucid dream. Stephen LaBerge has written such extensive book on how to do lucid dreaming and he claimed that he even able to experience The Divine while lucid. If you have innate talent of lucid dreaming, this could be the easiest route to be with Divine. A bit of LaBerge’s statement about this:
  To go beyond the ego’s model of the world, the lucid dreamer must relinquish control of the dream (“surrender”) to something beyond the ego. The concept of surrender is illustrated by the dreams above. Each of us probably has a different conception of this “something beyond, “ the form of which depends on our upbringing, philosophy or exposure to mystical ideas. A common theme, expressed in religious terms, is “Surrender to the Will of God. “ However, if you don’t like or don’t understand religious terminology, you may wish to express your desire in a different manner. In the context of what we have been discussing here, the phrase could easily be “I surrender control to my true self. “ Whatever you assume about the nature of your true self, surrendering control from who you think you are to who you truly are will be an improvement. Because it includes everything you know, whether consciously or unconsciously, the true self is capable of making wiser decisions than your ego.
  LaBerge’s book: http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-World-Dreaming-Stephen-Laberge/dp/034537410X
  There is an entire chapter on that book on how to see The Divine in LD.
  
  
  
• Substance and Drugs.
  Well you know they are still mushroom and stuff or ayahuasca. But I personally don't encourage this. They are such extreme shortcut and you could potentially die when doing this. These ways are not 100% successful too. And if you are indeed successful, how many people would take you seriously if you claim getting into 'heaven' and talk to God by consuming the Shrooms? I could still believe in you but I don’t think others will feel the same way.
  
  
• Forget everything I'd told you in prior and just live your life to the fullest :)
  
  In conclusion there is no easy way to be able to have ‘dialogue’ with God directly. You either have to feel extreme physical or mental pain, extreme trauma and danger, severe despair and depression, living like a monk, or putting extreme effort in meditation or lucid dreaming. And even all of that doesn’t always be fruitful. If you are successful in achieving this then would you finally be able to believe in yourself that your experience is real? In the end what important is what you believe not what you experience. If you don’t believe than you will always be living in denial.
  
  The path to ‘talk’ to God 'directly' is sure not easy task and I know that you are complaining about that in your replies. If it’s easy there’s no point of human being were born on earth. If God is on plain sight, then you are living in what so called heaven or nirvana not on earth. Just remember not to have despair with love from God!
  
  Just remember that God has always been with you all along. You have always been taking dialogue with God all the times.
  
  I am just trying to deliver the news and not to argue, in the end it’s up to you to decide. I was in total despair before and I just really do not want you or anyone to experience everything I’d went through hence I went into so much trouble writing this. Before, just almost like you I was once very disappointed about this life and incapable of feeling love from God. I just did not understand the point of my life or why I had to suffer so much. I was once really lost. But here I am after having my own enlightenment in a dream I am talking about God’s love to you. Now, I am just trying to be a better person. What I really want you to be able to live happily in this life. Suffering/difficulty is not a curse; it’s the best tool to experience love. This may sound cheesy but yeah God bless you :D
  
  >Well, we know how much the Christian God prefers men over women, so maybe I've got a better chance, cause, ya know, testicles, or something.
  
  Btw I am a girl, so your testicles or something are actually not that important on the eyes of The Divine :P
  

1. I am relatively new to Reddit, only 2 months reddit old, so I have not been gifted and I dont have an intro.
   
   2.10 months ago my father got diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and emphysema.. As a 20 year old, and even if I was way older, I couldn't handle this news. It was way too frightening. I decided to study everything about natural cures, and I did. I also skipped college for an entire year so I could be home giving him love, feeding him, spoiling him, and just hanging out. My mom and brother were always at work every day and my father would tell me go to school, go to school, dont worry about me. But I decided screw you dad, I am staying to be here with you, and for you, and I did for 10 months, everyday, I was taking care of him, making him feel like he is on vacation. That decision was the best decision of my life. 2 months ago, my father past away. It was the first day of the new semester, my dad forced me to take one class since it has been 10 months that I haven't been to school. ON THE FIRST DAY, I come back from school to find him past away, blood everywhere in the house, he choked on his blood. He went into cardiac arrest the paramedics say. I cried a lot, until today, and forever, I will cry, but I am happy to know I was there for him for 10 months, taking care of my dad, my hero, and now he is living in paradise. Ever since then, I got 4 of my friends to stop smoking, and the parents of one of my friends.
   
   
2. This is a thing
   
   
3. My father, while he was alive he would always throw me to the best direction. He went to the best programming/engineering school in the world, and he was the most intelligent man I have ever met. Even now when he is dead, he gives me so much power, so much guidance, and its hard to grasp since he is not physically giving me the guidance, but in a spiritual sense, I can feel it.
   
   
4. My dream is to become successful, and to acquire that American dream that my father was so close to achieving. My dad always had a great job, making 120k a year, until a few years back when he decided to try hitting that American dream, and start a company. Except the company never made it.
   
   
5. I did all of them because when I talk about my dad, I can keep talking forever.
   
   
6. There will always be people that annoy you, make you feel terrible, make you want to kill or hit them, make you feel worthless, but these are all choices you have. You have the choice to feel annoyed, you have the choice to feel the need to hit or kill them, you have the choice to feel worthless, catch my drift? It is always better to take the smarter, more humble approach, because letting it agrivate you, just harms you, and make your day feel bad, when in reality you could choose to smile upon their annoyance, and say to yourself, "Im choosing to be happy and not annoyed because that will just slow me down, and then they won". If you let them annoy you, they win, if you just choose to be happy, you win, and everyone likes to win.
   
   
7. I love you too, I can feel you have a beautiful soul.
   
   
8. Happy Easter, 4/20, Passover, Holidays :)
   
   
9. I completely understand, I did not do this post for the gift, I did this post to try and change a few peoples mentality, and also for my beautiful dad who I hope is having a Happy Passover up there in heaven. R.I.P.
   
   11.
   http://www.amazon.com/Lucid-Dreaming-Gateway-Inner-Self/dp/193049114X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1397947647&sr=8-2&keywords=lucid+dream ($12.62)
   http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Solutions-V4-EF16-MBXN-Dreams-Inhaler/dp/B000RBC4CO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1397947647&sr=8-3&keywords=lucid+dream ($5.75)
   http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-World-Dreaming-Stephen-LaBerge/dp/034537410X/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1397947647&sr=8-4&keywords=lucid+dream ($4.83)
   
   I know these are three different things I have posted here, just in case you couldn't afford one of them, I gave a few cheap alternatives. :)
   
   
10. This is such a great edit. I will happily comment on others beautiful words.
    
    Thanks for this beautiful post, hope you were able to take in something from my words, and wish you the best of luck and health and hope you don't smoke cigarettes, and if you do, I hope you stop in the near future.
    
    Very Best
    
    Ecc10394

warning: long post incoming

tell your son that he is at the best possible age to pick up drawing. if he draws a lot now and keeps it up for the next several years he'll eventually become good. by the time he's out of high school he could be almost pro depending on how his artistic pursuit goes.

every single artist, even those with natural talent, started off from the same place. it takes a very long time and a lot of bad drawings to get to a place where your art "looks right".

"how to draw books" are largely crappy because they tell you "copy this" without actually teaching you the basic fundamentals that all artists have to learn. there are very good books out there but you have to talk to actual artists/be part of actual art communities to really learn about them.

honestly, the most important thing at this stage for your son is for him to learn not to be too hypercritical of whatever he does and for him to have fun drawing. i can't stress the "fun" part enough. of course this is probably hard for him to do at this point because he's a kid and kids get frustrated pretty easily, but keep encouraging him.

one thing that might be helpful is showing him "here and then" comparisons which show that artists get a lot better over time. i could give you some examples if you want, from my own art even.

while the main thing is just for your son to learn to have fun and keep drawing, i suppose it wouldn't hurt for me to post a couple of the resources i've amassed over the years. However I cannot stress enough that no book, video, tutorial, or whatever can substitute the hours and hours of drawing that are required to get better. again, the most important thing is for your son to draw a lot. the rest will come with time.

another thing to keep in mind is that everyone is different, there are many ways to learn art and everyone learns better through different ways. some artists mostly just copied other people's art to learn, others did detailed focused studies of art fundamentals, some used tracing as a learning tool (not to claim the art as their own). there are many different ways and techniques that are all basically rooted in the same fundamentals. i'd say it's most important right now for your son to try a bunch of stuff out and see what helps him the most. there is no "best way".

with that said...

http://www.ctrlpaint.com/library/

this is a site focused on digital painting primarily but there are a lot of videos about basic drawing techniques and a lot about the struggles/psychology of art. this is a good place to start.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5dyu9y0EV0cSvGtbBtHw_w

this is one of the best youtube art channels around. these [are] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck4NuQWZ-kk&list=UU5dyu9y0EV0cSvGtbBtHw_w) some good videos to get you started out.

http://funkymonkey1945.deviantart.com/

this guy is a phenomenal artist and has tons of amazing tutorials/breakdowns on his page. give it a look, you can try and ask him for advice yourself if you want. he's a super nice guy so if you ask politely for advice i'm sure he can give you better direction than i could.

books that i think would be the most useful/important for a beginner:

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain don't pay too much attention to the "science" in this book, it's the drawing exercises that you really want. it will teach your son to draw what he sees much more accurately.

Fun With a Pencil Andrew Loomis is renowned for being a really good art instructor. any of his books are worth owning but for your son i'd recommend starting with this.

Vilppu Drawing Manual In terms of introducing a beginner to basic artistic fundamentals (especially form) this is the best book i've found so far.


i apologize for the long post, but this is a topic i'm pretty passionate about. if you want more help, guidance or resources you can feel free to pm me and i'll help you to the best of my ability.

Yeah, man. Look, I hope you didn't think I was being too harsh. I tried to make constructive criticism.

I will say this: I really appreciate hearing when artists try things that are different and out of the ordinary. Its necessary, and I will always support artists who try things differently more than artists who tread the same tired waters in a more polished way.

Yes, you could use some practice in the application of your ideas. But I hope this will be a fire under your ass a little to focus in on taking the little elements that you like about what you do, and find a way to do them better. That's where the true magic happens as an artist.

I'm reading a book right now called "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love" by Cal Newport.

The main idea of the book is breaking down the idea of being motivated to do what you do based on passion, and how that's an idea that can be dangerous. He says we can think about our work in two ways. There is the passion mindset, and the craftsman mindset.

• In the passion mindset, our focus is on what value our work will bring us.
  
  
• In the craftsman mindset, our focus is on what value we can bring to our work.
  
  The passion mindset leads us to find more heartbreak and creative blocks in our workflow because of our expectations for the kind of feelings and value we perceive our work to be adding to our life.
  
  The craftsman mindset however, is much more fulfilling, realistic, and helpful in the long run. Our minds become not consumed with the grandiose ideas of how amazing our work is, and instead are focused on how we can improve them. This ultimately leads to a point where our work is undoubtedly much more full of value, because of all the energy we put into giving our work value. We can't help but feel the value in our work. We don't have to rely on vague abstractions of passion and trying to stay optimistic with our work, because we know exactly how much work we put into it.
  
  I have found this to be especially true, and there are a lot of other theories and things I've found along the way that support it too.
  
  The book mentions Ira Glass's Famous quote on advice for beginners. The idea that we've got to just keep working and learning and improving and not focus on how good our work is. Here's a really nicely animated version of the short speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1oZhEIrer4
  
  Then there's the famous 10,000 hour idea from Malcom Gladwell's book Outliers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_%28book%29) The idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master. I always take that with a grain of salt, but there is something to it. I generally take it though that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberately working on getting better to become a true master. 10,000 hours of casual playing will make you a master at casual playing. Like Kenny G. (who I still consider a master, by the way. He's the best at what he does, even if what he does is fucking simple)
  
  Another of my favorites is the story from the book "Art & Fear" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0961454733/lifeclever-20?tag=lifeclever-20) about the pottery teacher who turned one semester class into an experiment. He split the class into two halves. One half were told they would be graded on only one pot that they could spend all semester working on, and the other class were told they would be graded on the amount of pots they created. The long story short is that the side of the class who took all semester working on one pot had inferior pots than the side of the class who wasn't graded on the quality of work, but by the quantity they produced. The side who made a lot of pots gave themselves so many opportunities to learn from their mistakes simply because they gave themselves the freedom to make them. Once you do something so many times, little changes each time mean you find a better method. There is only so much you can do to improve when the approach hasn't been practiced, and all the fundamental skills haven't been repeated over and over.
  
  Something that can help us to keep in this mindset is from one of my favorite books "The Artists Way" by Julia Cameron (http://www.amazon.com/The-Artists-Way-Julia-Cameron/dp/1585421464) She suggests a practice to help artists work through creative blocks by a process of freewriting with a pen and paper, a practice she recommends for every kind of artist. She suggest starting every single day out with writing 3 pages of longhand writing without stopping. The only rule is to not stop. You write and write, even if you have to repeat stupid things over and over because you can't think of anything else. You come up with ways to keep yourself from stopping by writing about your day, or your grocery list, or saying "this is stupid" over and over. Anything to keep you from stopping. It gets the juices out and you keep going and going, and going. You practice getting over the fear of making the mistakes. You are practicing your art. Free expression where there are no mistakes. You practice coming up with ways to keep going. Then when you are done with the three pages, you close up the notebook and you don't read over it. You are done with the pages and you move on with your day. There is no reason to look over what you wrote since you are not critiquing what you wrote. The process is about getting over creative blocks and creatively acting without hesitation. I've found this practice to be invaluable.
  
  Some advice that started to help me was to not spend too much time on each of my songs deliberating over details, until I was good enough where it was hurting the final product to not dive in deeper. I also don't listen to my tracks over after finishing. Instead, when I finish a song, or make a recording. I listen to it and set it aside and begin working on something else. After at least a day, or sometimes more, I listen to it with a notepad and take notes as objectively as I can, and try to find ways in which I would have improved on the song. Things I could have done better or approached differently. If its a couple of small things, I might fix them right there, but if its a bunch of bigger things, I just appreciate that I learned a lot from that song and try to incorporate what I learned into a new song to practice it.
  
  All of these all point toward the same thing, and I hope you find some of the advice useful if you try it out. I'm not telling you this because I think your music sucks, but because I think you have what it takes because of how you are trying things outside of the ordinary.
  
  My ideas to all artists: Abandon thoughts of your work being brilliant. Focus on keeping moving. Let yourself make terrible music. Learn from your mistakes without getting down on yourself. One finished song that you had to think creatively to get to work even though it sucked, is a better use of your time than 20 unfinished alright ideas sitting as loops. If you do like making lots of loops, export them as audio loops and churn them out like an assembly line. Don't deliberate on every move when your time would be better spend actively working through a block. In art, mistakes is where magic happens. Hone in on your mistakes and see if you can let them dictate the direction of where your song goes. Focus on improving your skills instead of feeling good about being an artist.
  
  I hope this wasn't just a bunch of gibberish. Let me know what you think about this kind of stuff if you're interested. I'm always down to talk about it when I can't be making music.

So, I don't know whether you'll consider this good news or bad news, but the path to illustrating anything well mostly involves developing your artistic skills in general, and not one specific type of illustration. For example, you don't learn how to paint landscapes so much as you learn to paint in general, and then do a lot of landscapes.

Example: Randall Munroe, of xkcd fame. xkcd is very simplistic art (stick figures, for the most part), yet it looks better that most people's attempts at stick people. Why? Because he's an actual artist (by hobby, not by profession, although it's basically his profession now), not just some guy who decided to draw stick figures. Stuff like this is what he was working on back in his high school years, and he's clearly had many years of practice since then. His stick figures look better than the average person's because he draws them with attention to the details of human anatomy and proportions.

Okay, so what's the path? The boring answer: practice, practice, practice. If you really are willing to "put in the 10 years," then you already have the right mentality. But you probably want a little more guidance than that.

Step 1: Start thinking about art in the right way. You think you want to draw from your imagination, but what you really want to draw is reality that doesn't exist. What do I mean by that? Drawing "from imagination" isn't much different than drawing from life; it's just strictly harder. When you draw from life, you see something with your eyes and then copy it onto your paper. When you draw from imagination, you have to see it with your mind's eye and then copy it onto your paper. This means that your imagination has to come up with the details you'd normally see in the world, all on its own! That's very hard. (This is true even for stylized drawing, which I'll get to in a bit.)

So how do you learn to do that? Well, your brain can't come up with realistic details without knowing what realistic details look like. So, every artist needs to start by drawing from life. There's no way to get around it. BUT, there's a catch! If you don't have any artistic inclination right now, you probably don't really know "how" to draw from life! Eventually, you'll "get it," but for now you could use some guidance. So, you need someone to teach you. Assuming you don't have any private art tutor friends, you should get a book. The standard recommendation for new artists is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which, despite its title, is not a book about pop psychology and is a book about learning to draw "the right way" from the ground up. What is "the right way"? Basically, it's forcing yourself to draw exactly what you see without thinking about it at all. You need to learn to shut off the part of your brain that tries to draw things the way "they should look" and instead draw them the way "they do look." The book will teach you all about this.

Step 2: Developing your basic skill set. Assuming you picked up the book I just recommended, you're going to want to start reading it and doing the exercises. I recommend spending the first week of your artistic journey just blindly following what the book tells you to do. Do one exercise per day for the first 5-7 exercises, and read the material in between your practice. Do practice 5-6 days a week for at least 30 minutes each day (preferably longer, but we all have lives). Don't burn yourself out by spending an entire Saturday blowing through half the book. If you're having fun with your drawing, do some light doodles on the side, but don't undertake more than one major project per day. Spend your doodling time just playing with the pencil (or pen), drawing shapes, experimenting with holding the pencil in different ways, etc. Just have fun. Not only will this keep your brain fresh for the major projects, but it's learning in its own right because you're developing comfort and flexibility with your instrument.

Step 3: Embark on your own projects. If you've worked through the first 5-7 exercises of that book, then you probably "get it" a little more than you did before; enough to start drawing anything and everything that catches your fancy. At this point, you don't need to keep following the book. Feel free to only come back to it when you need ideas or inspiration.

Copy, copy, copy. Like a picture you see online? Copy it. Your version won't be as good, but it doesn't matter, because it's all practice. However, try to make at least 50% of your drawings from real life (as in, 3D objects that you see with your physical eyes), and not pictures you see in books or on the internet. Why? Because drawing from a picture is easier than drawing from life. Pictures are, by definition, "flattened" for you, so you don't have to interpret what you're seeing as much. You need to be able to visualize and interpret objects in 3D, so you need to draw from life.

Step 4: Challenge yourself. Although your art skill will have undoubtedly improved by this point, you're still super far from your goal. This is usually where people settle in to only drawing things that they can draw kinda-sorta well, like simple objects, or copies of cartoons without any shading. This is a huge mistake! You have so much to learn and you know it, so don't stunt your growth now. If you're not sure what to practice next, I recommend drawing human beings. Why? Because there's not a single artist on the entire planet that couldn't benefit from being able to draw people; it's basically a necessary skill. It's also difficult, and forces you to move out of your comfort zone. But it's also a highly desirable skill, and once your humans start looking, well, human, you're going to feel super proud of yourself.

How do you practice figure drawing? Well, if you can find real people to pose for you naked, then go with that. But, your friends and family probably aren't going to be comfortable with that. If you feel up to it, try to find a figure drawing class (check local community colleges). But, if all else fails, find pictures of naked people online (really not that hard).

Regardless of whether you decide to pursue anatomy at this point, there are two huge skills you should start working on about now: foreshortening and shading. This shit's super hard, and you're going to suck for a super long time at it. If you don't know what foreshortening is, it's basically the fact that objects warp themselves into optical illusions when you're not looking at them at right-angles. Your brain processes this seamlessly, but as a non-artist you've never thought about this before, so you're going to be terrible at drawing objects from all kinds of angles. Shading is exactly what you think, but there's no "secret" to it; not only is seeing light and shadow (in an artistic way) hard in its own right, but just getting the shadow to look right on the damn paper is a skill unto itself. NO MATTER HOW LONG YOU SUCK AT THESE THINGS, DO NOT BECOME DISCOURAGED. This is the death valley of art. Every single artist just needs to hammer away at this stuff until they start to become better at it, little by little. When you first start drawing, you usually make surprisingly quick progress. But this stuff? SLOWWWWW. Just do it and do it and do it, over and over and over. You will improve, very slowly, until you're actually kind of okay at it. Do not give up. Do not get frustrated. Block all emotion out of your head about this stuff, because you will not feel anything positive about your skills in this department for a long time.

Step 5: You're an Artist! It turns out there's no "endgame" for art. Every artist thinks they suck until they die, but around this time you'll start realizing that you can kinda-sorta draw almost anything. From this point forward, draw the things you want to draw, and go out of your way to practice the things you know (deep down) you need extra work on. Improvement at this point is measured in years, not months, but if you stick with it, you will become "a good artist" by the end of your 10-year timeline. Of course, at that point, you'll still realize there are infinite ways to improve, and you'll realize you're going to be working on this until you die. But congrats, that just means you're an artist.

---

Q&A

Q: All you talk about is pencil drawing here. What about painting??

A: Drawing with a writing instrument on paper is where you should start because it's super cheap, super flexible (you can do it anywhere), and super productive (the line is a fundamental artistic unit). You should start experimenting with alternative artistic instruments (marker, chalk, feathers dipped in lamb blood, whatever) near the end of Step 3. At the start of Step 4, feel free to start transitioning to other mediums, like painting (digital of physical). Painting is about "form" more than about "line," but you'll need the fundamentals you developed in steps 1-3 to paint anyway.

Q: What about cartoons/manga/anime/comic books/Tim Burton/Picasso? Those aren't realistic! When can I start doing stylized drawings from my imagination?

A: No matter how abstract or stylized something is, it always has roots in reality. That's why you need to never stop drawing/painting/etc. from real life and real photos. However, you can start experimenting with these fields in Step 3. Do not let them make up more than half of your time practicing, though.

So unfortunately it seems most of the initial research I did into certain techniques on this subreddit was before I had made an account, so I don't have any of them saved. :(

A few links though, in case you haven't checked them out yet...
From the sidebar:

• Quickstart Guide
  
  
• FAQ
  
  Probably worth investigating all those other sidebar links, I haven't done so myself yet, but they look promising. :)
  
  GREAT Wikibooks article on LD induction techniques:
  
  
• LD on Wikibooks
  
  Awesome Book:
  
  
• Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (8 bucks from Amazon, definitely worth the purchase. Good to have something to read about LDs when not at a computer.)
  
  There were several times in my two experiences where the dream began to fade. If I hadn't done these things the dreams would have ended far before they got really interesting:
  
  
• Dream starting to fade away? Look at your hands, rub them together, touch your face with them. When I looked at my hands in the tale above, there were a dozen little thumbprint-swirlies spinning on each palm. Helped stabilize the fading dream.
  
• Spinning also kept one of my dreams going. I've read you shouldn't spin frantically like a madman or anything, but a few twirls definitely kept my first LD going, somehow. :)
  
• Reality checks: since I wear a digital watch (technically an iPod Nano on a wristband, but it has a watch too), checking my wrist for the time is extremely natural. I check it many times a day while awake, and in most cases digital displays just don't work right in dreams (though I've heard of exceptions.) If the time is changing crazily every time you look at it, or has nonsensical times displayed as mentioned above, you're probably dreaming.
  
• If you wake up and remember you were having an awesome dream, don't open your eyes and don't move your body at all. Imagine with all your might that you're still there, wherever you were. Hold onto the image, don't think with words, and you may fall back into it. It helped me above, and has helped me get back into several non-lucid dreams I was enjoying in the past.
  
  General tips from personal experience:
  
  
• Avoid cannabis if you can. For me and many others, it inhibits dream recall. Having a LD is no good if you don't remember it. Vividly remembering dreams and the occasional epic LD is worth the tradeoff, IMO.
  
• DREAM JOURNAL. Most important thing ever. The entire second LD I posted up there would have been lost had I not suddenly remembered the dream while taking a piss this morning, and I quickly dashed into my room to grab it and write down all I could. Not only does merely having one next to your pillow with a pen ready seem to increase dream recall, but can help when you're retelling your adventures. My initial write-up for all this felt a little off, so I went back and read it and noticed I had omitted some important things I didn't remember, though I had written it all down mere hours before. Also, don't get lazy with the dream journal. There's been a few mornings where I woke up and remembered a dream, but I groggily thought "meh, I'll write it down later" before turning over to snooze for a bit. When I got up ten minutes later, all memory of the dream was gone.
  
• I have noticed that I remember dreams much more often if I've been reading about dreams/LDing the day/night before going to bed, and remembering more dreams means a higher chance of remembering the lucid ones.
  
• Wish I had the old reddit links, but alas. I'd say keep an eye on this subreddit, check every submission for more tips from folks more skilled this than I am. (Only 2 so far!) Read other people's stories and see what worked for them.
  
  It took me a couple months to have the experience after I REALLY started researching it, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time for you if you keep at it, friend. :) Dream on!

How long did you really try ? It took me like 3 years. Because I didn't want force myself to lucid dream. It didn't try straight for 3 years. Maybe here a month and there a month. I am guessing you maybe do RCs here and there, sometimes question reality but not really trying it hard.

Also you are doing only 1 technique. There is FILD, WILD, SSILD, VILD, MILD, ...

I recommend the sidebar :

All about Lucid Dreams. How to, sǝɔuǝıɹǝdxǝ, etc.

Please take discussions of the paranormal such as astral projection someplace else. Binaural beats are also inappropriate. Let's keep this in the realm of science.

Welcome to r/LucidDreaming! Please check out the sidebar and Wiki before posting.

***

• Quickstart Guide for Beginners - Know this stuff before you post!
  
  
  
• Frequently Asked Questions
  
  
• An excellent Podcast by TheLucidSage
  
  ***
  
  

  Rules
  

  
  

• . Be nice to everyone!
  
  
• 1. All posts must be related to Lucid Dreaming!
  
  • 1a. No posts regarding just the paranormal. There's /r/astralprojection (among others) for that.
    
  • 1b. No posts just about dreams. There's /r/dreams and /r/thisdreamihad
    
    
• 2. No advertising!
  
  ***
  
  

  Related Subreddits
  

  
  

• The everything about dreaming multireddit!
  
  
• Teaching Kids to Lucid Dream
  
  
• Lucid Dreaming Memes
  
  
• SleepParalysis
  
  
• Lucid Dreaming Speculation
  
  
• Dreams
  
  
  ***
  
  

  Some good ןɐıɹoʇnʇ links
  

  
  

• Finger Induced Lucid Dreaming This appears to be the biggest improvement in lucid dreaming techniques in a long time. Be sure to give it a try.
  
  
• Dream Views A good fairly comprehensive guide. There's also a great message board and an online dream journal.
  
  
• LD4all A message board, it's got solid information and good community.
  
  
• Mastering the Art of Lucid Dreaming A nice straightforward, step-by-step tutorial.
  
  
• All Day Awareness is a great approach. Also check out [Lucid Living] (http://wedreamnow.info/?cat=7). They are both effort intensive, but pay back in lucid dreams and more awareness in life.
  
  
• This FAQ was produced by the Lucidity Institute. It's not pretty, but is based on solid science.
  
  

  For when you are ready to obsess
  

  
  

• Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is THE book on Lucid Dreaming. "A Course in Lucid Dreaming" is the most thorough lucid dream training tutorial with lots of charts for you to keep track of your progress. (No link right now.)
  
  
  ***
  
  

  Lucid Dreaming Acronyms
  

  
  LD - Lucid Dreaming - Being aware that you are dreaming while in a dream.
  
  
  RC - Reality Check - A test to establish whether you are in a dream or waking life, actively done during the day in hopes that the habit will continue within dreams.
  
  
  DC - Dream Character - Any personality you encounter other than yourself...well, occasionally it can also be yourself.
  
  WBTB-Wake Back To Bed - Waking up for 20-30 minutes, then going back to bed increases the chances of lucid dreaming. Use that time to read about lucid dreaming or plan your dreams, and make your intention solid. Can be combined with other techniques.
  
  
  MILD - Mnemonically Induced Lucid Dream - In short, MILD is telling yourself as you are in bed ready to sleep that you are going to become lucid when you dream, then visualizing yourself in a dream becoming lucid. Repeat until you fall asleep.
  
  WILD - Wake-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique in which you maintain consciousness while your body falls asleep. Not for the squeamish.
  
  FILD - Finger-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique using subtle finger movements as you fall asleep.
  
  SSILD - Sense-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique where you use awareness of your various senses as you cycle through them while falling asleep.
  
  False Awakening - False Awakening is in essence just dreaming that you woke up, only to usually immediately after either actually wake or have another dream of waking up from the previous dreams. Those can often happen multiple times in sequence. It can be a bit jarring but also fun. If those happen often use it to do a reality check every time you wake up (or think you do).
  
  SP - Sleep Paralysis - A natural, safe part of the process of falling asleep which causes you to be unable to move your body. The paralysis process happens to you every time you go to sleep. When you WILD and experience SP, you are conscious while it happens. Sometimes you may be visited by the dream transition buddies--relax and enjoy the show until you can interact with your environment. Attempting to induce SP is NOT required to achieve lucidity.
  
  

  ---

To begin...

I'm glad to hear that it sounds like I haven't offended you with trying to be silly, as that wasn't my intent. :/ I was pretty worried about it, honestly, and if I did and you're just not saying, I really do apologize. I'm in a very similar ship, so I meant to commiserate. My self esteem is getting better, but it's still quite low and fluctuates a lot.

> It's also very hard to try and be positive about myself when people treat me like I'm garbage. It validates my core negative beliefs about being unlikeable, socially inept, unlovable and just plain worthless and undeserving of love. :s

Sadly, I understand that all too well, and I unfortunately don't have any real advice to you other than that you have to keep trying to counter those thoughts. Which, if you're feeling like I've felt, can be one of the hardest things ever. What I had to do was say positive affirmations to myself religiously in the shower, OUT LOUD. Every day, over and over again. They were really uncomfortable, and I thought they were hokey, but they helped. I couldn't really face myself in the mirror and do it, and the noise of the shower helped me feel less self conscious. I also had a therapist that would harp on me (kindly) if I didn't do it, so I eventually did it regularly.

However, I understand completely how hard it is to say these things when you don't feel like they're true. That's why I was trying to focus on the logical aspect. Heck, I know that what other people think only affects me if I let it (technically), and that what really matters is my own self esteem, but that's really bloody hard to translate into reality.

As for failed relationships or whatever, you have honestly no real idea what happened there. I'm sorry to be the one to inform you, but you're not a psychic. :P I pretend to be too, and I have to remind myself all the damn time that I don't honestly know what is going on in someone else's life. I'm pretty good at reading other people and picking up on non-verbal cues, but if someone is upset, I jump to the conclusion that it's because of something I did. I still do, but less than I did. Really, just being aware of this mind-reading is the most important thing you can do. Actively combating takes time, but it CAN be done.

Take a moment to really think about it. Have you ever been upset or grumpy at work or around others because of something totally unrelated? I certainly have. I've had people think I was upset with them because of a face or visible discomfort, when all it really was was an upset stomach. I've also flaked out on plans with friends simply because I was feeling too depressed to go out that day, but I was too ashamed to fully communicate that fact to them. They thought I was upset with them, but really, it was just a personal matter. Is it not fair to think that that could be the case with some of your interactions with other people too? Sadly, some of your suitors could have been scared away just because you maybe were anxious and your body language was screaming, "Don't come by me!" As such, I stand by my statement that your first and most important step would be to try to improve your self esteem/anxiety.

Yes, it's a long process. Yes, you will fail. Again, IT'S OKAY. It's totally okay to mess up. It's TOTALLY fine. It has NO reflection on your worth as a person if you mess up. I am straight up giving you permission to fail. I hope when you're a little stronger, you can give yourself that permission too!

As for what particularly happened with Nick specifically, I honestly have no idea. I'm guessing it's just that he probably felt like he was putting himself out there and didn't understand your more subtle signs that you returned his affection. :/ Sadly, some people just don't seem to be patient in matters of love, but that's okay. Honestly, it took a really long time to get with my fiance-we met online, we're both shy, and the only way he ever found out I liked him was that I got super emotional one day and just flat out told him in an email. (I was sick of him telling me about all his little crushes actually.) Then, I literally ran away to a friend's house several states away for a mini-vacation. X_X Luckily, he was my best friend by this point and things didn't get very awkward after my confession. He didn't realize how much I meant to him really until I ran away either, so I guess it worked out in the end. It wasn't exactly the best response I could have had, but I needed it at the time.

My point is that love is a tricky thing that cannot be easily evaluated. Sometimes you just have to accept not knowing as the answer and try to move on. Sometimes, you have to go way outside of your comfort zone and just be totally direct with someone.

Of course, I felt the same about not finding anyone, and it actually was about 5 years from my last real relationship. I sort of just tumbled into it on accident. It's a bit trite, but hobbies are a great place to find like-minded people. With the internet now, it's a lot easier to find others that enjoy the same activities. I happen to be a big dork, so my SO and I met on World of Warcraft. It's an LDR, but we've met in person a number of times, and I'm positive that he's the one for me. This is not something for you to use to flog yourself with if you're feeling that compulsion (as I would if the situation were reversed)-it's to give you hope!

As for meditation, I liked Headspace a lot because it's very novice-friendly. There's a lot of positive affirmations in it, and you start off with only ten minutes a day. If you need "assistance" finding the files, let me know and I'll give you some pointers.

I would also like to recommend this DBT workbook, as I found it to be helpful for me in starting to overcome my default negative thoughts. I think DBT works a little better than CBT in that regard, and it 's written in such a way that is very forgiving.

As strange as it might sound, The Now Habit helped me a decent bit with my self-esteem too. It focuses on procrastination, but procrastination stems from perfectionism/fear of doing poorly.

Anyway, I'm not a therapist. I've been to plenty throughout the years, and I've been in this boat before. My best advice to you is truly to try to focus on caring about yourself. When you can love yourself more, when you can feel worthy of love, that is when you make the connections that last a lifetime.

The only constant you'll ever have in this life is yourself. I'm not saying you're doomed to go it alone, just that if you can learn to at least tolerate yourself, it'll make the going a lot easier. :)

YOU ARE WORTH IT!

20 y.o. Here's a bit of mine

Make money- I want to open a surf shop in the town I grew up in. I want to be my own boss so I'm taking business courses and I'm trying to learn how to make my own clothes. I worked at a place on the boardwalk this summer and I had a chance to print t-shirts and see the process of the business. It's really not that hard and I think I can handle the business part of it. There's probably not a lot of money in it, but in the off season, I figure I can do something else to make money.

Keep in shape- Sorry man, but I don't think you can count going to the gym as a hobby. It should be more of an obligation really. You should enjoy it, but because of the good that you are doing for your body. Find a sport to play there's so many I'm sure you'll find one. Who cares if you suck, you will find people your level. I've been a tennis player pretty much all my life. It's a great sport and you only need a few things to have a great time. A racket, a couple balls, and a partner! I work at tennis courts in my town too and I see people in their 80's still playing! And like a bunch of other sports I'm sure, you can take lessons to get better! The gym is great exercise, but you should really try to get the thrill and competition of a sport.

Creative- This is my favorite one. Over the last year or so I've been going crazy trying out new ways to express myself and it's honestly the most fun trying to tap into it. I like music a lot. I spend a few hours a week just looking for new music. All kinds, have an open mind to new things! Then last january I said fuck it and bought a guitar. There's a bunch of free opportunities to learn to play whether its from a friend or online. This is the site I've been using and I'm not great or anything, but being able to (somewhat) recreate some sounds from my favorite bands is so satisfying. I've also started to take up drawing. This is the one that's most difficult for me because I was always aweful, but I bought a book to teach me. I've realized you're going to need a lot of help if you want to learn or do something. And that's ok! I've been taking videos and playing around a bit with some old editing software I got a few years back. Unfortunately this hobby is halted, since my video camera was confiscated at a concert :( Also, I'm not really sure which category this fits into, but I've taken an interest in cooking as well. Nothing crazy, but I can put together a few decent and healthy meals. It's really rewarding making a meal for yourself. Even more-so if you share it with friends for the hell of it!

Dude start trying anything. Really anything you can think of that you are interested in. You'll realize things aren't really as hard as you think. If you aren't good at something, well that's ok too. Just find something that interest you and work towards it and slowly get better. Cut out time wasted and put it towards creating something that you can be proud of. It doesn't even have to make money.. any skills you learn will benefit you in some way, or at least give you an outlet to clear your mind. Play around with life! Test yourself and see what you can really do. I might be going a little overkill. I almost feel like I'm hitting a mid life crisis already hah but you should really experiment, it's a hell of a lot of fun. And not I'm not speaking directly to you, but generally people just need to cut out some wasted time being distracted watching tv to do something that requires thinking and action. At least substitute some tv/movie time for reading. It gets easier to find things that interest you once you get going! I'm sure you'll find something man just remember to have fun with it. Hobbies are hobbies, thats all theyre for, so don't worry if you think it might not benefit you in some way, because it will.

Edit- Formatting

Hi,

I did something similar a few times, following a hunch and throwing away the work of years.

There are many aspects to this I guess, but the thing which might be the most interesting right now would be: Why don't you want to finish this?

What's below the surface, what is lingering beyond the surface of wanting / not wanting something?

Would crashing and burning the whole thing now make it easier to reorient? Do you feel like you're going in a direction you are not sure you can manage to be in?

Do you feel like you'd like to have some time for yourself to figure it all out?

I think that if you can finish it in any way now you should try to. For your parents and for your future self. You can be proud that you finished something big, even if you didn't feel like it in the end. Which is a thing to be very much proud of I think.

I am often times taking the path of least resistance, but I know it and I am kind of concerned that I might be a quitter... at least some part of me feels like that. You could nip that in the bud now! :)

Also, be mindful of "Resistance" rearing its ugly head and trying hard to keep you from finishing, being its strongest when you almost reached the mountain top.

There is a great book called "The War Of Art": http://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421863874&sr=8-1&keywords=the+war+of+art&pebp=1421863877374&peasin=1936891026 - which I feel is amazing.

Amazingly written, amazingly concise, to the point and giving you lots of examples to identify the snake that is resistance.

And it can give you the strength to power through it too, I think.

I don't have it here right now unfortunately, or I'd quote you the passages related to Resistance becoming stronger the closer you get to your goal.

So know, Resistance is real, cunning and strong, and is a force always coming at you right from the point you know you need to go in your life. So it is naturally strongest and will try to keep you from finishing when you're so close.

Doubts? Resistance.
Feeling unwell? Sit down and do the work. It's Resistance trying to keep you from working.
Relationship troubles? Resistance.
Too early? Too late? Resistance.


So, while Resistance tries to make it hard to reach your goal, it is at the same time the perfect compass: Just face into the direction of the biggest resistance, and you're going exactly where you're supposed to be going. You'll be at the mountain top faster when you're going towards the mountain, no?

And, at the end, some more compassionate advice again:

Maybe, if you're afraid that you are about to hit the last nail into your own coffin which is the rest of your life now by finishing this degree - if you feel like you're not sure if you are ready to start your career in the field you're currently in - maybe make a deal with yourself: If you finish this degree now, you'll give yourself some time to do nothing or reorient yourself and maybe find something else if you feel like it after all of this.

Maybe get some support in this direction, maybe you can talk with your parents or a friend or your partner about it - tell them how you're feeling and that you are gonna power through and finish this degree, but aren't not sure if you're entirely on the right track yet and that you're gonna allow yourself some rest and / or reorientation after your degree.

Maybe make a plan on what you'd like to do after your degree instead of immediately joining the workforce? And if, after your degree, you should find yourself suddenly full of motivation to start a career in you field, that'd be a nice surprise too, don't you think? :)

---

Best wishes, time to do the laundry, i'm procrastinating on that one for days now! That's probably why i'm wrote this too! I'm off to do it now, I promise! :)

Your friend is sort of right about the pen. It can help do away with the "chicken scratch" method of drawing by forcing you to be more confident with your lines but you should stick with pencil for now.


I'm mostly self-taught as well (although I learned a bit from Watts Atelier until it got to be too expensive) and the sheer amount of information out there can be really overwhelming. I mean, there's so many things to learn: perspective, line weight, figure drawing, portraiture, landscape, etc.


What definitely helped me is realizing that I'm never going to stop improving as an artist. That means that I'm going to have my entire life to hone my skills. Even if you have to unlearn a lot of bad habits, you've still got plenty of time to practice slowly, deliberately and mindfully.


If you understand that you've got your whole life to get better, it's easier to formulate a strategy to get better. You've got to think about this in the long term. That means taking a month to work solely on anatomy, another month to work only on perspective, another month to work on tone and values, while always revisiting the skills that you've already cultivated.


For example, I've laid out my artistic goals 3 months in advance. That means that for the next 3 months, I'm only focusing on anatomy and gesture/figure drawing. My daily schedule this week looks like this:


warmup

1, 2, 5 and 10 minute gesture/figure drawings

study/copy hands from Bridgeman's Constructive Anatomy book

draw 50 hands

spend about 10-15 minutes drawing hands from memory and comparing them to the references I was using earlier

work on something fun


If I have extra time, I'll work on some more anatomy studies but it depends on how busy I am with work/life. After this week is up, I'll move on to arms, then the core, then legs, head, etc, following the same setup I've made. Maybe the next 3 months, I'll move on to perspective drawing but I haven't thought that far ahead yet.


If you're confused about where to start, just pick something that you're the weakest at and start drawing that. It's a grind and you're going to be producing hundreds, if not thousands of drawings but that's the way to get better.


Like I said, if you start thinking in the long term, it gets less overwhelming. I'm gonna link some resources that really helped me out.


Books

Perspective Made Easy

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Fun With a Pencil Actually, anything by Loomis.

How to Draw Kind of a technical book but goes into really great detail about perspective


Youtube Channels

Watts Atelier Highly recommended. Watch his figure drawing videos. Also, if you can spare the cash, join his online school. It's fantastic and very structured course in drawing. Definitely look into this if you have trouble deciding what to learn next.

Proko This guy has great intro videos for figure drawing. I think he learned at Watts Atelier as well.

New Masters Academy They have a ton of great videos about everything. Definitely look into Glen Vilppu's figure drawing series. He's the god of figure drawing.

Alphonso Dunn Really great pen and ink tutorials


Sorry if I overwhelmed you (ironic, considering your original post) but I just wanted to share some stuff that's really helped me develop a schedule and get better. Let me know if you have any questions and I'll do my best to help you a fellow art student out.


TLDR: You have plenty of time in your life to get better, so make a schedule and stick to it.

Reading material:

• https://www.amazon.com/Ignore-Everybody-Other-Keys-Creativity/dp/159184259X
  
• https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Winning-Creative-Battle/dp/1501260626
  
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
  
  What you're experiencing is normal very normal for all artists!
  
  
  > I’ve been feeling really down about my art lately. It just doesn’t feel all that good and I honestly feel like I’m fighting my hand to do what I’m imagining I want.
  
  With time experience will take care of this. Produce more and more work, keep on making art. You want to get to a point when, after you've finished a piece, you know whether it's something you are proud to put your name on it, or needs to be thrown away. You'll like/love some pieces more than other, but there's a treshold that some pieces won't make. And . . it's just your own feeling and visceral judgment.
  
  
  > And I know you aren’t supposed to compare yourself to other artists,
  
  Of course. And it's easier said than done.
  
  > or measure your art by how much attention it gets,
  
  Well, you can go on Instagram or other Social Media and follow established and famous artists and art institutions . . . well, they don't get much attention. Well Banksy does, but very few are loved by Social Media. Social Media attention is not an indication of anything.
  
  > but its really difficult to see how amazing some artists are,
  
  Oh yes! There are a lot of very talented artists out there. It's humbling.
  
  > and how some of them haven’t even been drawing as long.
  
  OK. So?
  
  > Or can make quick “doodles” that would take me hours and hour to even get close to.
  
  OK. So?
  
  > And then when I do spend a lot of time on something and post it everywhere, it just… get close to no attention.
  
  Read all of the above.
  
  > I know part of art is practicing and getting better,
  
  Yup
  
  > but it’s hard to do that when you have done that in the past and don’t seem to be getting anywhere.
  
  If you look back at your pieces I am sure you can see signs of improvement.
  
  > And I want to go back to school for art,
  
  That's an option. But before you do that, read this https://noahbradley.com/blogs/blog/dont-go-to-art-school
  
  > probably graphic design.
  
  OK
  
  > But I feel like it would be a mistake,
  
  Maybe.
  
  > that I wouldn’t be good enough to make a career out of art.
  
  Making a career out of art is a great endeavor. If successful the rewards, tangible and intangible are great. Unfortunately it's very hard to make a living out of one's art. What most people do is to have a job/career that is somewhat art-related, something that pays the bills and also finances the art endeavors, and then, also make art. It's like having 2 jobs. With time the art efforts will start producing some cash flow and, with more time, one transition the art efforts to be the main source of income.
  
  > I don’t know how to get better when I’m not getting any feedback- positive or otherwise- on anything I do.
  
  That is a very serious issue: there is no good way to obtain good feedback. If you want to know more about this, PM me.
  
  > I just make art and it… sits there. Which art of my OCs is mostly for my own enjoyment I suppose.
  
  Nothing wrong with that.
  
  > But then even when I make fanart, nothing.
  
  Ok, same as above.
  
  > I don’t see the point to spending so much time and attention to detail for something that’s basically just for me to look at when it’s done.
  
  Ok, same as above.
  
  > Anyone have any suggestions to kind of help me get past this feeling? I'd imagine just lots of practice but that just almost feels worthless to me now, too.
  
  See the reading material at the beginning of this post, espedially the 2nd resource.

This is an awesome question, and good for you for identifying what you need and reaching out to others. For me, it is so validating and encouraging to hear that I am not the only one struggling with my sense of self-esteem and self-worth, and I hope that you also feel less alone by reading the answers in this thread.

A year ago, my low self-esteem was debilitating.I couldn't work, I was living in state of fear that the people I loved would stop loving me, and I spent a lot of time being disgusted with myself. Today, I am slowly and deliberately learning to love myself more everyday, and I am seeing positive results in my life as a result of my efforts. For instance, my relationships are healthier, I feel anxious less frequently, I feel more competent in my work and hobbies, and I am more willing to take risks. Here are a few practical things that I have worked for me so far:

• Therapy. The first day I walked into my therapist's office, I told her I had anxiety issues. Within 15 minutes of listening to me, she was telling me to go buy a book on self esteem for our next session. Reading that book was like reading a record of my inner life; I couldn't believe how accurate it was. My therapist worked through the book with me and helped me reflect on my thought patterns. I can't afford therapy anymore, but the dozen or so sessions that I went to made a huge difference to me.
  
• Journalling. The process of writing down my thoughts forces me to turn them into logical sentences. This is important for me because a lot of the time, my internal narrative is illogical and not fully formed. Putting those thoughts down on paper helps me look at my thinking more objectively and wholistically. I also do things like make lists of things that I am good at, my positive traits, my accomplishments, etc. Making these lists gives me ammo when I feel bombarded by negative thoughts.
  
• Asking my friends for help. During a particularly low time, I asked my closest friends to write me a letter about why they liked me, ways I inspire them, etc. I read these letters regularly, which means that I remember their words when I feel low.
  
• Learning about Psychology. Learning about how my brain works, both physiologically and psychologically, has helped me look at my self-esteem more scientifically.
  
• Practice. This is the most important thing. Just like any skill, you've got to put in the time if you want to see results. This doesn't happen overnight. Whatever you do to help you love yourself and think more realistically (yoga, journalling, meditating, relaxation, reading, exercise, etc), do it regularly. Behaviours leading to unhealthy self-esteem are habits, and you've got to work to override those habits. The best way is to train your brain when you feel good so that you are stronger for when you feel low.
  
  Be patient with yourself, and take the time to find things that help you individually. Building new, awesome life-long habits takes a lot of work. The progress can feel really slow--I know it sure does for me. However, it's totally doable and lots of people have made this happen for themselves. You can do it! Here are some resources that have helped me so far:
  
  Breaking the Chain of Low Self Esteem. The book I read in therapy.
  
  The Upward Spiral. For learning about how your brain works. Highly recommend.
  
  You are a Badass. Quirky encouragement.
  
  The Gifts of Imperfection. Lots of practical advice in here.
  
  Excel at Life While this site is ugly and disorganized, the content is quality.
  
  The Power of Vulnerability TED talk by Brene Brown
  
  The Healing Power of Self Compassion A podcast about the science of self-compassion.
  
  
  Thanks for reading my giant post-- I'm really passionate about self esteem :) And as a general call-out: I don't know many other people who struggle with self esteem and self compassion, so if anybody wants message back and forth and talk about it, I'd love that :)

I personally think that you should appreciate women's beauty, however I feel that catcalling would be unnecessary i didn't see any approach done "right", i actually feel that people, specially men should learn some social dynamics specially towards talking to the opposite sex, and by this i don't mean learn pick up and fuck as many girls as possible and shit like that, but because I feel that its important to be able to connect with women in a way. I feel that a lot of rapes, and sexual frustration, and probably prostitution is because men want an easy way out, and don't want to put in the work to approach women, and now you could even go online dating if you don't like it but i think that men become more aware of how to deal with this certain situation, I am working on myself to be able to approach a girl and give her a genuine compliment and to mean it because I say it and say it because I mean it, not to get attention that just because by catcalling people I 'prove im manly' they come off as needy and shit.

Although I feel that people, specially women, if you learned some pick up or rather some more sociability they see that as ungenuine and even more chumpy, but the counter argument i would say is they are not being genuine either, they use make up and they are manipulating their appearance to look more attractive and in a way is manipulating me to think better of them, I am against some of the principles of pick up but the dating science isn't wrong, but its on the right path. I personally think that, like in my case, if you know you suck with women, and you don't want to be in a path of crappiness and neediness, via using prostitution to get laid or roofing people to get laid or rather rape girls, or vast usage of porn, I would say that its good.

I personally would recommend reading Models by Mark Manson because the book is really fucking awesome and it would make you a better man, and perhaps reading the 'further reading' books from that book help you understand the mating system of humans, and to become a better man. I think the book itself is actually really good because it states more than just to get laid is to find quality women to be fullfillled and be more happier with women, and in a way is actually attacking the dating science in a way by attacking The Mystery Method which all pick up could be summed up by that single book. In a way I would recommend both and take the best from both because neither of them is 'wrong' but niether one of them is 'right'. I do agree with Manson's idea of confidence and working in yourself more than in women and being sexualy fulllfilled doesn't require large amounts of women, while I also agree with Mystery's focus on competence vs. confidence because he says that you can't quantify confidence and rather focus on number of approaches and really statistics because that shows competence and successful competence breeds confidence eventually but in a way Manson's idea is better, because he is coming from a place of abundance of women and general happiness, is like saying being 'good' with women is something you are and not do and your looks, money demographics and ect does matter in the equation, over mystery's idea which is coming from neediness, because he refers as girls having 'high value' and by that you are infering that you aren't enough for her so you have to in a way manipulate yourself into making her thinking you are 'good enough' so that it doesn't matter if you look like a fucking troll no matter what if your 'game' is 'tight' it doesn't matter what even if the girl is married or anything really, she will sleep with you and that isn't the case, because mysetery uses a lot of indirect and 'fool proof' tactics that are more convoluted than just expressing your intent and if it doesn't work out move on asap, I'd say that take the best they both are right, and both concepts are correct but im leaning more the natural no scripts type of things and just being freeforming it.
I'd recommend both people getting those two books and they will change your life or at least make you think better and be more aware of how to flirt better. And perhaps reading Double your Dating by David DeAngelo, this one focuses more on dating girls and setting up and getting exposure to women over, is focused on both competence and confidence, and in a more natural way. I'd say get them, you can torrent them if you are so cheap, but defenitely read up on them and see what comes out of it.

So defenitely get Models by mark manson and Mystery Method because you can get a really clear picture on the subject of picking up women, and Double your Dating by David D just the simple ebook don't dig too much into it.

other books, I heard of them, and read some reviews on amazon and they seem to have really good reviews but I haven't gotten them or read them but they seem legit too.

Bang by roosh V

Day bang by roosh v

The manual by W. Anton

the Natural by richard la ruina

Get inside her by Marni Kinrys

they all seem like good resources to start and move on from there... and work on specific sticking point, but i'd say don't believe everything use them as guidelines and not as rules, and take them with a pinch of salt. the reason for this was because when I read the Mystery Method, it was well argued and every contingency is planned for, that I couldn't really find fault with the method, And so I believed all the "high value" bullshit that i fucking felt that i needed to one up everybody and that isn't the case, i was able to rescue myself from that mindset by Models, and I really thought it was genuine and it doesn't rely on too much bullshit and is more natural there is no one upping bullshit. I am not preching seduction community but i feel men should know what they are doing, specially if they suck like me, and be just more aware of things.

Perhaps i'd also reccomend
Gifts of Imperfection by Breene Brown since this book really digs somewhat on the self acceptance/self worth/self esteem part and what pick up artist would call 'inner game' ...
I'd say pick whatever books you want to BUT STOP reading too much into it, i became too paranoid and wanted to read every book on pick up out there and that is not the case guys, hope i helped.

TLDR--read books, become aware, know better, don't be a creep but don't be chump either, get informed guys know your shit,

Are you sure you're not mistaking hours worked for productivity?

The most productive people I know aren't necessarily the ones that work the most, but the ones who work the smartest.

Some of them learn to delegate, giving them leverage. At even 5 hours worked a day they are ten times more effective than someone younger who works 14 hours. Most CEOs I know are like this. Also, many creatives I know now handle the whole creative teams now.

Some of them work in bursts - yeah, there is no life beyond work, but they work on a project basis, for a few months, and then take a month off. Or for a few years, and take a year off. A friend of mine sold her company for $10M recently, spent a year travelling, and now she's launching a new one, again, planning to work 3-4 years doing crazy hours until she sells the new thing.

Some people mix family and business. Me & my gf are like this. We work during the day, and for fun we do networking, conferences, and stuff. At home we talk about what inspires us - which usually is work related, and our since our closest friends work in similar occupations, even a Sunday brunch is an opportunity for inspiration etc. When one of us goes for an international trip, the other one often tags along, doing their work remotely.

Some other people I know do a few projects of different kinds at the same time. E.g. a friend I know writes books, does projects for corporate clients, and is a judge at a race track on the weekends. Another friend, at 33yo, is a world-known pro-gamer, wins programming competitions for money, builds stuff for a startup, and tries to launch an indie game.


Finally, I believe that in any creative profession, you absolutely need time to relax and get inspired. That's when the best ideas come from after all! If you're exhausted every day after work, then you most likely have suboptimal performance.

There is this story about a super-programmer, who spent 3 hours a day playing Quake on company time. When a newbie reported him to the boss, the boss berated the newbie: "I hope you didn't interrupt him - that's his way of getting thoughts organised."

Playing Quake might not be your thing, but perhaps if you do quick Headspace, or yoga breaks during the workday - on company time! - you'll discover that not only you get better ideas after that, but also end the day with some energy left in you?


There's also this nice book I found some time ago:

https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/0307273601

It's mostly about artists, but perhaps you'll find some inspiration there. There's also the book by Covey about the 7 habits.

tl;dr; productivity ≠ number of hours worked. also, if you have no energy after work, then perhaps you should work less, so you can be productive in your spare time as well

Heres my take. The TL:DR is this... BUY AND READ THIS BOOK. It is the bible of lucid dreaming, simply written, and easily explained by a scientist, the pioneer of lucid dreaming, a Stanford professor, he is basically THE MAN! But for reddit, here you go:

1. Set a sleep schedule
   Go to bed and wake up at roughly the same time everynight, this is easy if you are employed or have kids etc, not so much for college students and partiers etc... Having a routine makes everything so much easier later, but is not a necessity...
   
   
2. Build Dream Recall
   Wake up and write down your dreams, every morning, no matter what. Keep a pen and notebook next to your bed. Writing them down forces you to remember them. If you wake up at 330 am from a dream, write it down at 330 am, you will not remember it as well at 8 when you wake up. This serves multiple purposes I'll get into later, but most importantly, you could have a lucid dream, but if you don't remember it, you fail.
   
   
3. Reality checks
   After you have a good amount of dreams written down (or voice recorded if thats your thing) Go back through them. Look for common occurances. For example, I often dream of my own home, but things are never right, there are extra rooms, things are arranged differently, you get it... Find things you often dream about, or things that keep occuring that should tip you off that your in a dream. Write these down and commit to doing a reality check every time they occur, for me, whenever I walk into my house, I check to make sure I'm dreaming. Usually just asking the question is enough to trigger lucidity, but not always. DO NOT BLOW THIS OFF. Don't ever answer a reality check with "of course I'm not dreaming" or you will in a dream state as well. I've made this mistake before, its pretty frustrating to wake up and recall that you said that while aboard a spaceship or something crazy... Google easy reality checks, like double checking digital clocks and rereading text (it changes in dreams, your brain is too busy to keep that stuff consistent)
   
   4)Setting yourself up for lucidity
   Now that you have a weeks or months of dreams journalized (results may vary) playing with your sleep schedule can be helpful, REM sleep (dream sleep) occurs in cycles of about 90 minutes. So 6 hours into your sleep you are entering a dream. Set your alarm for 6 hours or a bit after and get up, walk around, read about lucid dreaming, reread your dream journal, do some reality checks, focus your intentions on having a lucid dream, but in a positive, and not stressful way. Then go back to sleep half an hour or more later. You pick up in your sleep cycles and go straight into dreams, this makes it easy to become lucid, read up on WILD and MILD in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming...
   
   
4. Congrats, you did it, but probably screwed up.
   Tons of people will tell you their first lucid dream ended immediately, they became lucid, it was exciting, they woke up... It happens... Research stabilization techniques, two popular ones are spinning, and looking at your hands. Spinning my change your dream setting, but really who cares, you can change it back or do whatever later... Keep trying, don't get frustrated here you are SO CLOSE!
   
   
5. Practice
   Not everyone can control dreams like a god their first few times, it takes practice. You have years and years of experience telling you people CANNOT fly, its hard to overcome. Do more reality checks in dreams, take it step by step... If you are lucid the hard part is done, just keep trying and you'll be a pro in no time!

In the fall semester of my last year of college, I decided to drop out. It didn't seem worth it to me to even get my English degree. I felt I had learned more from my own reading and study than I had from any of the workshops or literature classes I had taken. It seemed a waste of time to even spend another 6 months in school.

Enough people yelled at me, especially mom mom, my roommates, and some other friends, that I ended up finishing up. To do this day, I don't think, for my writing, it would have made a difference in the long run had I stayed or had I gone. But staying meant a few things.

First, writing takes dedication. A lot of dedication. And it's especially hard to finish a story, much less finish a novel. Being able to see college through to completion is, while seemingly pointless at times, an experience that really can, I think, reinforce a habit of completion. If you get used to backing out of things, especially big things, then it's easy to make that a constant every time you reach that moment of "Will I persevere or relent?"

Second, there's a branding and respect factor to consider. 22 year old me was ready to tell everyone to fuck off. They'll respect me when I'm a published author who is selling books and a shooting star. But the reality is that shit still takes time and is difficult and won't happen over night, unless you have a really lucky first book and that doesn't even take into account being lucky with the people you meet and the people who give you a hand up. For most of us, it's going to take a decade plus to really get a writing career going. Do you want to be, that entire time, known as someone who finished school and continued your work, or someone who dropped out? There's much more pressure on the drop out to prove themselves. Sometimes that pressure can result in the extra motivation to do the work. Sometimes it can result in collapse. It's a riskier proposition than finishing your degree.

Third, it gives you a bit more time to think and plan. Had I initially dropped out of school, my plan was to move to LA and work in a bookstore and write. Who knows what would have happened. But since I spent the other 6 months finishing up school. I refined what was really important to me, looked at my opportunities, and decided to move to Sydney, Australia for a year. The degree gave me an extra level of security. Also my mom felt much better about helping me out since I had finished my degree rather than bailed on it. I seemed a little more responsible to everyone around me. And it helped when I was in Sydney. Not job wise. I worked at a Subway and made $18.50 an hour and then worked at a Berkelow Books and made $17.50 an hour. But when I met people, they would ask about if I was in school, what my degree was, etc. I was really aware of those conversations because I had been so close to dropping out. And I realized how different they would have been had I dropped out.

-----

When it comes to what degree you should get, that depends.

I initially started as a business major because I had the same thought as you. After two years, I was losing my mind. I had taken more English classes than business and would have to be in school for 5 years. So I changed majors to focus on English.

I still feel like both an English undergrad degree and an MFA are nonsense. I know a bunch of people who went the MFA route and thought it was fun but unhelpful or not fun and unhelpful. There are very few people I've ever talked to who got their MFA and felt that MFA really helped them reach the next level.

I say all that from an education perspective. The workshops you're in are usually with students are your caliber of writing or worse. Which usually makes it a blind leading the blind kind of situation. And the professors usually have other things they're worried about. Making you the best writer you can possibly be isn't what most professors really care about. They may like teaching and helping you, but they're concerned with their own projects. So while you'll get some help, it may not be the mentor/mentee relationship that would be ideal.

The main benefit of undergrad and grad is networking. There really isn't that much of a difference between what you're taught at The University of Akron versus what you're taught at Yale. But there's a vast vast vast difference between who's teaching you, who's next to you, and who you have access to.

The best thing you can probably do while in undergrad is leverage the network. Does the school have a literary journal? Join it. If it doesn't, start one. Befriend all the professors. Ask them for advice on a writing career. On internships. Or publishing. Conferences, etc.

That's the true value of a school. Not the classroom experience. But the networking.

If I was back in college, that's what I would focus on.

-----

TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens worked day jobs their entire lives. Einstein worked a day job while working on his major breakthrough.

It may help to look at the book Daily Rituals which looks at the day to day lives of many artists (mostly historical).

But, really, you don't need the classroom to learn how to be a writer.

You just need to read, deconstruct what you read, research what you read, and write a lot.

----

And with all that said, I did, at one point, pay for a year of private lessons with a writer. That was when I was 26. I had come a long ways on my own, but I felt like I needed more. I did a summer workshop at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. The workshop itself was interesting but not revolutionary. But the guy who lead it was who I worked with for the next year. We had weekly calls. He'd assign work. I'd send work. He'd give me feedback. It's the first time I really felt I had feedback from someone who knew what they were talking about and was actually a better writer than me.

I wouldn't recommend everyone doing private lessons. But I do think everyone needs to find someone who they respect as being a superior writer and work with them. Up to that point, I had been in...two poetry workshops, two fiction workshops, two non-fiction workshops, then two other writing groups, and another writing group. As awful as it will make me sound, I always felt superior to the other people in the workshop. I had read more, I had written more, I had studied more. So having that experience of being coached by someone who had read and written more than me—that was priceless.

-----

I also think working as an editor for a literary journal is more educational than any writing class. In classes, you usually read a great work and discuss it. In workshops, you're reading a dozen or so low quality works. The workshops are skewed because these are your peers. It's not so easy to objectively examine their work. And it comes in a situation where you know they're judging your work. And that you're all experimenting and busy.

It's an entirely different experience to read submissions for a literary journal. Reading 30-50 poetry submissions in a month or reading 20-40 short stories in a month. And the quality is always changing. You see this whole gamut of quality. And it gives you a much better sense of why something works and why it doesn't. Most of the time, these writers will be better than you are. But they are still flawed. And it's easy to recognize those flaws. Which makes it even more shocking when you encounter a really really good submission. It's much more clear WHY it's good when you've just read 15 bad stories in a row.

You don't get that experience if you're only reading great works of poetry and literature. The flaws just aren't as obvious. And your eye probably isn't trained to see the flaws that are there.

Likewise, if you're in a workshop with other college kids, the quality of work they turn in probably isn't good enough to create the necessary contrast that you get from reading submissions of better quality writers.

-----

So to summarize:

• Stay in school
  
  
• The networking and writing experiences you have are more important than the classroom stuff
  
  
• Reading, deconstructing what you read, and researching what you read are better than classroom stuff
  
  
• Start volunteering as an editor at a literary journal. (We're always looking for people at Red Fez.
  
  

On behalf of Chuck Klosterman...

1. Let us assume you met a rudimentary magician. Let us assume he can do five simple tricks--he can pull a rabbit out of his hat, he can make a coin disappear, he can turn the ace of spades into the Joker card, and two others in a similar vein. These are his only tricks and he can't learn anymore; he can only do these five. HOWEVER, it turns out he's doing these five tricks with real magic. It's not an illusion; he can actually conjure the bunny out of the ether and he can move the coin through space. He's legitimately magical, but extremely limited in scope and influence. Would this person be more impressive than Albert Einstein?
   
   
2. Let us assume a fully grown, completely healthy Clydesdale horse has his hooves shackled to the ground while his head is held in place with thick rope. He is conscious and standing upright, but completely immobile. And let us assume that--for some reason--every political prisoner on earth (as cited by Amnesty International) will be released from captivity if you can kick this horse to death in less than twenty minutes. You are allowed to wear steel-toed boots. Would you attempt to do this?
   
   
3. Let us assume there are two boxes on a table. In one box, there is a relatively normal turtle; in the other, Adolf Hitler's skull. You have to select one of these items for your home. If you select the turtle, you can't give it away and you have to keep it alive for two years; if either of these parameters are not met, you will be fined $999 by the state. If you select Hitler's skull, you are required to display it in a semi-prominent location in your living room for the same amount of time, although you will be paid a stipend of $120 per month for doing so. Display of the skull must be apolitical. Which option do you select?
   
   
4. You meet your soul mate. However, there is a catch: Every three years, someone will break both of your soul mate's collarbones with a Crescent wrench, and there is only one way you can stop this from happening: You must swallow a pill that will make every song you hear--for the rest of your life--sound as if it's being performed by the band Alice in Chains. When you hear Credence Clearwater Revival on the radio, it will sound (to your ears) like it’s being played by Alice in Chains. If you see Radiohead live, every one of their tunes will sound like it’s being covered by Alice in Chains. When you hear a commercial jingle on TV, it will sound like Alice in Chains; if you sing to yourself in the shower, your voice will sound like deceased Alice vocalist Layne Staley performing a Capella (but it will only sound this way to you). Would you swallow the pill?
   
   
5. At long last, someone invents "the dream VCR." This machine allows you to tape an entire evening's worth of your own dreams, which you can then watch at your leisure. However, the inventor of the dream VCR will only allow you to use this device of you agree to a strange caveat: When you watch your dreams, you must do so with your family and your closest friends in the same room. They get to watch your dreams along with you. And if you don't agree to this, you can't use the dream VCR. Would you still do this?
   
   
6. Defying all expectation, a group of Scottish marine biologists capture a live Loch Ness Monster. In an almost unbelievable coincidence, a bear hunter in the Pacific Northwest shoots a Sasquatch in the thigh, thereby allowing zoologists to take the furry monster into captivity. These events happen on the same afternoon. That evening, the president announces he may have thyroid cancer and will undergo a biopsy later that week. You are the front page editor of The New York Times: What do you play as the biggest story?
   
   
7. You meet the perfect person. Romantically, this person is ideal: You find them physically attractive, intellectually stimulating, consistently funny, and deeply compassionate. However, they have one quirk: This individual is obsessed with Jim Henson's gothic puppet fantasy The Dark Crystal. Beyond watching it on DVD at least once a month, he/she peppers casual conversation with Dark Crystal references, uses Dark Crystal analogies to explain everyday events, and occasionally likes to talk intensely about the film's "deeper philosophy." Would this be enough to stop you from marrying this individual?
   
   
8. A novel titled Interior Mirror is released to mammoth commercial success (despite middling reviews). However, a curious social trend emerges: Though no one can prove a direct scientific link, it appears that almost 30 percent of the people who read this book immediately become homosexual. Many of these newfound homosexuals credit the book for helping them reach this conclusion about their orientation, despite the fact that Interior Mirror is ostensibly a crime novel with no homoerotic content (and was written by a straight man). Would this phenomenon increase (or decrease) the likelihood of you reading this book?
   
   
9. You are watching a movie in a crowded theater. Though the plot is mediocre, you find yourself dazzled by the special effects. But with twenty minutes left in the film, you are struck with an undeniable feeling of doom: You are suddenly certain your mother has just died. There is no logical reason for this to be true, but you are certain of it. You are overtaken with the irrational metaphysical sense that--somewhere--your mom has just perished. But this is only an intuitive, amorphous feeling; there is no evidence for this, and your mother has not been ill. Would you immediately exit the theater, or would you finish watching the movie?
   
   
10. You meet a wizard. The wizard tells you he can make you more attractive if you pay him money. When you ask how this process works, the wizard points to a random person on the street. You look at this random stranger. The wizard says, "I will now make them a dollar more attractive." He waves his magic wand. Ostensibly, this person does not change at all; as far as you can tell, nothing is different. But--somehow--this person is suddenly a little more appealing. The tangible difference is invisible to the naked eye, but you can't deny that this person is vaguely sexier. This wizard has a weird rule, though--you can only pay him once. You can't keep giving him money until you're satisfied. You can only pay him one lump sum up front. How much cash do you give the wizard?
    
    
11. For reasons that cannot be explained, cats can suddenly read at a twelfth-grade level. They can't talk and they can't write, but they can read silently and understand the text. Many cats love this new skill, because they now have something to do all day while they lay around the house; however, a few cats become depressed, because reading forces them to realize the limitations of their existence (not to mention the utter frustration of being unable to express themselves). This being the case, do you think the average cat would enjoy Garfield, or would cats find this cartoon to be an insulting caricature?
    
    
12. You have a brain tumor. Though there is no discomfort at the moment, this tumor would unquestionably kill you in six months. However, your life can (and will) be saved by an operation; the only downside is that there will be a brutal incision to your frontal lobe. After the surgery, you will be significantly less intelligent. You will still be a fully functioning adult, but you will be less logical, you will have a terrible memory, and you will have little ability to understand complex concepts or difficult ideas. The surgery is in two weeks. How do you spend the next fourteen days?
    
    
13. You have won a prize. The prize has two options, and you can choose either (but not both). The first option is a year in Europe with a monthly stipend of $2,000. The second option is ten minutes on the moon. Which option do you select?
    
    
14. Your best friend is taking a nap on the floor of your living room. Suddenly, you are faced with a bizarre existential problem: This friend is going to die unless you kick them (as hard as you can) in the rib cage. If you don’t kick them while they slumber, they will never wake up. However, you can never explain this to your friend; if you later inform them that you did this to save their life, they will also die from that. So you have to kick a sleeping friend in the ribs, and you can’t tell them why. Since you cannot tell your friend the truth, what excuse will you fabricate to explain this (seemingly inexplicable) attack?
    
    
15. For whatever the reason, two unauthorized movies are made about your life. The first is an independently released documentary, primarily comprised of interviews with people who know you and bootleg footage from your actual life. Critics are describing the documentary as “brutally honest and relentlessly fair.” Meanwhile, Columbia Tri-Star has produced a big-budget biopic of your life, casting major Hollywood stars as you and all your acquaintances; though the movie is based on actual events, screenwriters have taken some liberties with the facts. Critics are split on the artistic merits of this fictionalized account, but audiences love it. Which film would you be most interested in seeing?
    
    Edit: For those wondering, these questions are a subset of Chuck Klosterman's Hypertheticals. I'd have included more but Reddit only allows 10,000 characters per reply.

Keep a dream journal. Doesn't matter if you can only remember vague details, or if you are not even sure if a dream scene occurred; write down ANYTHING that might be relevant to your dreams. Every serious dreamer has one handy nearby.

Your brother is right. Everyone has dreams--which is just REM sleep--and their frequency increases per hour as the period of time of sleeping progresses.

The number one site I recommend is Dream Views. I know the site is dedicated to lucid dreaming, but 1) there are a lot of people on the site who have the same problem that you have in terms of remembering stuff and 2) your chances of experiencing a lucid dream increases as your recall of dreams also increases. The best books I know that deal with dreaming are: 1) Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, 2) Control Your Dreams, and 3) The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. Each contain a tiny bit of new age stuff, but if you are able to ignore those details then you're golden. The only one I advise against for now is book number 3; you need to place a LOT of effort in order to effectively carry out the exercises the book describes. It's well-written and informative though.

A topic that you might find of interest is "Dream Yoga". Like the 3rd book, don't do it if you're a beginner or you suck at meditation.

Finally some more modern stuff: A SciAm article about dreaming and a "HowStuffWorks" section on dream recall.

I know most of this stuff talks about lucid dreaming, but dream recall and lucid dreaming are interconnected with each other. At some point during the recording of your dreams you will have a lucid dream and most likely you will freak out. You might have already had one, but I can never be too cautious.

A last bit, if you are interested in taking supplements. If not, then you can skip this part. Anyways, there's an excellent book that talks about supplements that can increase your dream recall. The majority of them are recognized nootropics, while others are a bit sketch. The book is called Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements. You can also look up "dream supplements" on google. Here is my personal list of supplements that I have been taking for about 1-2 months now:
25 mg of DHEA
650mg of choline
B-complex 100 to get 100mg of B6
8 mg of galantamine
530 mg of Valerian Root
5 mg Melatonin time release (You only need 1 mg, but I did not know this when I bought my bulk supply)
500 mg of Bacopa Monniera
My dreams haven't been that weird, while my recall is more improved than usual (I have been lucid dreaming and remembering my dreams since 6 years old, though it might have been even earlier. Can't remember). No major mood swings, though the above ^ dosages work perfectly fine with my body. I did my own personal research and estimated the supplements' effects on my body though, so I wouldn't recommend using my dosages. I'm 17 btw if you were wondering how the supplements might affect a developing brain; no major changes from what I can tell.

Something that you might want to start, if you haven't already: meditation. Not only does it decrease the daily stress you get, but it helps hone your concentration skills. You also learn how to relax yourself fairly quickly :D There have been some studies that meditation helps increase dream recall/frequency of lucid dreams, though I can't find that many right now...

tl;dr version:
Keep a dream journal. Read some books about lucid dreaming and dream recall. Go on a website called "Dream Views" and immerse yourself in their tutorials/FAQs. If you're serious about remembering your dreams then look up "Dream Yoga"; a good resource is this website. Meditation helps A LOT.

That's exactly perfect! I like to take the "3P Approach" to solving problems:

1. Premise
   
2. Parts
   
3. Procedures
   
   What typically happens is that we feel some anxiety & get motivated to change & then jump directly into the weeds (the step-by-step checklist procedures required for implementing change in our lives) & it's a big mess. This approach is better because you identify the problem, convert it from a big, monolithic issue into a bunch of smaller component parts, and then address each one as a project that you can work on bit by bit, which is a far easier approach for dealing with large, complicated things like overhauling your entire life!
   
   So your premise is that you're ready for a change in your life, you're ready for some improvements, you're ready for better, you're ready for more. The first-pass list of "parts" are:
   
   
4. Develop bulletproof self-esteem
   
5. Find a fulfilling career
   
6. Have great relationships
   
7. Improve your financial situation
   
8. Adopt better habits
   
   Yeah, so with the cookie-cutter analogy, you now have 5 shapes to work with - they're all different, but they're all going to lead to the outcomes you desire because you're controlling the shape of each one. So now that you've got a few separate, individual items to work on, you can start working on them. It's been said that there are only 2 problems in the world:
   
   
9. You don't know what you want
   
10. You don't know how to get what you want
    
    So now that we have that first-pass laundry list of things we want, we've solved the first problem, and can now work on addressing the second problem, which is figuring out how to implement real change to get better results than we're getting now. And the way we do that is by reading books, researching online, talking to people, thinking about stuff, walking through some checklists to define what we want & make decisions about the targets we want to hit, etc. Here are some starting points, just based on my experience: (based on your first 5 identified issues to work on, as listed above)
    
    Self-esteem:
    
    

• Book: (or audiobook) "Attitude is Everything" by Jeff Keller. For me, this really put into perspective two things: One, that my attitude determined the majority of my experience in any given situation, and two, that I had full control & ownership over my attitude. This book is an easy read.
  
• Book: (or audiobook) "Mindset" by Carol Dweck. This introduces the concept that there are 2 mindsets in any given situation: fixed ("this is why I can't") & growth ("how can I?"). This was a critical clarifying concept because it gave me an approach for whatever situation I found myself in: am I having a fixed (victim) or growth (victor) mindset about this situation? This book is a bit of a heavier read.
  
• CBT: (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) This is the basic idea that you can change your life by changing how you think. To quote Wayne Gretzky, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take". The way you think determines what actions you will take, so learning what kind of traps are out there (called "distortions") can help you overcome mental obstacles. One of my personal biggest ones was "all or nothing" thinking, basically fake perfectionism...I had to go big or go home, do it perfect according to my mental picture of success, or it wasn't worth doing, etc. This is a great starter article: https://positivepsychology.com/cognitive-distortions/
  
• Book: (or audiobook) "The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are" by Brené Brown, This book is a bit more of a grazing approach to illustrate some common traps we fall into with self-esteem issues
  
• These are all just starting points...imo, the ultimate goal of self-esteem is to give you a rock-solid foundation on which you can rely on yourself instead of requiring the validation of others. We all have a certain amount of anxiety & a need for validation, which is totally fine, but it shouldn't dictate our lives or drive our actions to the point where we're not doing, living, and feeling the way we want to.
  
  Career:
  
  
• We'll cover the money question in the financial section below, but "how much do you want to make?" is the first question I always ask. Not because it's a shallow thing, but because your entire lifestyle will be limited by your financial picture - how much free time you have, how much stress you carry, if you can afford to live in a nice neighborhood or take time off or drive a reliable car, etc.
  
• Businesses will pay you what they think you're worth. You have to define how much you want to make & then get trained so that you're a valuable asset to your company. A lot of people are unhappy with their jobs & their pay scales, but are also unwilling to get further education or change jobs, and you can't have it both ways, because jobs will pay you what they think you are worth, that's the bottom line! You can game the system by doing research, making decisions, and getting training on your own time, in order to achieve your goals, which means that you need to know how much money you want to make, what you want to do, and what job opportunities you should pursue, which gives you a nice checklist to follow to create a path to go down, rather than just feeling stuck & unhappy & not knowing where to go!
  
• The point of college & other training systems is to get you a job. You get educated to learn how to work at something specific. A lot of people go into systems like say college with no clue what they want to do with their lives & then just kind of drift into a job & stay there. Statistics say that 84% of people are unhappy in their jobs (hate their jobs, even), which says that that approach blows chunks & that being proactive about what you want in your professional life is a waaaaay better option to go with, haha!
  
• There are 14,000 job types & 7 million job openings, right now, today. There is no shortage of opportunity. What we lack is clear direction - a specific goal coupled with a realistic plan to move forward on it, supported by a personal work ethic to do what it takes to get what you want, no matter how many roadblocks, setbacks, and barriers you run into. One of my favorite TED Talks is on "Grit" by Angela Duckworth, which talks about how success is primarily a factor of being persistent & simply not giving up until you get what you want, which is pretty obvious when written out, but is far from obvious in practice!
  
• Another question to ask yourself is whether or not you want to find fulfillment at work, or outside of work, or perhaps both. Some people simply don't care what they do & are happier finding fulfillment outside of work. For me, I go a little nuts when I have a crappy job or a bad boss, so I need a really good working environment, or else I tend to get a little stressed out, haha! But everyone is different, so you have to figure out what works for you & what your personal parameters are & then do some research to match up jobs vs. payscale vs. personal fulfillment requirements. I have lots of resources on this topic when you're ready!
  
  part 1/2

Very similar situation, minus being a student and plus having a new job that is closed over the holidays. Beyond the new-to-me holiday break, my new job gives me a lot more free time (and latitude to come up with cool stuff at work) than my last role so my brain is spinning with all the stuff I could do.

I frequently recommend The Now Habit which I've found to be very useful for its concrete recommendations with how to winnow down what you are trying to accomplish and get out of the emotional quagmire of wanting to do stuff and into the objective state of having done stuff, but I also recently finished Self Discipline in 10 Days, which is similar in its practical recommendations and also available for free online.

What all are you trying to do? It is a good idea to sit down, make a broad list of what you are hoping to accomplish and review that. Ideally you are able to take that list then and break down each item as far as needed to have tasks that are imminently doable - that is, you could realistically do the task and cross it off your list at one time - BUT don't get too bogged down in making this perfect and having your list reflect everything perfectly (e.g., "Brush teeth" is probably sufficient without "Get toothbrush out of cabinet", "Put toothpaste on toothbrush" but "Clean kitchen" may be too broad - don't hesitate to add "Get out cleaning supplies", "Wipe backsplash", "Do dishes", etc.) You are allowed to have as many tasks as you need to stay on track - if you get stuck, breaking them down further can be an amazingly useful way to move forward so don't worry if they're not perfect when you first jot down your list. Letting it be a dynamic tool you interact with throughout the process can be shockingly functional.

It's also helpful to set some defaults - if I don't really know how long a task is going to take, I usually default my time estimate to 30 minutes. You can set a timer and check in after that time to see where you are and if you over-estimated or under-estimated. This sort of takes from the Pomodoro technique which I really love for making longer projects that require multiple work sessions seem doable. If it seems like a half hour is too much but the task is still imminently doable, you can also set a stopwatch and see how long it actually takes - I was amused when I set a stop watch for cleaning my cat's litterbox, which I had felt like was a fairly significant "to do" and carried enough emotional weight for me want to procrastinate on and avoid doing it, and discovered it only takes 2 minutes. Similarly for exercise - I have found that I can get a workout done in about 20-30 minutes but I can also take 60-90 minutes to get the same amount of actual exercise done if I dick around picking out what I'm going to do and browsing websites on exercise science or whatever.

The estimation has helped me a lot - even if you're inaccurate (and I've found myself to be surprisingly good at guessing even if I feel like I have no idea). Sometimes if I have a bunch of stuff to get done in a day, I will throw a list down on paper and add time estimates (I try to not have a segment shorter than 30 min so if I have like "Do the cat's litterbox" and "Empty the dishwasher", etc. I will batch several of those into one group to do at once.) Then I add everything up to see how long this would all actually take me. This can be really harrowing - I have ended up with to-do lists that seemed reasonable at first but after putting some estimated times on them, ended up looking like a day with 8 hours of pure work. Scale back as necessary to what you feel comfortable with (because you feeling comfortable and like the goals you set out for yourself are easy/accomplishable is key to actually doing them instead of succumbing to watching trash TV in sweatpants) or if it's less time than you thought, get the stuff done, note any guesstimates that were way off base for next time, and enjoy your free time.

Hope this helps!

It's just a dream tracker and a dream diary. I keep two different "collections" as bullet journal calls it. A collection (or page) starts as just an open two page spread in your journal. Start on the left side, add a title at the top and start writing. And the cool part is you reserve the first two to four pages of the journal as a topic page or table of contents. Then go and put a note on the T.O.C. page at the front of the journal so you can remember what page it's on. For your collection if you need more pages than that, you just go to the next blank open two pages and add those page numbers next to the topic on the index page. It's really easy and as an organizational system you can apply it to anything you're trying to keep track of.

You don't have to buy that specific journal BTW, admittedly it's kind of expensive ($24 US) but it's really nice quality plus it has the instructions/guide to how to use it in the back. But you can grab any old journal lying around the house and watch their YouTube videos to get the strategy.

So the first collection (page, spread, whatever you want to call it) is just titled "Dream Journal" at the top. Write today's date and quick notes on what the dream was about. I'm much more minimal than the fancy handwriting and elaboration example here. But I'm kind of OCD when it comes to lists and things. It helps me get it out of my head and relax but still be able to remember important details if I want to review them again later.

The second one to start is a "Lucid Dream Log" or tracker or whatever you want to call it. Start another two page spread. Make a straight list of the dates of the month down the left side of the page. It's also helpful to write the first letter of the day of the week just on the left or right side of the numbers. Sundays and Mondays I'm always thinking about work so it rarely happens then. Those kinds of things are helpful to notice so you don't get stressed out about it not happening "every day" possible. And I mark an X if I had one and next to it what reality checked worked. I have shorthand for my common ones, otherwise I write it out if something new happened and I that helps me remember it to see if that will work again. Usually it doesn't but hey. It helped me discover I can recognize a dream just by it being a strange scenario. For example looking at my hands never worked. But situations/context and the "this is so odd" feeling help me snap to.

If you've noticed other areas of your life or routine that either positively or negative affect your L.D. ability you can add a tracker for that. Kind of silly but say spicy food helps. You can start another two page spread, add the title to the T.O.C. and write another list of the days of the month down the left side, add the letter of the days of the week. Then add a column for "ate spicy food". Add any other columns that might also apply like gym, running, meditate, PMR, and put an x in that column when you do it. You can create an "avoid" tracker for positive reinforcement as well. Like heavy foods or alcohol are good to avoid in my opinion. They both inhibit remembering dreams and make falling right into a hard sleep a problem. So if you have a drink on Friday don't beat yourself up if you don't LD that night or even the next. Same thing if you eat a whole pizza (which I have done many times). Habit trackers are really easy and helpful in the BuJo (bullet journal, aka bullet points, aka fast journaling) system.

Even just doing the journaling and thinking about dreaming kind of makes it more accessible and vivid. If you haven't already read any books on the subject check out ones like Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Anything that is interesting and keeps your mind on it in an entertaining, fun, lighthearted way. Hope this helps! That was kind of a lot... :(

This seems like the perfect place to get started, and having the kind of confidence that it takes to be able to ask for help when you need it is exactly the kind of thing you need to be successful with drawing. I've been on my own drawing journey for about six months now, from a starting place quite similar to where you were, and although I still have a long way to go I'll do my best to share what I've been able to find out along the way.

Drawing is much like learning any other skill, like math or a sport, and as such the best favour you can do yourself is to know how you learn things best and to focus on that. Always try to go for several different methods, since variety will help your learning process from getting monotonous, and remember that any type of instruction will be better than no instruction, even if it's not your first choice.

Also, drawing on a tablet is hard. The disconnect between pen and screen as well as the small surface and lack of completely accurate touch feedback can make it a difficult way to begin making art. It's fun and you should certainly keep it up, but I found it was much easier to learn the basics with a good old pencil and a cheap sketchbook, and then apply what I learn to my tablet paintings afterwards. Sketchbooks also have the great benefit of being portable, and going around and drawing things that you can actually see in front of you is essential to learning to draw well.

Books did wonders to help me. Check you local library to see if you can find some on the cheap. Try to avoid books that only deal with drawing on specific thing, like "How to draw cars" and such, since these are often far to specific and narrow in scope, when what you really need is a solid drawing foundation. Probably the highest recommended one for beginners is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. It covers all the basics and is geared to the complete beginner, and unlike a lot of art books that focus primarily on techniques it also talks a lot about the thought process behind drawings. Judging by your work, I think it would be the most help to you of anything, as your major problem seems to be that you are relying on "symbols" that represent what you are wanting to draw rather than direct observation, which is extremely common and was my major problem too. You can also find videos of her teaching the lessons from her book on Youtube, but I'd still recommend the book, as it allows you a better view of the examples, lets you double check the instructions and makes it so you can work at your own pace.

Taking a class can be invaluable, since you have someone with experience right there to put you on the right track. Many colleges and community centers offer art programs in evenings or weekends (and during summer break, since you seem to be a student) where you could get started. Asking at a local art supply store might help to put you on the right track there. My work schedule prevents me from taking classes on any regular basis, but I'm always on the lookout for short intensive and drop-in meetups that do fit in.

For web based ressources that deal specifically with digital painting, nothing beats Ctrl+Paint. You don't need to bother with the videos that require you to pay for now, there is a great deal of free tutorials that will help you get started.

After you learn the basics, it all comes down to practice and choosing what you want to focus on at any given time. More advanced books and classes can focus on different mediums or subjects, and the fun part is often exploring and experimenting on your own. The trick is to think big, avoid restraining yourself, laugh off every mistake and try again and practice, practice, practice.

/r/LucidDreaming

All about Lucid Dreams. How to, sǝɔuǝıɹǝdxǝ, etc.

Please take discussions of the paranormal such as astral projection someplace else. Binaural beats are also inappropriate. Let's keep this in the realm of science.

Welcome to r/LucidDreaming! Please check out the sidebar and Wiki before posting.

***

• Quickstart Guide for Beginners - Know this stuff before you post!
  
  
  
• Frequently Asked Questions
  
  
• An excellent Podcast by TheLucidSage
  
  ***
  
  

  Rules
  

  
  

• . Be nice to everyone!
  
  
• 1. All posts must be related to Lucid Dreaming!
  
  • 1a. No posts regarding just the paranormal. There's /r/astralprojection (among others) for that.
    
  • 1b. No posts just about dreams. There's /r/dreams and /r/thisdreamihad
    
    
• 2. No advertising!
  
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  Related Subreddits
  

  
  

• The everything about dreaming multireddit!
  
  
• Teaching Kids to Lucid Dream
  
  
• Lucid Dreaming Memes
  
  
• SleepParalysis
  
  
• Lucid Dreaming Speculation
  
  
• Dreams
  
  
  ***
  
  

  Some good ןɐıɹoʇnʇ links
  

  
  

• Finger Induced Lucid Dreaming This appears to be the biggest improvement in lucid dreaming techniques in a long time. Be sure to give it a try.
  
  
• Dream Views A good fairly comprehensive guide. There's also a great message board and an online dream journal.
  
  
• LD4all A message board, it's got solid information and good community.
  
  
• Mastering the Art of Lucid Dreaming A nice straightforward, step-by-step tutorial.
  
  
• All Day Awareness is a great approach. it is effort intensive, but pay back in lucid dreams and more awareness in life.
  
  
• This FAQ was produced by the Lucidity Institute. It's not pretty, but is based on solid science.
  
  

  For when you are ready to obsess
  

  
  

• Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is THE book on Lucid Dreaming. "A Course in Lucid Dreaming" is the most thorough lucid dream training tutorial with lots of charts for you to keep track of your progress. (No link right now.)
  
  
  ***
  
  

  Lucid Dreaming Acronyms
  

  
  LD - Lucid Dreaming - Being aware that you are dreaming while in a dream.
  
  
  RC - Reality Check - A test to establish whether you are in a dream or waking life, actively done during the day in hopes that the habit will continue within dreams.
  
  
  DC - Dream Character - Any personality you encounter other than yourself...well, occasionally it can also be yourself.
  
  WBTB-Wake Back To Bed - Waking up for 20-30 minutes, then going back to bed increases the chances of lucid dreaming. Use that time to read about lucid dreaming or plan your dreams, and make your intention solid. Can be combined with other techniques.
  
  
  MILD - Mnemonically Induced Lucid Dream - In short, MILD is telling yourself as you are in bed ready to sleep that you are going to become lucid when you dream, then visualizing yourself in a dream becoming lucid. Repeat until you fall asleep.
  
  WILD - Wake-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique in which you maintain consciousness while your body falls asleep. Not for the squeamish.
  
  FILD - Finger-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique using subtle finger movements as you fall asleep.
  
  SSILD - Sense-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique where you use awareness of your various senses as you cycle through them while falling asleep.
  
  False Awakening - False Awakening is in essence just dreaming that you woke up, only to usually immediately after either actually wake or have another dream of waking up from the previous dreams. Those can often happen multiple times in sequence. It can be a bit jarring but also fun. If those happen often use it to do a reality check every time you wake up (or think you do).
  
  SP - Sleep Paralysis - A natural, safe part of the process of falling asleep which causes you to be unable to move your body. The paralysis process happens to you every time you go to sleep. When you WILD and experience SP, you are conscious while it happens. Sometimes you may be visited by the dream transition buddies--relax and enjoy the show until you can interact with your environment. Attempting to induce SP is NOT required to achieve lucidity.
  
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I love it. I can't help you, but I love it.

I used to work on lucid dreaming intensively, about 6 months in after all my techniques & known lucid dream producing practices I was able to achieve a state of lucidity while asleep each night. I believe in you friend!

Do you have a dream journal? They can help you begin recognizing your dream patterns.

Other than that I also highly recommend using the hand/face method. In dreams you have more or less than 5 fingers. While in a dream if you look at your hand and notice you have more/less than 5 fingers you can sometimes bring yourself lucid but it takes practice to not wake up immediately from noticing/excitement. Another thing is we don't dream faces, our subconscious fills them from the personalities our brains are thinking of, try and look at the faces (or lack-thereof) of the people in your dreams to remind yourself you're dreaming.

I'm working I tried to make the tips coherent as possible, sorry for any errors there may be.

There are a few books on lucid dreaming I highly recommend, I'll get you the names once I'm home.

It's something you have to keep at every night, but it's so worth the time it takes to achieve. Thanks for this post, I'm going to start getting back into it. Once you can reach lucidity while dreaming you get to live two lives and it's so rewardingly beautiful & fun. If you have any questions feel free to ask :)

Edit: Book #1 & Book #2 / Book #3

Those three books are all great ones for lucid dreaming, I only used the first two (Stephen LaBerge, very smart guy) initially but I added the third book to my repertoire later on and I highly recommend it as well. They're all pretty cheap on Amazon!

No problem at all! In this case, I mostly learned it by reading a lot of essays and interviews and books, in this case especially ones on Kubrick and on cinematography. I don't remember specifically what stuff in particular, unfortunately. The best advice for watching EWS (or any film) in its intended format is to find a screening of it that's in 35mm--depending on where you're located, good bets are museums like MOMA in NYC, a local university, or arthouses and repertory theatres that might have a Kubrick retrospective or something.

As far as becoming well-versed in film, the first step is to watch everything you can get your hands on, even if you think it will be awful, and pay as much attention to the choices that are being made, how a camera is moving, what is in the frame and what isn't, lighting, color, dialogue, etc., even if you have no idea really what to be paying attention for. Anything you can think of or see onscreen, think about why that choice is being made and what the purpose of that choice is. And then after viewing something, look up some reviews of it (to find good critics, a good start is to go to Rotten Tomatoes, narrow down a movie's reviews to Top Critics, and then read the full reviews from there), positive and negative, and try to match what they're talking about to what you just saw and see if you can recognize what they're mentioning. And if you can't, just store the type of thing they're talking about and remember to think about it during the next movie you watch, and the next, and so on. Practicing this will build up your knowledge quite quickly, and it will become second nature to pick up on all kinds of things, and once that becomes habit and you don't have to pay as much attention consciously, you'll pick up on more and more subtle nuances. (If you want to have a starting point for films, you can go with a list like this, a list of 1000 movies that are "the best of all time" as a result of aggregating several different polls. Obviously, you never want to put too much stock in other people's opinions of what the best is, and it seems intimidatingly long, but like I said, it's just if you want a reference point. And they link to the polls they use, so if you want a smaller list to work with you, you can try one of those. This is helpful because again you'll discover what you like, so you might find one movie on that list by a director you love and then go off and watch everything else she ever did. And then you come back to the list. So it's not really about completing the list, just using it as another starting point for discovery.) Also, I recommend you keep at least a brief log of everything you watch, along with some notes about it--this will help you keep track of directors/screenwriters/cinematographers you like, as well as help you understand what you like and don't like about films better.

Once you start to feel comfortable with some of the basics, you can start seeking out books that discuss the film-making experience. With both movies and books, you'll discover your tastes as you go along, so it's best to start casting a broad net and reading books that cover a lot of topics, and then you might find that cinematography interests you most and then start reading books that are more specifically about that, and subscribing to specialty magazines like American Cinematographer, or you might find it all appealing and want to read books on all aspects of filmmaking.

That probably seems like a ton of info and fairly intimidating, but I basically started from nothing and basically just taught myself whatever I know by this method, no film school or anything certainly. Not saying I'm an expert on this stuff by any stretch of the imagination, but I've been able to become knowledgeable enough.

Some specific recommendations that I found immensely helpful that hopefully might be helpful to you too:

Current film critics: Dana Stevens (Slate), Stephanie Zacharek (Village Voice), Karina Longworth (freelance), Manohla Dargis (NYT), Wesley Morris (Grantland), A.O. Scott (NYT)


Kubrick:
The Stanley Kubrick Archives - A great book that also features Kubrick's drawings, personal notes, continuity photos, and interviews with him

Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made - A book on SK's uncompleted Napoleon film

The Kubrick Site - A really amazing online resource with a lot of links to essays and articles


Film magazines: Sight and Sound, Film Comment, American Cinematographer, Filmmaker, Little White Lies, Screen International


Books (if you only ever read one book on film, I'd make it Hitchcock/Truffaut--I learned more from it than from any other single source):
Hitchcock/Truffaut

What is Cinema?

Pictures at a Revolution

Negative Space

A Cinema of Loneliness

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

The Age of Movies

Making Movies

Are you a reader? Check out Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I know it may seem silly, reading a book about drawing, but the approach they take is that really a "lack of drawing skill" is an issue with perception. Something else you can work through are the Loomis books. There are .pdfs of them to be found here. I've just been reading and plugging away at the examples in the books, picking up tips and tricks along the way.

SUBREDDITS: Even if it's just to see someone else's work and be inspired, pick up techniques. /r/drawing is great to see a lot of pencil stuff. Also, they have a whole sidebar of resources. /r/redditgetsdrawn may be one of the best modded and fun subreddits there are. You get to see so many different styles, and now they just launched /r/watchredditgetsdrawn for time-lapse videos of some process. Most of these are digital paintings, but you still pick up tips and tricks. But on RGB, all skill levels are welcome, there is no down vote button, and people are very positive and willing to critique. Plus, you get a some interesting things to attempt to draw, generally people, but some of the submissions are fun. I actually created an "art" multi reddit that contains:/r/doodles, /r/drawing, /r/drawings, /r/Illustration, /r/learnart, /r/redditgetsdrawn, /r/SketchDaily, /r/Sketching, /r/watchredditgetsdrawn. Don't be afraid to put your stuff out there. Eyes on something with tips and helpful critique will go a long way.

And lastly, break yourself of this notion that drawing is a magical skill or talent that some people possess and others don't. Very few people are able to free draw something straight from memory, and if they do, they likely practiced that form many times before they could do it. Practice, practice, practice and have fun. Don't be afraid to use trace paper to fix a first version, don't be afraid to experiment. Watch any drawing video you can and look at as many drawings as you can.

I recently started about a month ago of wanting to learn how to draw and have found the above super helpful. The amount of improvement I've seen in just a few weeks from a lot of the above is so encouraging. My trade is motion design, and I can't wait to see how learning a new technique or skill will shape the way my work comes out. Don't get discouraged, it will feel hard at times, and it will feel like work. Make a habit of sketching or drawing something daily, even if it's just an artists mannequin. With pencil, realize almost as much erasing goes into a drawing as lead does.

Enjoy the journey.

There is a sticky post when you visit the sub

---

Also :

All about Lucid Dreams. How to, sǝɔuǝıɹǝdxǝ, etc.

Please take discussions of the paranormal such as astral projection someplace else. Binaural beats are also inappropriate. Let's keep this in the realm of science.

Welcome to r/LucidDreaming! Please check out the sidebar and Wiki before posting.

***

• Quickstart Guide for Beginners - Know this stuff before you post!
  
  
  
• Frequently Asked Questions
  
  
• An excellent Podcast by TheLucidSage
  
  ***
  
  

  Rules
  

  
  

• . Be nice to everyone!
  
  
• 1. All posts must be related to Lucid Dreaming!
  
  • 1a. No posts regarding just the paranormal. There's /r/astralprojection (among others) for that.
    
  • 1b. No posts just about dreams. There's /r/dreams and /r/thisdreamihad
    
    
• 2. No advertising!
  
  ***
  
  

  Related Subreddits
  

  
  

• The everything about dreaming multireddit!
  
  
• Teaching Kids to Lucid Dream
  
  
• Lucid Dreaming Memes
  
  
• SleepParalysis
  
  
• Lucid Dreaming Speculation
  
  
• Dreams
  
  
  ***
  
  

  Some good ןɐıɹoʇnʇ links
  

  
  

• Finger Induced Lucid Dreaming This appears to be the biggest improvement in lucid dreaming techniques in a long time. Be sure to give it a try.
  
  
• Dream Views A good fairly comprehensive guide. There's also a great message board and an online dream journal.
  
  
• LD4all A message board, it's got solid information and good community.
  
  
• All Day Awareness is a great approach. it is effort intensive, but pay back in lucid dreams and more awareness in life.
  
  
• This FAQ was produced by the Lucidity Institute. It's not pretty, but is based on solid science.
  
  

  For when you are ready to obsess
  

  
  

• Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is THE book on Lucid Dreaming. "A Course in Lucid Dreaming" is the most thorough lucid dream training tutorial with lots of charts for you to keep track of your progress. (No link right now.)
  
  
  ***
  
  

  Lucid Dreaming Acronyms
  

  
  LD - Lucid Dreaming - Being aware that you are dreaming while in a dream.
  
  
  RC - Reality Check - A test to establish whether you are in a dream or waking life, actively done during the day in hopes that the habit will continue within dreams.
  
  
  DC - Dream Character - Any personality you encounter other than yourself...well, occasionally it can also be yourself.
  
  WBTB-Wake Back To Bed - Waking up for 20-30 minutes, then going back to bed increases the chances of lucid dreaming. Use that time to read about lucid dreaming or plan your dreams, and make your intention solid. Can be combined with other techniques.
  
  
  MILD - Mnemonically Induced Lucid Dream - In short, MILD is telling yourself as you are in bed ready to sleep that you are going to become lucid when you dream, then visualizing yourself in a dream becoming lucid. Repeat until you fall asleep.
  
  WILD - Wake-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique in which you maintain consciousness while your body falls asleep. Not for the squeamish.
  
  FILD - Finger-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique using subtle finger movements as you fall asleep.
  
  SSILD - Sense-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique where you use awareness of your various senses as you cycle through them while falling asleep.
  
  False Awakening - False Awakening is in essence just dreaming that you woke up, only to usually immediately after either actually wake or have another dream of waking up from the previous dreams. Those can often happen multiple times in sequence. It can be a bit jarring but also fun. If those happen often use it to do a reality check every time you wake up (or think you do).
  
  SP - Sleep Paralysis - A natural, safe part of the process of falling asleep which causes you to be unable to move your body. The paralysis process happens to you every time you go to sleep. When you WILD and experience SP, you are conscious while it happens. Sometimes you may be visited by the dream transition buddies--relax and enjoy the show until you can interact with your environment. Attempting to induce SP is NOT required to achieve lucidity.
  
  

  ---

All about Lucid Dreams. How to, sǝɔuǝıɹǝdxǝ, etc.

Please take discussions of the paranormal such as astral projection someplace else. Binaural beats are also inappropriate. Let's keep this in the realm of science.

Welcome to r/LucidDreaming! Please check out the sidebar and Wiki before posting.

***

• Quickstart Guide for Beginners - Know this stuff before you post!
  
  
  
• Frequently Asked Questions
  
  
• An excellent Podcast by TheLucidSage
  
  ***
  
  

  Rules
  

  
  

• . Be nice to everyone!
  
  
• 1. All posts must be related to Lucid Dreaming!
  
  • 1a. No posts regarding just the paranormal. There's /r/astralprojection (among others) for that.
    
  • 1b. No posts just about dreams. There's /r/dreams and /r/thisdreamihad
    
    
• 2. No advertising!
  
  ***
  
  

  Related Subreddits
  

  
  

• The everything about dreaming multireddit!
  
  
• Teaching Kids to Lucid Dream
  
  
• Lucid Dreaming Memes
  
  
• SleepParalysis
  
  
• Lucid Dreaming Speculation
  
  
• Dreams
  
  
  ***
  
  

  Some good ןɐıɹoʇnʇ links
  

  
  

• Finger Induced Lucid Dreaming This appears to be the biggest improvement in lucid dreaming techniques in a long time. Be sure to give it a try.
  
  
• Dream Views A good fairly comprehensive guide. There's also a great message board and an online dream journal.
  
  
• LD4all A message board, it's got solid information and good community.
  
  
• All Day Awareness is a great approach. it is effort intensive, but pay back in lucid dreams and more awareness in life.
  
  
• This FAQ was produced by the Lucidity Institute. It's not pretty, but is based on solid science.
  
  

  For when you are ready to obsess
  

  
  

• Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is THE book on Lucid Dreaming. "A Course in Lucid Dreaming" is the most thorough lucid dream training tutorial with lots of charts for you to keep track of your progress. (No link right now.)
  
  
  ***
  
  

  Lucid Dreaming Acronyms
  

  
  LD - Lucid Dreaming - Being aware that you are dreaming while in a dream.
  
  
  RC - Reality Check - A test to establish whether you are in a dream or waking life, actively done during the day in hopes that the habit will continue within dreams.
  
  
  DC - Dream Character - Any personality you encounter other than yourself...well, occasionally it can also be yourself.
  
  WBTB-Wake Back To Bed - Waking up for 20-30 minutes, then going back to bed increases the chances of lucid dreaming. Use that time to read about lucid dreaming or plan your dreams, and make your intention solid. Can be combined with other techniques.
  
  
  MILD - Mnemonically Induced Lucid Dream - In short, MILD is telling yourself as you are in bed ready to sleep that you are going to become lucid when you dream, then visualizing yourself in a dream becoming lucid. Repeat until you fall asleep.
  
  WILD - Wake-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique in which you maintain consciousness while your body falls asleep. Not for the squeamish.
  
  FILD - Finger-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique using subtle finger movements as you fall asleep.
  
  SSILD - Sense-Induced Lucid Dream - A technique where you use awareness of your various senses as you cycle through them while falling asleep.
  
  False Awakening - False Awakening is in essence just dreaming that you woke up, only to usually immediately after either actually wake or have another dream of waking up from the previous dreams. Those can often happen multiple times in sequence. It can be a bit jarring but also fun. If those happen often use it to do a reality check every time you wake up (or think you do).
  
  SP - Sleep Paralysis - A natural, safe part of the process of falling asleep which causes you to be unable to move your body. The paralysis process happens to you every time you go to sleep. When you WILD and experience SP, you are conscious while it happens. Sometimes you may be visited by the dream transition buddies--relax and enjoy the show until you can interact with your environment. Attempting to induce SP is NOT required to achieve lucidity.
  
  

  ---

A few things I do, from taking a course at uni on idea generation:

• Keep a sketchbook or journal, or a combination of both.
  
  
• Pick something and make as many connections to other things as you can, it may sound lame, but mind mapping is actually really helpful in pinning down what you're thinking about.
  
  
• Explore! If you have a car, drive around, get lost, park somewhere interesting and walk around. Walk, ride, travel, explore. I do a lot of exploring and honestly, just seeing something new and refreshing away from my desk is quite inspiring.
  
  
• Take photos of things. This ties into the previous one, take photos of everything! Draw things from those photos, edit them, chop them up, stick them back together.
  
  
• Collect objects that you find interesting. I went to the beach a few weeks ago, I collected a handful of shells and rocks with interesting colours and textures. I have a pinecone I picked up a few months ago too, I like to look at it or touch it. It's amazing how much of an effect engaging your senses can have on your ideas.
  
  
• Engage in other hobbies. I play video games a lot and I've got a bunch of ideas floating around now for fan art I want to make.
  
  
• Keep images and text you find that you enjoy. I follow some subreddits on here that are good for finding that sort of thing, like r/designporn r/adporn r/abandonedporn r/wallpapers r/drawing etc. I also follow a few websites in a feed reader called Feedly which lets me save things and suggests new feeds related to what I already look at. One of my favourites is Fubiz.net which I discovered through my reader. There's some great stuff in there including architecture.
  
  
  My sister bought me this for my birthday one year and it gives some interesting ways to think outside the box and get you to be creative.

Don't give up man. There's many ways to improve.


1.) My best advice, is find a good teacher that you like and feel comfortable around. Once you do you'll really begin to improve and like your sound.


2.) If you can't find a teacher there's plenty of online resources


3.) This is probably the best and hardest way to improve; it's very slow but the pay off is amazing. Transcribe everything. Start with the Beatles or CCR and transcribe simple chord songs and slowly (I mean after several months of doing this) move on to harder material.
This method is not recommended as it's hard, but it'll make you damn good.


Don't give up bro, I've played guitar for 5 years. I sucked for the first two, was mediocre the last 2 years and it's only recently that I've begun to get good. Just like anyone can learn algebra or learn to read anyone can play guitar.

Two Books to Recommend (On the Mental Aspect of Music):

Effortless Mastery - Liberating the Master Musician Within
by Kenny Werner. This book is simply awesome.

• Download it here (It's a safe download, I uploaded it myself. Shhh!)
  
  Zen Guitar - Philip Sudo
  
  
  don't click me! :)
  
  
• Even more awesome, it not only changed how I view music but also my life. This is personally better than Effortless Mastery, as what you read in the book not only affects your music mindset but spreads into your life. Buy It
  
  Two Final Tips
  
  

1. Just get into the habit of practicing, even if it's only for 5mins everyday. Make sure it's at the same time.
   
   
   
2. There's a cycle. Practice -> Improvement -> Motivation -> Practice -> Improvement - Motivation ->
   
   
   Occasionally you'll hit walls or plateaus at which point, watch Crossroads or listen to Zeppelin and remind yourself why you started playing, then go and practice.
   (-> = leads to)

In no way do I want to understate the importance of reading scripts, but when do you write?

Will you, at some point, shift from indulging in something you like as a reward for reading to a reward for writing?

As an olympic level procrastinator myself, I struggled with something similar. I've been playing piano for 25 years. I love it and am able to play challenging repertoire that's really fun. A few years ago, I'd play piano to "warm my brain up" before writing. Or I'd play piano to "let ideas gel" after outlining. Or I'd play piano after reading a script to "get out from in front of the screen" before I started writing.

And I was getting really good... at piano. I realized that while I wasn't "wasting time" (reddit, clash royale, etc.), I wasn't writing either. My procrastination had outsmarted me by having me do things that benefitted me, that didn't feel like time wasters. But I still wasn't writing. It had moved beyond simple procrastination to Resistance with a capital R. If you're unfamiliar with the term, please please please read Steven Pressfield's magnificent book The War of Art. It's less than $10 on amazon. It's short, some chapters are only a paragraph or two. It's more of a daily devotional than a novel.

Sooo... not to say that this is what you're doing. I don't know your life. And in no way do I intend to wag my finger at you or anything like that. Just some of the language you used in your post sounded familiar and I'll pretty much look for excuses to plug a book that kind of changed my life.

1. How many credits are these courses worth? The average credits per semester is 15, I had 17 my first semester and found it draining to have 5 straight hours of classes.
   
   
2. I don't know about their program, but I had to take a 1 credit class that was just a bunch of bullshit trying to get people to look at their interests and then join groups related to them, and we even spent time going over TED talks. Our "required" reading was The Element. The class was a waste of time.
   
   
3. It might be a good idea to think of a backup school now, because different places have different requirements, and some do not accept credit for certain things. Once you have one picked, look into which classes will not be a waste of time regardless of whether or not you transfer and take those until you know. Your advisor can be a great help for this.
   
   
4. On the subject of generic freshmen things to know, relax. Everybody else is or was in the same position as you. Put yourself out there and meet people, who you meet during college is important because those people can help you during and after. This isn't high-school, you will probably be able to make friends with almost everybody, and how long you've been there doesn't make much of a difference in this aspect. Work hard, but don't forget to have fun too, it will help clear your mind and you will be able to focus more easily when you need to. Don't over-study and know when staring at paper is less beneficial than sleeping or relaxing.
   
   Good luck!

I absolutely LOVE seeing aspiring artists :)

I will say the same thing to everyone who is at this point who is truly serious about improving their artwork. I suggest picking up the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards.

It's a 1 week, 4-8 hour a day book that will teach you how to see your art in a better light, and I think it will be much more useful to you than anything I could say about your work. (If you put up with the psuedoscience in the book, it's very worth it :)

So, I'll give some advice that will help after you've read it, just so I'm not leaving you dry with only a book, but I cannot stress this enough, don't do anything else until you read this book!

-----------

From a compositional standpoint, I love it. It shows character with the pose that he has, having a large sword, not wearing anything, giant demonic wings.

From the larger perspective, you have everything you need, but I suggest really emphasizing a lot of the strong points here. Make the sword much larger, make his pose more exaggerated by making it look like his weight is truly shifted on one leg (Try copying the pose yourself and see what you can change. Take a picture if you have the option, even better have someone else take a picture)

Really emphasize that explosion in the background. Curve the wings more, and try to get them to flow with the pose, and really push out his casual attitude. Maybe even having the wings retracted could help in this :)

These are all fairly minor things in the grand scheme. I love it, so please, please keep going forward! Read the book, and what I say will make more sense. If you need any help understanding the concepts behind this stuff, let me know and I'll point you in the right direction. I really hope to see where you go with this!

Warning: rant on "following passions" ahead...not directed at you personally OP but I've encountered too many people like the ones I describe below.

>Decades of penny-pinching and doing what you hate just for a few bucks while ignoring your passions will make your passions die.

It's not an either/or decision where either you do what you love all the time or you do what you hate all the time. Why not both?

If you really care about something, you will find ways to keep up with your passions while you work toward building a cushion to pursuing them full time. In fact, it's dedicating a little time each day to what you love that gets you through those tough times. The stories of people who did this and eventually succeeded are many; the stories of people who took that "one big shot" and made it are incredibly rare. That's why they make movies out of them. Success just doesn't happen that way very often.

To be honest, people who will only pursue their passions if they can pursue it the way they want to have pretty weak passions. People who really love something often find the time no matter what. This guy wrote a whole novel on his phone while commuting on the train. If really you want to do it, you'll do it. And you'll save pennies and put up with shit jobs in the meantime to pay the bills.

Also, to put it bluntly, a lot of people are full of shit when it comes to their "passions". They're really in love with their vision of what accomplishing those things will give them--the rewards--rather than a genuine interest in the work that doing their "passion" requires. That's why all those guitars lie on the walls unplayed, books lie unread, courses unfinished...because when the idea smashed into the reality of how much daily sweat & hard work it takes, people realize they didn't really want it.

TL;DR: If someone says "Nah I'm not going to pursue my passion until I can do it full time", that either a fake passion or at best cleverly disguised procrastination to me.

Recommended reading: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

I see a lot of improvement and you should be proud of yourself.

As for suggestions, at this point the most important thing for you to do is to keep getting the mileage down. I know that's not what you want to hear, but drawing every day and drawing a wide variety of subjects will objectively be the key ingredient to moving forward.

If you want a more specific critique, I think your edges need work. You're doing a lot of line petting, which shows a lack of confidence when you lay down marks. This is completely normal and will go away with time, but training yourself to lay down confident lines will help sharpen a number of skills in ways you wouldn't expect.

I tend to advocate this book frequently, but I would really recommend picking up Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. You can find a used copy relatively cheap, and there is a library's worth of valuable information inside. The book is highly focused on stepping away from "symbolic drawing," and actually drawing what you see - and while you are clearly past that point now, she thoroughly covers a ton of different subjects and exercises, many of which I think you could still learn a lot from.

One last bit of advice: you should consider working on studies. A study is a drawing you approach with a specific learning experience in mind. For example, you could potentially benefit from putting some time into a value study - that is to say, a drawing where you put the most energy into making sure your darks and lights are as close to the reference image as possible. Print out a simple black and white picture, then do your best to recreate what you see accurately by comparing them as you go.

Good luck, keep drawing!

All of these are linked to Amazon, if you have an account, you can make a wishlist to keep track of ‘em:

• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
  
  This one teaches you how to see shapes objectively, which will improve your drawing from photo or real life. I recommend getting it from the library because you’ll only need the book once. Drawing a lot of still lifes/self-portraits helps achieve the same goal even without the book, though the exercises are awesome and will speed up the process. You can ignore the author’s rambling about the brain, it’s been debunked by science~ I’ve republished the first exercise of the book on my blog here - trying to build a step-by-step guide for beginners, but I only have a few hours a week. :)
  
  
• For anatomy and portraits, after “Fun with A Pencil”, you can also read “Drawing the Head and the Hands” and “Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth” by Loomis. See sidebar. They’re all about the same material, just more in depth.
  
  
• “Perspective Made Easy” by Ernest Norling.
  Do the exercises! They’re simple yet awesome. After you finish the book, apply perspective to stuff you draw from imagination. When I finished it, I didn’t use what I learned, but once I started applying perspective to every drawing I made, my skill skyrocketed. I believe perspective is the second most important drawing skill, but it can be tedious.
  
  
• "Drawing Comics the Marvel Way"
  Teaches you a variety of solid fundamentals, like construction and composition. Useful for after you’ve got the basics down with Loomis and Perspective.
  
  
  
• Hardcore: “How to Draw" and “How to Render” by Scott Robertson. His books are intensive. Most of my friends bought them but didn’t use them because they’re so technical. You have to be prepared and comfortable with sketching before tackling these. Even I haven’t finished the books cover to cover, yet I use his techniques for every single artwork that I make (I was taught them by FZD).
  
  
  
• Here’s the most important: have FUN. You can start studying and struggling but remember why you are drawing and doodle for fun every now and then. Play some good music while sketching. If you have fun, you will keep doing it. No matter how fast or slow you learn, stick with it and you’ll be damn good someday.

First of all, for technique/practice, consistency in the woodshed is key. My daily routine is very repetitive, to the point that it is incredibly boring. But the improvement is so amazing, that I'm still excited to do it every day. I also kill the monotony with something to occupy my mind, usually either a sitcom or reading material, once I had the routine down.

[This is my daily routine], which takes about 90 minutes if you go nonstop, at the tempos marked (which will take some time to work up).

Secondly, your performance anxiety should be addressed. My professor in college had a required course for the whole tuba/euphonium studio called "Performance Anxiety: Understanding and Coping."

I had some mild anxiety then, but the class helped. The class was almost 20 years ago, but here's the largest takeaways:

• Perform as often as you can in front of an audience. If you have a weekly student recital class like larger schools of music do, sign up as often as you can prepare something. Start with easier solos, and work your way up.
  
  
• Read these books, which were the required reading of the class:
  
• • The Inner Game of Tennis (There is a music version, but consensus is that this is still far superior)
    
• • Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within
    
• • Zen in the Art of Archery (Very short read, can be done in the same day)
    
    Two of the three texts are not music books, but are read by students of just about every single discipline and apply it to their area of study. They will take years to understand on new levels, but you should be able to get some immediate results and understanding of your situation.
    
    As I got older, I've found the best way to quiet those nerves is to overprepare for anything. My teachers used to say "an amatuer practices 'til he gets it right; a professional practices 'til he can't get it wrong." When I'm in a position where I know I cannot screw something up, I actually enjoy the performance, butterflies and all. And I've been in some very high stress situations, with fewer train wrecks each year. This takes some massive time management, but it definitely helps. I usually set a goal to be "performance ready" a few weeks out, so I can do some very picky polishing of the performance.
    
    This is a lot more than I thought I'd say on the matter, but there should be a lot here to help. Happy shedding!
    
    Edit: After perusing the other comments, it looks like you might have a difficult professor. Sounds like you should sit down and decide if he's helping or hindering your progress. To be candid, I never really think of a trombone player being very good for tuba students. Maybe some pedagogy, but there's enough differences in the two instruments to warrant a specialist at the collegiate level. Great euphonium players can teach tuba, just as my best teacher was a tuba player, but they both doubled strongly on the other instrument. Unless your professor can be considered a professional tuba player to some extent, you might need to find a different school to finish your education.

If you don't mind giving you tips from my experience after 20+ years drawing, i'll bullet list it and you're welcome to add-on or change anything. I'll give you my own tl;dr at the end.

1. purchase this book: http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376710571&sr=8-1&keywords=drawing+with+the+right+side+of+the+brain
   
   
2. purchase the workbook: http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Workbook/dp/1585429228/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y
   
   
3. Purchase a 100 page sketchbook and draw 4 things per page front and back.
   
   
4. Use real humans and reference pictures of animals to practice drawing anatomy
   
   
5. Once you go digital, get or somehow download, Paint Tool SAI
   
   
6. Play around with it, but honestly, find as many tutorials with it and keep working with it.
   
   
7. When drawing digitally, make sure you zoom out periodically to make sure your proportions are matching up
   
   
8. since you have photoshop, paint tool sai will work with it since it can save .psd files
   
   
9. tablets are amazing, I personally have a widescreen format wacom tablet
   
   
10. practice every day, as much as you can and however time will allow you, just practice, but more importantly, draw from life. Real life stuff will lend to your own personal style and you can develop it from there.
    
    
    My TL;DR
    
    I've spent my whole life drawing. I'm 30 now and my mom says when I was 3 I picked up a crayon and drew a witch and it looked like a witch. Ever since then, my family only ever bought my art supplies for birthday and christmas. I spent my younger years thinking i'd animate for Disney, then I discovered comic books. I eyeballed the characters and drew them over and over till I could draw them from memory. Eventually I was making my own.
    
    I was slatted to attend an art college out of high school, but money and family fell through and I was left, literally, heartbroken. Feeling as if I wasn't good enough, I spent the next 3 years working and not doing any art at all. Eventually I couldn't put it off any longer and I decided to start up again. Still drawing based on other artists, my style developed very slowly. I had the usual artist anger of feeling stagnant and then eventually getting over the hump.
    
    I've dabbled with online webcomics, i've made tattoos for folks, and i've done some character designs, but it wasn't until last year that I decided that I should take my love of character concept design and try and put it to use. I googled "good video game schools" after having a bad run in with art institute, and found a place here in Washington called Digipen.
    
    I was accepted and part of my summer assignment was to purchase the book "Drawing with the Right side of the brain". Honestly, i'd never been much for reading books to further my art, but considering I had to do this for my summer assignment, I did. I've been doing exactly as they instructed me, and after practicing with the portions of the head and etc, I immediately noticed a difference.
    
    http://sammiblackrabbit.deviantart.com/art/Riverwind-comparison-390032834
    
    the right side is a sketch I did the night before. The left side is one I did the next day. I was floored by the improvement. I know my style isn't what some like, but for me I felt 100x better with my progress and that was just a single night.
    
    Working with this book has been so inspiring to me and so amazing.
    
    I will say that I too had started out with pen and paper and hesitantly moved to digital, but paint tool sai makes it so easy to sketch, line and color all in the same place. Tablets make it that much more joyful and I feel like i'm unlimited in my creativity when I work digitally.
    
    I hope some of this helps, and I hope you find your groove :)

I conquered emotional eating and some other comfort habits through meditation. We eat to avoid feeling uncomfortable emotions. So I went out of my way to experience them, lean into them, to meditate on those emotions, to understand and accept them. A few weeks of dedicated meditation on feeling and accepting uncomfortable things, combined with a focus on my values (health is a top priority) and learning other emotional regulation skills (through DBT), allowed me to stop eating emotionally in the vast majority of circumstances. It takes hard work to replace such a strong comfort behavior, but it's possible. I'm sure I'll have to do some version of all that again someday, but it's been months now and I'm still good.

As for hobbies, I think you're describing mood-dependent behavior. Our moods change more often than the tide. If you let your moods dictate your behavior, you'll start and quit things all the time. There is no trick here, just an understanding that no matter what I choose, my moods will eventually make it uninteresting. So if I want something in my life, I need to accept that I'll be uninterested at some point, and I'll need to do it anyway. What's the point then? The point is that I value consistency, I value having skills and hobbies, I want to improve in the areas of my life that fit my talents and ambitions, and I absolutely do not value being flaky with the direction of my life. So when I feel like quitting, I remind myself I'd feel like quitting anything, and I chose this thing knowing I want it in my life long-term no matter what I feel in that moment. ( speaking of which, just about time for my 3 mile walk ;) )

A lot of your struggles sound like mine from last year. Getting serious about a DBT program and a starting a strong meditation practice would probably help you a lot. Practice challenging your self-defeating thoughts would also help. The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown and Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns can teach you a lot. The stories we tell ourselves have extreme power over our internal states (things like "I don't deserve oxygen"), and you can absolutely change the stories you tell yourself. It's worth the effort.

I'm a graphic designer, and I too have been struggling with creating. Right now, I'm in the middle of moving, planning a wedding, and what feels like a million other things, but for a time, I had a pretty good routine down.

I found that if I set a schedule for creative time, and stick to it, that eventually, something good will come out of it. You're always going to have bad days. You'll always have nights where you move your pencil around the page for hours and churn out nothing you like. It's part of the gig.

I also found that keeping a list of projects in a notebook was very handy. Instead of spending my creative time worrying about what to work on, I just picked from the list. I also made sure that I didn't have any distractions. It was almost like meditating. I would sit at my desk, and wait. Wait for creativity to come.

Granted, our mediums are different, but I'd suggest giving it a shot. Stick to a creative schedule. Eventually, I think your mind will become accustomed to working at a certain time, and you'll have more success.

Also, find some subreddits or communities where you can talk about your art with other people who enjoy what you do. Share your work. Ask for advice. You might run into an asshole here or there, but that's always going to be the case.

I also spend a lot of time worrying about the future. Worrying about my career, worrying about not being good enough. Try your best to push those thoughts out. I know that's easier said than done. Just sit and wait for it to flow through you.

I'd also suggest checking out this book. It's called The War of Art. The way the author views creativity is exactly what I needed to do in order to find success and stop letting my fears get in the way of doing what I love.

Keep at it. Good luck!

Traditional materials are the best place to start. Don't worry about anything fancier than pencil/charcoal and paper until you've got the basics down.

What you need to do first is study the Principles of Design and the Elements of Design. These are the first things students are taught before they can move on. Usually, they are taught alongside Drawing 101, where students become familiar with these elements in practice, drawing mostly contour drawings of still lives. You should also be learning about linear perspective. You should be focusing on how to break objects down into simple forms, like cylinders and cubes and cones and spheres. Learn to draw with your arm and not your wrist; you can do this more easily by drawing on large paper (18"x24" or bigger).

Once you've got those basics learned, you can move on to learning about drawing with value. Charcoal and a kneaded eraser work best here, I think. Start doing still lives of single objects, like eggs or fruit, small geometric forms like cubes and the like, and focus on how light moves around these objects. One thing our professor had us do is to wipe our drawings down with a chamois frequently. It keeps you from getting focused on your drawing, but gives you a vague guideline to continue from. It makes drawing more about process than product, which is ultimately your goal if you're learning; to understand the process of seeing and drawing.

Once you've got the concept of the process and how value works, start increasing the complexity of your still lives. See how large you can make them. Get some big boxes and chairs and stuff and set them up in the middle of your room and draw that. Then start drawing the room you're in. Now, go outside and draw the buildings outside. You might notice that they're like a larger version of the boxes you were just drawing!

If you can, take some classes at your local community college. They'll really help you along learning these basics. If that's not available, most schools base their teaching methods on Betty Edwards' Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Pick it, and the accompanying workbook up, and you'll be well on your way.

You should also look at Andrew Loomis' books to help study most of these principles. George Bridgman is another godsend for learning to draw, as well as Burne Hogarth and Louise Gordon.

You should always be studying things from life to keep your skills sharp. Always remember that reference photos aren't cheating. You'll find that more often than not, they're a necessity.

I also heavily recommend you check out CtrlPaint's videos. They're focused on becoming a digital artist, but have a section devoted to traditional work and its importance in digital work. He also goes over the basics quite well and provides links to outside resources, as well as homework assignments for every video. Check it out, watch a video a day, and do an assignment with it, and you'll be putting yourself on the fast track.

One thing about drawing is that it's going to take a lot of patience. It takes a long time to develop your skills. Don't get discouraged! Learn to handle criticism, both good and bad. Critiques are your friend and whether you agree with them or not, they'll help you grow. Never ever rely on the excuse "It's my style!" because more often than not, if you have to use that line, it's a mistake you don't want to fix, not a stylistic decision. I've seen many people with great potential fail out of the art program I was in simply because they couldn't handle criticism.

Looks like a pretty good start to me. How did you do this? Did you copy from an image or drawing or just go from scratch?

I'll throw out a few pointers if you don't mind, but I guess you wouldn't because you asked.

When shading, me mindful of the direction of your strokes. If the thing you're shading is curved, your strokes should follow that curve. You did this well in some areas, like the largest valve coming off the heart, but you have more of a flat shade on others (like the 3 top ones), and the result is that it makes the image look flat.

Get a nice and defined outline of your heart. Typically, the edges of round objects are darker than the front so it's okay to get a nice thick line around your subject like this. Some areas, like the bottom of the heart, are too sketchy.

Maybe use more than 1 lead hardness. Use softer leads for darker lines when you need them.

Having something to complete the image would help, like a background or something.

I'm no expert, but I could never sketch all through highschool, then I went to college for architecture and we were required to read this book and it really clicked for me. That, and practicing sketching in class for a semester, and I'm no expert, but I love sketching now. Here are some sketches I've done on a recent trip to Italy.

I'd say, keep practicing and enjoy the time.

Girl!

The first and most important advice I can give you is to buy/rent the book "Steal Like an Artist". It's the best book for getting you into the mindset of just creating. Read it whenever you start doubting yourself. In fact I'm going to read it tomorrow since I've just reminded myself.

The biggest thing is to just relax! Ignore your sister and your mom, and just bear through the task of making yourself draw. Get a sketchbook. You know and I know that the first drawings will be bad, which is why you always allow yourself a warm up. Skip the first page, and just PLAY, EXPERIMENT, EXPLORE, whatever! It really doesn't matter what you do, because you're just basically telling your hand that it's okay to try.

So you mentioned you're more technical. That is a strength! You want to do fashion? Okay, so get a book on human anatomy and study it. Copy the figures, body parts, poses, bones, muscles, etc. Draw folds and wrinkles in cloths. Most of all just draw from observation. Go to cafes, libraries or public transit (wherever people are sitting still, distracted for long periods of time) and draw them, what they wear, their expressions. Get SO inspired that you can't help but record their moment. Make their moment YOURS.

The fact that you see this as a hobby is actually great, because you can use the art to relax instead of getting really agitated about it. One thing I did to get more confident about drawing in public was to get in touch with people on meetup.com and find people that do sketching in public. I don't know if you live in a bigger city or in the country or what, but there are many groups out there that make it their mission to find fun locations to do some sketching. The choice to draw people, architecture, landscapes, or doodle is your choice. Getting together with your community can seem scary at first, but you get to meet a lot of people that have a common interest, whether they're in art school or see it as a hobby. You get to hear a lot of other perspectives and trade around sketchbooks. I know it sounds scary, but trust me, I was in a pretty similar situation as you, and this has really helped me not feel anxious about drawing in public and showing other people my work. You should also try to post on reddit when you want to, and just ask for areas to improve. Let me know if you're in Toronto, because there are a couple of groups I can let you in on.

By the way, a couple of years back, I moved to a different country and wasn't able to bring any of my art supplies with me. I didn't make art for two years, until I realized it was a fundamental component missing from my life. The things I mentioned above are some of the pieces of advice I could have used a few years back. I would advise you to be patient with yourself, draw as much as you can let yourself (to blow off steam or whatever), and read various books on subjects that you think will help you. Try to draw as many different things as possible (people, water, cloth, animals, etc.). Just don't tell yourself that you can't. Accept the drawings that don't make you proud as a step in a long, long process. One medium that I think helped me with confidence is the Micron pen, or felt tip pen. Using pen keeps you from second guessing. It's so permanent and the lines are expressive, so you learn to go with the flow. Alphonso Dunn has a great youtube channel with tons of videos on various subjects, all with micron pen. Look him up!


I hope some of this helps. Good luck!!

Hey! So, this CMV speaks to me, because I'm a big fan of the idea that people can learn to be good (not necessarily world-class, but good) at whatever they want, if they train themselves well. Last year I decided to put my thoughts into action by working on improving myself in an area where I considered myself bad, and I picked drawing.

Last January, my drawing-from-imagination looked like this, and my drawing-from-reference looked like this. I felt like drawing from a reference was cheating, but the first piece of advice I got was to first practice drawing from reference...we start with the easier things, and then move on to harder things as we get better.

So that was my starting point. I was pointed at the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and decided to go ahead and follow its advice. It's a learning-to-draw book that actually focuses on what the skills are that go into it, not one of the "here's how you draw this specific picture" books.

It did some things like having me copy drawings upside down, trying to train me to draw what I see, rather than what I think the shape should look like. It had me trace on glass and then copy that drawing. It gave me advice on how to shade things well, and talked about using light and dark, etc., giving me exercises for each particular thing. I put in probably 1-3 hours a week, and by May I was drawing more like this and this (the cat is from this reference...i missed a bit on the length of the cat's face, which makes the facial expression actually way different, but I'm still pretty happy with it). Note: Drawing wasn't something that I had never tried. It was something that I liked as a kid, kept trying to do more of, and then got discouraged and stopped because I felt like I was never going to get to the point where I actually felt good at it.

So the takeaway message is that you can get better, and if you haven't already done so, start finding some advice from people who are actually good at teaching drawing (which is sometimes different from being good at drawing), and follow their advice.

Please let me stop you.

As I did the same because of Mega64...5 years ago. Flash forward to this past spring where I graduated from broadcasting school, moved to LA, interned, got fucked over, moved back to my original state got a last minute offer and moved back to LA within a month. It is not easy. College will not make it any easier. Film and TV really only exist in LA or NYC. It's extremely hard to find work anywhere else. Mega64 is a group of guys who got lucky by finding an audience online that comes back every week to give them love and views. Going to school for broadcasting only threw me into a already over saturated market. What I learned most in LA is: a friend who went to NYU told me this as I was an assistant editor for him for a month, "any dummy can edit, it's the motion graphics where the money is." so with that I say go to school for graphic design with a focus in motion graphics. Not only will you get a degree from a place that values you, you can work at an agency in any city...anywhere. The people I interned over the summer were all self taught by youtube and books. That's all it takes in filmmaking is experience; going to broadcasting school did nothing in that category for me. I had to research, network and go out of my way to keep up with NYU/Florida State film school big leagues HOWEVER unlike them my college debt will only take 5-10 years to pay off. NYU(not Florida State, holy shit their tuition is cheap and their program is amazing so if you're in florida GO THERE! Otherwise read the rest of this)'s tuition will follow you past your death. Editing/filmmaking is much like painting or any other creative outlet, it takes time and the more you do it the better you get; the more you work with people who are better than you; the better you get; the more hungry you are for opportunity the better you get.

Some books I recommend for pursuing your interest in anything creative further:

In The Blink of An Eye

It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be.

Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!): How To Unleash Your Creative Potential

And some helpful links in what it's going to take. You can't learn everything in college, it's only a gate to your journey that opens the day you graduate and enter the real world.

Ash Thorp - Steps On A Creative Path

Say No To Spec

Fuck You, Pay Me

Here's what film school taught me: How to order my own DSLR, tripod, memory cards, case and a second lens. How to download the creative cloud and pay for it using a student license. How to play with Avid but not really learn how to edit in avid. How to make shitty short films so you get that out of your system and never try to make some deep bullshit story ever again, you're 21 years old you have no life experience stop throwing 20 minute films about pills down other peoples throats. How to understand 3 point lighting. How to waste money on courses for information I could of gotten off research. Now for the good stuff I got out of going to college: friends, mentors, experiences, memories, and chances to work(without pay). I was able to learn how to get burned but I was also more driven than the other students in my program. It's all about drive, and Mega64 has an unstoppable drive that's why they've been successful for the last 10+ years in keeping interest alive. You gotta take that inspiration that drive to want and keep moving forward with you to the future. Let mega64 be your inspiration but for the love of god don't waste your money, talent or time on broadcasting school.

• Confucius' Analects: Some things in Confucius don't exactly fit in with my world view (such as his and later Confucians' view of women), and some of the specifics don't conform to the gospel (such as sticking with Chinese rituals of ancestor worship), but most of the ideas and concepts are incredible and extremely practical in everyday life. It's all about cultivating oneself and one's mind, doing the proper things to conform with the Way. I highly recommend Edward Slingerland's translation, which includes translations of important commentaries.
  
  
• Dao de jing by Laozi: Opposes Confucius on many things, but still some incredible stuff there. Lots of stuff about letting go and allowing things to happen without trying so hard to push them in the exact direction you want. In most things, I lean towards Confucius, but in creative endeavors I lean toward Laozi. More and more, however, I lean toward Laozi, because I realize there are things that are outside of my control that I have to let go. It's very hard for me to do, and I'm nowhere near mastering it, but I'm working on it.
  
  
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster: The best book on the importance of a well-rounded education. Everything you learn, everything you can learn, is important, and while you may not see a use for a particular thing in your life right now, it doesn't mean you'll never use it. Also, it's the best children's book with the highest number of great puns.
  
  
• Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon: This book is great for anyone in any creative endeavor, be it art, music, writing, or even business. It's all about where to get great ideas from, and how most of the time, you have to steal them. This doesn't mean you plagiarize, but you take them and make them your own and make them something new. It's a tiny book that packs a big punch. It's really opened my mind to the possibilities of creativity. How this relates to the gospel... I'm not quite sure yet. But it's changed my life and mindset in so many ways, I had to share it.
  
  

/u/hellxxfire - Absolutely agree! :)

/u/Acornriot - Thankfully for my shorter (essay style) pieces...I've got my process down.

As for fiction...so far I've got:

• Just write (keep a log of the idea,,,and each time I make changes) the image I see in my head...follow the characters as long as I could.
  
• See the structure so far.
  
• I use plot points and story arcs to get to the questions I need. For example....I broke down a couple of scenes from 'Grace Is Gone' and was able to come up with what I needed (What does the inciting incident help achieve? What could be a connection to the past? Once the protagonist thinks that there are two options...what's the hidden one?) to progress on a short story.
  
• Write based on those prompts - for the short story I went long hand...when I do screenplays I just make notes and type (as formatting is better typed)
  
• Update draft
  
• Reread (If I typed up something from long hand, I see some gaps and plug them...also...I get some ideas and add them as I go. If I already was typing...I print it out and read it --- much better if I bring it with me and read it in between tasks...while I am out and about)
  
• Review structure (if needed --- for particularly long things. Does it make sense?)
  
• Submit/Publish (Thankfully I've recognised my 'perfectionistic tendencies' --- and no longer spend hanging on to a piece of work longer than I have to. Because it's quicker...not only to get the right feedback....it's also quicker for it to find the right audience.)
  
  Now I realise the phrase ('trial and error') is not enough...because you'd be keen to want to know where to find 'things to trial' right?
  
  I've got these:
  
  
• Write Your Screenplay (What I like about what Jacob does is he says why a story works....and how a story could be tweaked)
  
• Creativity Inc --- Biggest takaway is treating a story similar to how an archaeologist would treat a discovery...the best version is there...you just have to find it. :)
  
• The Story Grid Podcast - Was quite interesting to 'listen in' to another writer going through the process. Even if my focus is more of screenwriting....I'm pretty sure there were a number of things that helped me get to some epiphanies. And thinking about it...I think it would be genre (sticking to it and understanding it)
  
• The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith - My favourite episode was Eric Heisserer's one. This contributed in making me think of other avenues for my writing (which made me open to short stories).
  
• The Blacklist's Script Breakdown - I'm pretty sure that this contributed to my idea of doing a 'Film to Script' exercise. My thought was: 'Why bother with the script when the best version is the one that's is out in the world?' (Well....I know now that sometimes the film doesn't live up to the script ---- that's okay...I'll just focus on the films I really enjoyed...because there may be instances that I may not be able to get a copy of the script to compare)
  
  My favourite writing action point? Only focus on the strategy that leads me forward. :) I may want to wade into Michael Tucker's analysis and keep taking notes...but that won't get me closer...and would likely result in me feeling overwhelmed...so...step by step. I only 'wade' when I'm stuck (that is...if my current process has resulted in a brick wall....so far....none yet!)
  
  Edit: Expanded the 'trial and error' phrase! :D

These books are more theoretical and about self growth as a well-rounded designer, if you want game theory others listed some great ones like Rules of Play and Book of Lenses. That said, here's my list:

• Level Design For Games: Creating Compelling Game Experiences by Phil Co (Valve)
  
  It's more of a broad game design book since it talks about all the pipelines / processes of all departments coming together, with an emphasis on scripting / level design for crafting experiences. Portion of the book uses Unreal Engine 2 as a reference, but you can probably use UE4 or something else to follow along the actual game design lessons he's teaching and not have the take away be a technical tutorial.
  
  
• Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull (Pixar)
  
  I cannot describe how invaluable this book is, if you're only to get one from the list it'd be this one. While it does covers Pixar's history as a frame of reference for a lot of stuff, it's also more importantly about their ideology for fostering creativity, productivity and work/ life balance -- all of which are important and can be applied to Game Design.
  
  
• Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister.
  
  I read this one after Gabe Newell recommended it one of his interviews and it was at a time in my career when I was working at a AAA studio struggling with the corporate forces that got in the way of creativity / productivity. It was one of those that changed me as a developer. It's more from a management point of view, but seriously applicable if you are collaborating with other people in game development, either on the same level as you or those who rely on your work to do theirs. Or if you are going to work at studio, AAA or indie, it's also an insightful book to evaluate whether the culture cultivated by management is in your best interest so that you have the tools to do your best work without burning out.
  
  
• Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (Basecamp / Ruby on Rails)
  
  This one is like Peopleware but not as exhaustive, it's an easier read since it's a compilation and edit of blog posts the authors wrote on their old website 37signals. It's more or less about getting stuff done and filtering out noise, simplifying things to make results better -- this one is relatable for planning game project milestones. A lot of it will sound like common sense that a lot of people may say they already know, but it's surprising how many don't actually practice it.

Personally, I find that I don't get things done because I'm scared of not doing them well.

I worry about what other people will think of my efforts and so I prefer to procrastinate, rather than actually make any progress.


>The only way to get good at something is practise

Try starting a journal, even if it's only for a few days and record everything.

If you can identify what kind of feeling you were having when you avoided doing something, maybe you can change something to avoid that feeling.

It's a good idea to record every activity for a few days and even what you eat, just to see where your time goes and if there are patterns that trip you up.

• if you go out to eat do you end up spending the day browsing shops and not doing anything?
  
• if you're home alone in your pyjamas after noon does that mean you never get it together for the rest of the day?
  
  
  And don't ever be ashamed of not getting stuff done.
  Procrastination is a technique your brain uses to avoid stress.
  The problem is that avoiding problems almost never takes away the root source of the stress.
  
  So it keeps on coming around and you keep on using procrastination to avoid getting stuff done ( it's super effective!)
  
  I'd recommend the book "The Now Habit" by Neil Fiore.
  
  In particular it has a great analogy for getting things done.
  
  Imagine that your task is to walk along a wooden plank about 15cm wide. It's on your lawn and it's about 4 metres long.
  
  As long as you've got decent motor skills and are not drunk it should be no problem, we could all do it.
  
  What happens to you is when you want to walk on the plank you find that it's now between 2 buildings, 4 storeys up.
  
  The idea of walking across becomes terrifying, all you can imagine is falling to your doom.
  
  When people give you advice to "get yourself together" and "just do it" they're doing the equivalent of setting fire to the building you're in.
  They're hoping to force you out onto that plank so you can save yourself from burning.
  
  You might crawl out and even make it across with this approach but does it sound like a good way to reduce stress?
  
  Instead what you need is a safety net. A super strong net underneath the plank that means that whatever happens, you'll be safe.
  
  You can fall over and over again ( it might even be fun ) and just get back up and try again.
  
  In the real world you need small winnable challenges. Record every one of those wins.
  
  
  
• washed the plates
  
• opened word and typed title for paper due next week
  
  
  Create a book of win that will have tiny tiny victories. By the time you've added a few you'll find that your victories and goals achieved will get bigger and more frequent.
  Sometimes you'll screw up and fall back into bad habits
  
  
  As long as you keep starting, you'll eventually win.
  
  
  
  I've been reading advice like this for a decade and I still sometimes sit at home and cry because I didn't get anything done.
  
  The one piece of advice I recommend for everyone. everyone. is to get some exercise. The worst feeling I've ever had cannot outlast a single hour in the pool or a martial arts session.
  
  If you get up in the morning and don't know what to do, go for a walk.
  
  You might still not know what to do after your walk but you'll have a small achievement to write down in your journal for the day.
  
  Enjoy yourself :) Hope this helps a little, pm if you want to chat.

Ooh, I know this! So, first read everyone else's responses. They're probably smarter than I. I was in your shoes about 10 years ago. I was working for a small film company and taking on any job that had any element of copywriting in it. (If I got my boss coffee, I'd write a story about it and send to all my friends.) Then, I got a call from a CD I'd met at a party that I have an interview "later this week." I called all my advertising friends. This is a compilation of the advice that I think helped me land the job:

• Bring examples of your writing. 5-10 things that show you can do the work. Be prepared to discuss them, what you learned while writing them, and how you'd improve them.
  
  
• Update your resume to focus on the writing aspects of your work history.
  
  
• Research the people interviewing. Find some shared interests and the value you'll bring to the team.
  
  
• During the interview, they told me I wasn't ready for the position. I asked for the opportunity to prove that I was. I think they appreciated the pushback. I wrote a pro-bono Point-of-sale, which they paid me for so they could sell it to the client.
  
  
• The only time I ever used an AP stylebook was to win an argument with my CD. Everything is subjective in advertising.
  
  
• If you have basic competency, copywriters differentiate based on relationships, ability to execute, and life experience. Focus on these for your interview.
  
  
• Some books that changed how I see my job as a copywriter:
  
  Ogilvy on Advertising
  
  It's not how good you are...
  Selling the invisible
  
  Keep in mind, I focused on the creative side bc the agency I worked for put ZERO value on research. They (wrongly) thought it was a waste of money, and I wasn't going to convince them otherwise. They also didn't care much for conversions. They simply wanted clever writing. Your situation may be different. Research first, and focus on the important bits. Good luck, and feel free to PM me if you want to discuss.
  
  As for your lowball salary, everything is negotiable. Be honest. Tell them you realize they're taking a risk by interviewing fresh talent, and you'd like to revisit it after 6 months or so.

Oooh ooooh I know! I know!! I did a LOT of work on myself the past two years and have really worked hard on this exact thing. My fear of "what will others think?" led me to SO many poor choices. Not like going to jail or drugs or anything, just... choosing friends & partners who weren't good for me because I didn't believe I could do (or deserved) any better.

It takes a LOT of strength & courage to stand in the face of others' judgement and believe in yourself. But, you can do it. You deserve to be happy, to believe in yourself, to be proud of who you are.

I HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend you read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Thought-Was-Just-but-isnt/dp/1592403352

And then this one: http://www.amazon.com/The-Gifts-Imperfection-Supposed-Embrace/dp/159285849X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y

How can you not want to read a book titled "The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are"

And then finally, this one: http://www.amazon.com/Self-Compassion-Proven-Power-Being-Yourself/dp/0061733512/


And in addition to that work, I recommend finding hobbies/activities you enjoy. Do you like photography? Running? Weight lifting? Making crafts? Knitting? Reading? Doing hobbies you enjoy - and becoming good at them (or at least, decent) - will also help you feel good about yourself. Join a reading club, a cycling group, a cross-fit (or other fitness) group, a geocaching group, a craft beer or cocktail group, etc... meet others with like interests and geek out on the hobby. People who enjoy the things you do will help you feel good about yourself as well.

No worries, glad to help and thanks for the kind words. I totally accept your apology, though I have no recollection of how it went down ;) But yeah, there are a LOT of internet tough guys out there. It is pretty discouraging. Art is hard, criticism is easy. Too easy, perhaps, and too pleasurable as well. I fall into the trap from time to time, but really try to avoid critiquing without seeing the scene in front of me.

I have gotten attacked (and still do) from time to time. No reason to get angry really, hell, I will happily meet anyone for lunch who wants to sit down and have a civil debate about art/photography/my work/whatever. It is a lot harder to be an internet tough guy in person.

I remember when WT went viral. I was called a "terrible photoshopper," a "terrorist", a "rip-off artist" and so many more awful things.

Now, on to your questions, I am notoriously verbose...

I've never done any real social media'ing outside of facebook, which is mostly useful for keeping in touch with photographers. People claim that they get work through FB, instagram, twitter, whatever, but for ARCHITECTURAL photography I think it's nearly useless. For weddings, senior portraits, etc, different story entirely. Just depends what you want to shoot.

Best marketing is referrals, facetime, great website, I make no bones about it. All in my experience of course.

Like you said, can be very helpful and hurtful, especially when you post a project that you put blood, sweat, and tears into and people come out of the woodwork with unsolicited critique. But it doesn't really affect me at this point, I've just gotten so used to it and Wake Turbulence really taught me that the majority of people commenting are completely out of touch with reality, so I take everything with a grain of salt now. It's kinda funny, I want to put together a compilation of all the ridiculous comments. People actually wasted time writing articles about how I was a threat to national security.

I never really worried about comparing myself to other photographers because I'm not trying to BE other photographers. I do have my favorites, but I'm very careful of who I pick out. Like I've mentioned, I love Erik Almas' work, Scott Frances, Gregory Crewdson etc but they're all very different than me and have very different approaches. I find that it's better to compare myself to great classic artists instead of photographers- as it is the painters and sculptors who REALLY know how to work with light, color, form and shape - that informs my work more than anything. If I'm looking for inspiration I take a trip to LACMA or the Getty or something and have a feast for the eyes on some great classic stuff. Just beautiful. I love the soft colors, great textures, lighting, etc, inherent in the paintings from the greats.

And in regards to everything, a great book worth reading is 'Ignore Everybody' by Hugh McLeod. Well worth the $10 and really helped me on my career:

http://www.amazon.com/Ignore-Everybody-Other-Keys-Creativity/dp/159184259X

It is a tough industry in many ways, and built around some very specific cities. One decision you should make is what exactly you want to do in film. If you want to be an artist and create your own films, you don't necessarily need to go to film school or even work your way up in the industry. There is lots of cheap gear available. Chances are you have more than enough film making gear right now in your phone and PC, more than you could have dreamed of affording 20+ years ago- when film was film.

So if you want to work in the industry, it will mean 'paying your dues' and might mean never getting to make a film on your own - schools, training programs, etc... are a good idea. You might be poor for awhile, you might have a job so busy and high pressure that at the end of the day more film work (even on your own dream projects) might be the last thing you are interested in doing. Another approach is to come up with a solid day job outside of the industry so that you can pursue your own creative pursuits on the side until such time as they pay off. If you have to count on film making to pay the bills, you would be very fortunate to direct corporate videos and cooking shows and stuff you might not really feel. You will be so close to your dream, but so far away at the same time and that can be frustrating - depending on your goals. If you want to make films on your own terms, you can and should start right away. Don't feel bad if the first 5 or 10 of them are terrible. You are working the bugs out. Read Lumet, a bit of Mamet, and some Rodriguez. Watch a lot of Making of docs on Youtube.

​

Robert Rodriguez wrote El Mariachi with a bit of a brilliant approach. He listed all the interesting ('expensive') things he had access to through his friends (a pit bull, a bus) and incorporated those in his script so it looked a little more big budget. If you write a helicopter landing on a bridge, you would have to pay for it. If your grandma has access to a tennis court and your uncle has a dirt bike - write that instead, and you could pull it off for free. Don't get caught up buying gear, use what you have. You don't need to use lacking gear as an excuse for not making something, and don't need to use buying gear as a replacement for being creative. I have seen that a lot in film, photography, and music. You could hypothetically make a great film for free as a flip book on a pad of paper, and if you do you could show that to people that would help pay for more gear if you need it. Anyway, ramble ramble - free advice is usually worth what you pay for it. Good luck!

I hope it helped! :-)

I know this doesn't exactly pertain to your original post intent, but since it's 2 days later I figured why not post it....

You strike me as a person who would probably enjoy and get a lot out of Brene Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are.

It's not really a "how to" book per se, more of a "These are important things I've noticed we need in order to lead a fulfilling life. Now you figure out how to incorporate them into your life." type of book.

10 Guideposts for Wholehearted Living by Brene Brown:

1. Cultivate Authenticity – Let go of what people think about you
   
   
2. Cultivate Self-Compassion – Let go of perfectionism
   
   
3. Cultivate a Resilient Spirit – Let go of numbing and powerlessness
   
   
4. Cultivate Gratitude and Joy – Let go of scarcity
   
   
5. Cultivate Intuition and Trusting Faith – Let go of the need for certainty
   
   
6. Cultivate Creativity – Let go of comparison
   
   
7. Cultivate Play and Rest – Let go of exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as self-worth
   
   
8. Cultivate Calm and Stillness – Let go of anxiety as a lifestyle
   
   
9. Cultivate Meaningful Work – Let go of self-doubt and “supposed to”
   
   
10. Cultivate Laughter, Song, and Dance – Let go of being cool and “always in control”

>I've been around MFA on and off since 2011 and noticed that a common problem still crops up in threads all the time: people get bored with a basic or formulaic way of dressing and don't know what to do next.
>
>I've begun writing on this topic privately for some friends, and wanted to see if there were others on /r/MFA who also wish to reach the point at which they can confidently understand how to dress in more complex ways than the typical uniform. A lot of times the advice is "lurk SuperFuture or Styleforum," which, while helpful, is not directly instructive and requires a ton of time, absorption, and wading through less-than-useful threads to progress.
>
>My method to get you past the MFA uniform doldrums is based on Betty Edwards' bestselling "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." Edwards' book teaches readers that drawing successfully is less a matter of mystical or innate skill, and more a matter of learning to really see what is in front of you.
>
>Usually, those who don't know how to 'see' will pull from a library of visual symbols learned in childhood, when drawing: a football shape with a dot in the middle is an eye; a square with a triangle on top represents a house. Obviously, drawing these things don't capture the accuracy of this eye, or this house. The symbol-library is a left-brain approach; the 'true sight' is a right-brain approach. Edwards' mission is to get inexperienced drawers to activate the malnourished right sides of their brain.
>
>Likewise, I believe that current instructive fashion material skews heavily towards the left brain. Categories like 'peacoat' and 'button-down' are delineated and form the building blocks of understanding dress. I believe this is left-brain thinking that prevents people from 'seeing' in the way Edwards describes. It is rare (from my perspective, unheard of) that anyone is taught to look at garments in an artistic sense. There is a 'you get it or you don't' mentality, and I believe it doesn't have to be this way.
>
>The writing I've done so far, and hope to delve much further into if people are interested, explains how learning to view clothing in the same way that artists view drawing will let you move beyond the MFA uniform. In addition to the explanation, I am also working on a series of exercises that will help you put this newfound understanding into practice. Whether you want to go for crazy silhouettes or stick to a warm, minimalistic look, you'll have gained a new way of seeing clothing. With that comes a new command over a language, not just that of looking good in the GQ or Esquire sense, but of self-expression.
>
>tl;dr I'm gauging interest in an eBook that will propel you out of the basic MFA uniform to dressing like your favorite Internet fashion people. If you are interested, please send a note to "post.r.mfa@gmail.com" letting me know so I can notify you when the ebook's ready.
>
>edit: This book does not supplant learning, or a natural transition into developing your eye, any more than reading and putting into practice Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain instantly makes you an accomplished artist. It is just meant to speed and smooth the transition. I also see the book not as a prescriptive guide, but an interesting new framework in which to view fashion, that will be interesting to people anywhere on the fashion experience spectrum.

That said... as our MC is very much aware, the most damaging thing to the production would be for (a) the team to lose confidence in the director, and (b) the director to lose confidence in himself. So she finds a way forward that does enable him, but in a manageable manner. She turns what would be a negative conflict into a positive experience, one that gives the entire team more confidence going forward.

I'm the cofounder and software developer for a small startup myself. Do I cringe when my nontechnical cofounders try to change our requirements? Sure, but if it's for the best, you reschedule and replan and make it work if it's at all possible. And if it's not possible, you can't be negative off the bat - you have to still "enable" while trying to shape the conversation towards a mutual understanding of what a good compromise would be. Thus, snacks and positive monologues!

I'm reading Creativity, Inc. now, a management book by the CEO of Pixar, and it's astounding how much effort the Pixar leadership put into building a culture of creativity. If Shirobako's production company was Pixar, a senior level of leadership would done what the MC did, re-invigorating the team in the face of a dip of confidence in the director - they actually have a "Braintrust" that systematically makes sure these types of meetings happen early in the production cycle. But it's absolutely something that any employee can learn from. If you're interested in mitigating these types of management situations, I'd highly encourage you to read the book.

It sounds like you are on a road to burn-out. I've crossed the precipice and fallen into that abyss many times. At 31, I finally have some real insights on this subject.

The transition from student to professional can be daunting, and particularly so when you enter into an arrangement that resembles being a student -- i.e., working from home, especially in a research capacity. All of those old pressures come back -- you end up having the same lifestyle/problems as a professional that you did as a student. If you don't develop any better stress and time management mechanisms than you did back then, there's no reason to expect that the outcome will be better or different. Online jobs are especially bad for procrastinators, especially since Web 2.0 and its explicit focus on distracting you.

It sounds like you are employing avoidance as an anxiety-abeyance strategy against the rising tide of work, which never seems to wane no matter how much you work. Then you feel like you are always busy, always behind, always need to be working -- even if you instead spend your time procrastinating, online shopping, etc.

Making endless to-do lists and schedules is another penchant of the avoidant-obsessive personality type. The problem is that the schedules themselves become a visual manifestation of your anxiety, hence you tend to avoid them too, and end up feeling worse.

It might be beneficial for you to go to the office more often, to feel more viscerally-connected to your work and your colleagues. Perhaps you'll find the millieu motivating -- perhaps this is the solution to your problems. But maybe not, because as someone with these tendencies who has worked in an office building, I can tell you that it's just as easy to feel buried in that situation.

The resentment in your relationships, caused by not spending time with them owing to a sense of dread over work un-done, is just going to get worse and result in those relationships withering and dying. I would recommend taking a notebook to the park and trying to understand the root of your work-related issues. It won't happen immediately -- you'll have to devote time to it regularly in order to develop the sort of self-psychoanalytical facilities that allow you to view your self from a detached perspective. Once you figure them out, explain them to your friends and family, so that they might gain a sense that your absence from socializing with them is not personal.

As for how I've dealt with these issues:

• Have a morning ritual to get you ready to go. Although it's obvious, I find that waking up, eating something, showering, brushing my teeth, using mouth rinse, and washing my face brings me from a drowsy, non-alert state to fully on-line and ready to go.
  
  
• Exercise! Every god damned day. No excuses. It provides me with the clarity of mind and energy necessary to approach my work.
  
  
• As you mentioned, sleep is absolutely critical. I try to get up at 8:30 or earlier every day, so that I can put in productive time, and actually feel good about what I have done at the end of the day -- good enough that I don't feel guilty about doing non-work-related things.
  
  
• The book Getting Things Done has a lot of good advice for organization. In particular, write down everything that you need to do in every area of your life, and have it on a piece of paper in a file folder. When it's written down, it's not in your brain floating around causing you anxiety. Make sure your to-do lists are task-oriented and not goal-oriented. For example, "cure cancer" is a goal, not a task. "Read XYZ paper on cancer research" is a task, not a goal. Write each task on its own piece of paper so that you can consider them in isolation without getting overwhelmed by the totality of the work.
  
  
• Keep daily progress reports. Writing down something on a paper that says "DONE" at the top of it lends visceral satisfaction to progress.
  
  
• I find it helpful to regularly re-frame my work. I.e., rather than just having a to-do list of actionable items, I devote some time every day to writing down where I am within a project, where I want to go with the project, and the steps I can take that will get me closest to it.
  
  
• If it is possible for me to work on something off-line (i.e. if I am editing a document, programming, doing mathematics or whatever) I often disconnect my internet connection. If I need to look something up, I either do it on my phone or plug in my internet connection temporarily. Perhaps that isn't an option in your case.
  
  
• If you struggle with getting started on your work, focus on that specifically. Don't spend an hour repeatedly checking Facebook and reddit. Do it once, and then find a way to get your head into your work. Perhaps by reviewing the work you did yesterday, reading your to-do actions, or taking a walk. I like to go to the park with a print-out of yesterday's progress report and my to-do list.
  
  
• Take breaks during the day. Some people like the Pomodoro technique. I tend to work for about two hours at a time, before my eyes start glazing over, at which point I go for a walk around the neighborhood, take care of chores around the house, etc. Anything to take your mind off of work for a bit -- and resist the urge to let your mind wander back until you sit down to work again.
  
  
• Take dedicated time off. When 5/6PM rolls around, you are done for the day. Stop thinking about work. Don't do any work at all on the weekends. Eventually, you will re-frame your thinking so that you come to think that a particular block of hours is dedicated to working, and the rest of life is yours to do as you please. This mindframe itself is beneficial to productivity: given that I only have N hours to work, I certainly want to make the most of them so that I am less buried tomorrow, and can enjoy life even more tomorrow.
  
  
• Don't discount circumstantial factors -- in your introduction story, surely the stress of being in a different country apart from your loved ones was detrimental to your mental state. We like to think that we should be infallible, but circumstances can definitely affect your mood and productivity. For me, I find that keeping my apartment clean (spotless, in fact) is very important. When there is miscellaneous stuff strewn about in my perihperal vision, it leads to anxiety. It makes me view the world as homeostatic, which is not what I need when I need things to change (i.e. the amount of things on my to-do list).
  
  
• If you drink alcohol, it will affect you the next day. Keep it limited to two drinks except for special occasions and the weekend.
  
  You might benefit from books on personal psychology. I found Too Perfect excellent and insightful. The NOW Habit had some useful advice in it as well.

Oh I typed all this for you my dude but these dastardly bullies caused you to delete it.

​

Hope it benefits you or another ENTP stoner:

​

What caught my eye was the Myers-Briggs test: I also (usually) test ENTP. Just wanted to say I think the Reddit subs seem to do it a serious disservice:

​

A) It is a management tool. It is not meant to enable some rando's life as a lovable eccentric. You should be shoring up the weaknesses it shows, not jerking off to how creative you think you are (not that you can stop yourself amirite? Ha!), and

B) It is not a tarot card reading of your soul. I get profiled regularly, by professionals, using whatever method is in vogue at that moment and while I absolutely see the value in the tests, it is limited, it is contextual and it will vary over time.

​

It is not so much "revealing" your personality as a prediction of how your behavior will manifest in a given context. MB being particularly general. For example, all my ENTP result tells me is that RIGHT NOW, I likely have too many projects going on and/or am managing my time poorly.

​

So based on your results, I would recommend you get out of your comfort zone and focus on active productivity exercises. Far from being something unsuited to you: they are likely just what you need. Anytime I dial this in tight, my life has a night and day improvement.

​

7 Habits is the granddaddy of course.



Unchained Man has a great time management system. Actually he refers back to Covey's 7 habits and explains why and how he updated the principle for a digital era. The rest isn't "bad" but its pretty standard 4HWW/TRP/Digital nomad type stuff. You could literally read Chapters 8-11 and get a great deal of benefit.

​

4HWW fuck I hate this book. And it's probably dangerous for lazy fucks. But Ferriss has nuggets of good advice on productivity and time management.

​

More conceptual reading:

Do the Work;

The War of Art;

The Power of Habit;

Rework;

On Form - some tips, although heavily weighted to glorify salaryman life;

One Minute Manager;

Extreme Ownership has helped a lot of dudes here. Personally I despise wading through the military waffle for two or three pages of content but the message of owning every aspect of your life and not accepting low standards from yourself or others is good (Hint: that means after you quit weed, (after a reasonable interval) you can and should expect your lazy wife to too).

​

Corporations have invested a great deal of time and money in training me but honestly most of the valuable things I implement are on that list.

​

Atomic Habits is on my current reading list. Check out this post (and comments) with some concepts from it.

TL;DR: Draw EVERYTHING, draw CONSTANTLY, and TURN OFF YOUR LEFT BRAIN!


As an artist, I will tell you what all of my art teachers failed to ever tell me, and hopefully help kick-start you into drawing.


First of all, as /u/Im_A_Nidiot said, draw anything and everything and draw constantly. It's hard to train your fingers to do what your brain wants them to, so just like exercising to become a body builder, you have to draw constantly. Whether it's someone you passed by on the street wearing a funny hat that you want to capture, or something you just dreamed up, always draw. If you can, draw for at least an hour every day. For detailed pictures that's an easy task, but if you have a busy life and can't just sit down and devote time to it, then sketch every time something comes to mind. 10 gestures or sketches a day will be much more helpful in developing the skill than just one or two occasionally.


Secondly, a big thing my art teachers wanted us to do but never explained why, was drawing still life or from life. Figure drawing, inanimate object drawing, drawing your own feet from your own perspective, it's all incredibly important. Why, you might ask? Because it builds a library in your head of what things look like. If you have a pile of stuffed animals, and you say draw one each day as realistically as you possibly can, then after a month suddenly you'll know exactly what that stuffed giraffe looks like and how to draw it in various positions, even ones you haven't drawn before. Same if you have a pet cat or dog and you draw it every day in various positions- you'll be able to draw a cat or dog from your imagination without much issue. So even if it seems trivial, draw from life! An exercise I would do is I would divide my work space in half, and draw the boring realistic object in one side, and then draw the same thing on the other side but with added "weirdness" from my imagination. If it was a pill bottle on one side, it would have an octopus coming out of it on the other. That helps keep it interesting and helps you expand your mental library.


And finally, once you start building your finger skills and your mental library, as /u/jus_richards already mentioned, I highly HIGHLY recommend buying Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The entire purpose of this book is to train you to "turn off" your left brain, because it interferes with right brain activity which is what you use when you create art. Being an extremely analytical person, my left brain was always giving me fits whenever I would draw. Now I know how to quiet it down so I can draw, and it has done wonders for my work. If you are serious about wanting to learn how to draw, definitely invest in this book and do all the exercises.

>I'm afraid I'll end up one myself. I want to become a better person.

A narcissist will never ever say that. A narcissist believes they are perfect and all their problem or imperfection are the faults of others. You are critical (maybe over critical) of your flaws and you take responsibility for them. You are already a better person than your mother, SOs, and friends. From your description of the people that surround you, I think you have the same problem I had. I tended to repeat the same relationship pattern I had with my mother with my friends, so I ended up making friends that treated me like my mother treated me. I blamed myself and made excuses for my (ex)friends when they abused and exploited me. When meet good people I wanted to be friends with, I would tell myself that I was not good enough to be their friends and they wouldn't want to hang out with me.

My first N-book was Children of the Self-Absorbed. It not only helped me describe my Nmom, but also helped describe the various affects it had on me. It has fun worksheets and little questionnaires. It has little messages at the end of each section, which I put on post-its and put it around my workstation. The post-its have been enormously helpful in guiding my thoughts and most importantly interactions with my parents and friends.

The Gift of Imperfection helped me recognized my shame and insecurity, and gave me tools to deal with them properly. It also has a lot of inspiring messages about living life to its potential after being emotionally battered. This book helped me open up and reach out. This book is also an easy read. I read it in a week on busy schedule.

This forum, too, has been an amazing support group - the next best thing to a good therapist. People are so incredibly supportive and understand. I feel comfortable posting my thoughts, feelings, and get responds on difficult issues. I have learned, cried, and healed and never felt judged.

The best thing to do is to do all of the concept work first. You do not want to get three months into development and then realize that there's something you overlooked. The game should be fun before you even start programming it.

I know how you feel by the way ... with sort of moody teammembers. Managing a project is not easy - that is clear.

One thing that has helped my team a lot is using asana (free for up to 15 people). I have learned that absolute clarity about (1) where the project is and (2) how the project is going to finish across the entire team is ideal.

Before you start making any assets, you should make a schedule for the entire project. The first thing I recommend to do is to get concept art for the entire game. Every part of it. If you do not know what every part is going to look like, it is too early to start programming. If you do not know all the mechanics that are going to be in it, it's too early to start programming. Because once you start programming, it's going to be (very) hard to get back into "concept" mode. Right now is the most fruitful and creative part of game development - don't waste it by doing the routine aspect.

Do NOT leave the artist in the dark on your side of development. That fosters a poor working environment.

Read this

https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483297048&sr=8-1&keywords=creative+inc

It details how pixar makes movies. Apply it to your smaller team.

I repeat though, do not leave anybody in the dark just with an art asset list to make. That is definitely not how you make a great game.

Clarity and openness are key to fostering a good work environment. Everybody should know the schedule, and everybody should be able to know what everybody is doing at any time. Asana helps a lot with that.

Project management is hard and is something I've only just recently started studying, but I've had great success so far with what I've said here.

Oh yeah, somebody needs to be the leader. The tie breaker. And you MUST establish what the game should be. Because once you've established that, there is no question as to if one asset or the other is what should go in. The only question is if it fits with what the direction for the game is. The director makes those decisions.

Read a book on movie producing, too ... I like this one

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Production-Handbook-American-Presents/dp/024081150X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1483297223&sr=8-3&keywords=movie+producing

Producing a project on a team is a fucking hard thing to do. It's an art all in itself. Don't leave people in the dark, be open, and make a fucking schedule. It can change, and it will, but you need something to go towards. Good luck

A lot of times procrastination is a sign of a deeper symptom - wanting to be perfect and tying your self worth into it. A lot of times, people (including myself) will put off anything that might threaten this view that we have of ourselves as perfect because failing threatens our self worth. It kind of goes like this.

1. Have project with deadline
   
   
2. Pressure builds, you put it off because if it doesn't work out, you're not to blame right? You never really gave it your best shot.
   
   
3. More pressure, deadline comes putting a fire under your ass to get it done.
   
   
4. Its completed, maybe not 100%, but its good enough and hey, if I really had tried, it would have been spectacular.
   
   
5. Success from the previous round means more work. Promise of more work and more chances to fail only lower motivation. You feel shittier and the cycle continues.
   
   I think this is extremely common. So how do you break out of it? Its not easy, but you have take steps to detach yourself from this constant perfect vision of yourself and just be willing to do the work to a level below perfect, but do it consistently. Have a huge paper? Just write an outline with some good not great paragraphs and add to it later. Huge project? Get a small step of it done. Success and feeling successful isn't about "winning" or being perfect, its about steady, small bits of production.
   
   A good book is The Now Habit, that helped me with some of these feelings.

I know it doesn’t feel this way to you right now, but what you lived through, all those traumatic memories you are reliving, you are not at fault. You shouldn’t have had to live through even a second of one of those events, it isn’t fair. Your young self didn’t know what was going on, and even if you had a sense it was wrong, you were a child. You should have been protected. Unfortunately, when repeated traumas happen in childhood, it can warp our self image and our needs, even as adults.

Be easy and loving on yourself, it sounds like over the years you have been able to get out of those bad situations, but they still haunt you. I read the book The Gift of Imperfections when I was struggling with guilt, shame, and self loathing, and this helped me to see that shame=/=guilt or fault.

I got to the point in my life where I recognized that I was letting people use me because I felt so broken I thought it would be a miracle if someone could manage to love me. I kept entering bad relationship after bad relationship. I didn’t value myself. So I went out and bought a simple ring. I wear this ring every day (unless circumstance dictates I cannot, don’t run into that often) as a reminder that I am worthy of my own love. This ring is still my reminder to this day that I am to put myself first and to love myself. I am worthy of self love and worthy of basic respect from others. It’s been on my finger for ~6 years now, it’s almost like a commitment ring from me, to me.

I hope you are able to heal quickly from your surgeries and physical injuries. Be kind to yourself as you are healing and recovering. Even if it feels untrue, know that you are not at fault for the traumas that you experienced. I hope you find peace within your heart ❤️

I got back on adderall about 10 months ago, and think I've just about got the dosage right. When I decided to go back on medication I did some research on managing things better than the last couple times I've been on meds.
The most important thing I took away from the research was that medication won't do everything. You need to figure out some plan for managing your time/tasks, and the medication will make it easier to stick to it.

Paying attention for the whole lecture is a reasonable expectation, but working hours straight without a break is probably not. You should plan breaks, but limit the length of them. That way when you get distracted and find yourself on reddit or something, you can get yourself off after 10 minutes, and not beat yourself up about losing your focus.
I really got a lot out of The Now Habit, as far as techniques for getting things completed.

Wow, this is a lot longer than I expected.

There are plugins you can get for firefox and chrome that will limit the amount of time you can spend browsing: 10 minutes an hour, 30 minutes every 6 hours, whatever you want. Chrome Nanny is pretty versatile.

The best trick I've come up with to stay focused is to convince myself that I am genuinely interested in what I'm doing. Ask yourself questions about the paragraph you just read. Paraphrase what the professor just explained, look at a problem and think of what would happen if one part was different, and remind yourself regularly that you are doing something you like for your own good.
One of the aspects of ADD/ADHD is the reward centers in our brains work differently than other people, so we have to find our own ways to motivate ourselves.

I'm losing coherence, but I want to recommend you read Driven to Distraction, it will teach you a lot about how ADD/ADHD work. Also, if you think you'll have a hard time sitting a reading a bunch, you can find a lot of stuff on audiobook and listen to it while driving/walking/running/cleaning/whatever.

Hope this helps

This guy helped me a lot! http://www.dueysdrawings.com/drawing_tutorials.html
Drawing is one of those things that anyone can learn to do well, it's just a matter of practice and patience. But Duey's tutorials give a great run down of basic techniques to master, good tips most people starting out wouldn't think of and even gives a great list of essential materials and how to use them properly. I had been drawing for years without knowledge of all the right tools and blending with my fingers (a drawing sin as taught in school!) before I stumbled upon that site and found out that the oils on your hands are bad for the paper and to blend with tissues and blending stumps! Had always been artistic growing up but Duey honestly helped bring my work to a whole new level and made me appreciate the art form all the more. His free tutorials are definitely enough to become really good at drawing but if you want to refine or further advance your skills, he mentions a book on his site that he learnt a great deal from, which I ended up buying and definitely recommend. There's also another really good one here: http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201
No matter what method or techniques works for you, the most important and also the most difficult thing is to just stick to it and keep drawing!

I'm not far from your age, and while I've been drawing off and on almost my whole life I've only recently been getting serious about improving. I'll share some things that have helped me.

One book I'd recommend you buy above all others is Drawing on the Right side of the Brain - Betty Edwards. It's good even if you have never drawn before. Cartoons are a stylization of a person, so its good to study and draw people. If money is a factor, Andrew Loomis ebooks are free. Fun With a Pencil in particular has stuff thats good for cartoons.

Communities such as here and /r/LearnArt are good to get critique and to get help if you can't see where you are going wrong. If you are dry for ideas there is also /r/SketchDaily and /r/DailyDraw.

Youtube is an awesome resource. Proko did a good series on the Loomis method for drawing a head and its features. Will Terrell is one i found recently that's fun to watch, does a lot of cartoon/caricature and comic stuff.

The only way to improve is to practice. Get you a sketchbook and a some pencils. Don't worry about making every page a masterpeice. Beat that thing up, doodle, draw whatever in it. If you mess up, just flip to the next page. Draw draw draw! Things that catch your eye, old comic super heroes, Bugs Bunny, anything really. Draw as often as you can, I'd say an hour a day if that's possible with job and family. If not, just whenever you got some time. If time and money allow, take a class if you can.

Don't be afraid to use references. The mind can't remember every detail about everything. Even masters use them.

• Most people that have never heard of lucid dreaming, and are taught what it is, have a lucid dream that night.
  
  
• The best way to lucid dream is to become more conscious of your surroundings in real life. If you teach yourself to always be looking around you and wondering "am I dreaming? Is this a dream?" eventually you will start to ask those questions while dreaming, allowing you to notice you're dreaming.
  
  
• A big help are reality checks. When you're awake and you're wondering if you're dreaming, you can do a reality check. One good reality check is holding your nose and trying to breath in through it. If you're awake you'll be unable to breathe in, if you're asleep you'll still be able to breathe even though you've held your nose. As in the previous point though, you have to keep doing these reality checks in real life, until they're so imprinted into your routine (and subconscious) that you'll do them in a dream too.
  
  
• Are you dreaming right now? Possibly. But here's another reality check for you. Read this paragraph again, is it any different? In dreams you can't read the same piece of writing twice, it changes.
  
  
• Once you realise you're in a dream, don't stop and think. You'll wake up. Dreams are narratives that you follow through forward momentum. If the narrative stops, then you stop dreaming. One tip is when you realise you're dreaming, start running (or spin around really quickly) and this keeps the dream going. For reals.
  
  
• Lucid dreaming is different for different people. Personally I can't suddenly create a number of lesbians in front of me, because to do this I have to stop and concentrate, which breaks the narrative and makes me wake up. Instead I've learnt to use expectations to create something. For example, I may expect something to happen if I run around the corner. So I run around the corner and there it is. So I can't create lesbians, but I can expect them to be somewhere, and when I get there, they're already there. Hard to explain really.
  
  
• If you want more information on lucid dreaming, the best book to read is anything by Stephen LaBerge, who is considered a lucid dream expert. This one in particular is good: Exploring The World of Lucid Dreaming
  
  
• If you want a great, easy to read book about the different stages of human consciousness and cool things our mind can do, then I suggest reading The Head Trip which contains a huge chapter on lucid dreaming.

I:

• Went to therapy
  
• Finished the Artist's Way
  
• Moved into a better apartment
  
• Found a better job
  
• Hung out with all of my wonderful friends
  
• Spent time doing fun stuff that makes me feel good
  
  I know it's a cliche, but when my life is jam-packed with wonderful and important people and things to do, I'm much less likely to make room for a guy who's anything less than wonderful. I also have so many things in my life that make me feel good about being alive that I don't feel the need to latch onto any warm body for validation. It's hard to make HUGE changes in the way you relate to men immediately, but it's something that can definitely be done bit-by-bit over time. The most important step in the process, IMO, is learning to feel complete without attention from men.

It seems like the shame and embarrassment you feel all stem back to self-esteem. Having self-esteem is about perceiving the world through your own eyes and not imagining yourself through other people's eyes. Because all shame and embarrassment comes from perceiving yourself from an outside perspective, like "I probably looked so desperate to Joe", or "Sam laughed about me and probably thinks I'm pathetic now". Especially the embarrassment you feel when you imagine Joe saying "oh great, here's x again who won't leave me alone even after I rejected her". Notice in each of those cases, you're looking at yourself THROUGH someone else's perspective. It doesn't have to be that way, you get to choose how you perceive yourself! If you can start having respect for yourself, you'll realize that your opinion of yourself is the only one that matters.

I think the best thing for you right now would be to stop talking to Joe and Sam for a while and read a self-help book. Studies show that reading a self-help book is just as helpful, if not more helpful, than seeing a therapist. I did some research on self-help books that I thought would apply well to your situation, so I sorted through a lot of "self-esteem" themed related books.

You should try reading this: http://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Imperfection-Think-Supposed-Embrace/dp/159285849X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370538212&sr=1-2
It isn't specific as self-esteem, but it's about a much more general concept which self-esteem branches from. It's about how to be an authentic person, which in philosophy means to live solely through how you view yourself and without shame or embarrassment from other people. Being an authentic person will give you higher self-esteem not just in your relationships with other people, but in everything you do. This particular book gets excellent reviews. I haven't actually read it, but I've read many books like it and this one seems to be great.

If you're not up for reading an entire book, try looking at some videos on YouTube. I started watching this one and it seems to be up your ally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvtZBUSplr4

Another help could be to try meditation. Meditation is a good complement to gaining self esteem because meditation teaches you to control your thoughts, so you can learn to choose how you think about yourself. I'm sure there are weekly meditation clubs or groups wherever you live. You can also try meditation on your own, just set aside 15-30 minutes each day to sit down and and try to think about nothing. Focus on what your breathing feels like in your lungs. When you notice your mind wandering, focus back on what your breath feels like. But don't try too hard! A big problem with meditation is that people beat themselves up when their mind starts wandering, but it's hard to control that. So when you notice your mind wandering, just focus back on your breath and feel good that you noticed your mind wandering.

If you ever want to talk, just send me a message.

The first thing I would suggest is to slow down :)

Lucid dreaming is a fairly deep topic to just jump right into. A lot of people discover it and become super excited, but ultimately lose focus and stop trying altogether. The best thing you could do right now is start reading and taking in as much information as you possibly can in an organized manner.

I'd suggest visiting this site and completing the tutorial section. It explains one of the most common ways to achieve lucidity in a friendly, easy-to-read way. Buy or somehow "obtain" Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen Laberge. It's a bit "out there" at times, but maintains a down-to-Earth feel more often than not.

Try to recall at least two dreams a night, but it sounds like you've got that down already. On that website, you'll learn that it's important/helpful to go back and rewrite the end of your dreams to include a section where you realize you're dreaming and become lucid (for whatever reason.)

Practice reality checks, but don't just go:

> Am I dreaming?

Do something along the lines of:

> Am I dreaming? What have I done in the last half-hour? What did I do before that? What did I have for breakfast?

If you practice the latter enough you'll eventually do the same in a dream.

Read your dream journals or read other peoples' lucid dreams and use that as inspiration to keep up your reality checks.

And have fun! Don't be discouraged if it takes you a day, week, or month to have your first lucid dream; Stephen Laberge said some of his students have taken a while to really master the concept, so take your time.

Actually, thank you sir, this is that exact type of feedback I was looking for! Thanks for really reading carefully and walking through the book.

As for to the critic, it's quite straightforward, but I don't see any rudeness.

Clearly the book is more like a pure idea now, there is a long way to go (and I'm clearly settled to walk the walk). I always keep in mind the Pixar movies that are absolute crap at the beginning (according to https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Overcoming-Unseen-Inspiration/dp/0812993012) and have to walk through multiple sometimes painful transformations until they finally become the masterpieces they are.

I also have to say, that I need to keep my audience in mind. If I wanted to be pedantic I could just as well print out the :help manual. What I want instead is to create something pragmatic and practical, lite and simple, something people outside of the Vim community could grasp and be productive.

The idea is get more people familiar with Vim, so that they can then go deeper after that, maybe join the /r/vim/ and learn from people like you ;)

Anyway, thanks again for the fantastic feedback!

Dreamviews is a great community for beginners and advanced dreamers alike. You can even keep a dream journal there to help with you journey. Witch is very helpful.

And anything by Dr. Stephen Laberge is great. He literally wrote the book on lucid dreaming. Literally.

Don't be discouraged if nothing happens for a while. It might take months before your first lucid dream. You just have to actively be thinking about it day and night. And if you are interested enough, it shouldn't be that hard.

Also once you obtain your first lucid dream, it wont last very long. The second you become aware you are dreaming, you will become too excited and you will wake up. This will happen the first few times until you get over the initial excitement of being in another world where absolutely anything is possible.

Good luck and sweet dreams.

I am not an artist, but I did want to learn to draw better. It was recommended that I read drawing on the right side of the brain by Betty Edwards. It's a pretty awesome book. I definitely enjoyed reading it, and improved my drawing considerably by working through it. I got the latest edition, but any edition should help you.

The biggest part about getting better is time. Drawing takes time. Practicing takes time. So when you start, keep at it.

> Brutally harsh is good.

I'll try to be gentle but keep in mind this is just one guy's opinion on the internet. I base a lot of my critiquing from what I've picked up in songwriting books by guys like Pat Pattison and Ralph Murphy.

I want you to know overall I like the feeling of what you're going for in this one.. but yeah, you're writing needs some work and here's how I think you stand to improve

• Hook writing - I know, I know.. it's trite to say you need to write with a hook. But here's my case for it, the job of the songwriter is to keep the listener listening and one tool to do so is to set a hook in your pre-chorus and/or at the very least by the end of you chorus. Many times I'll start with the hook and write the chorus first, add some detail with the verse, then add a bridge for counterpoint or contrast.
  
  
• Detail, detail, detail - Your verses essentially are saying nothing.Tthe reason why is that the narrator is telling how he feels. And Ralph Murphy said, in so many words, the listener doesn't care how the narrator feels. At least until the chorus. In your verses you should be putting in as much detail as you can. Every line should move the story your telling along.
  
  
• Verse development - Another side of that is that your verses are telling a story. And their job is to give the listener something relatable and universal enough that they can imagine. All your favorite songs already do this. So before you write lyrics, think about and even write down a beginning, middle, and end development. A popular one is I, you, we or another is Aristotle's advice that the narrator must feel pain(traumatic even), fear (of something happening, and catharsis (a happy ending).
  
  
• Chorus - your chorus should tie all of the detail in your verse together. This is the payoff and where the narrator can talk about thoughts, feelings, and ideas. I'm reading your chorus as :"See I'll sink/Under this ship/And I'll drown/If I don't find land" now that's an okay chorus. Except that none of your metaphor in the rest of the song have anything to do with sailing.
  
  
• Rhyming - The rule of thumb is to keep the same rhyme scheme in your verses but change it up in your chorus. You've set up an XXXAABCCB rhyme scheme your first 'verse'. The first three line stanza has nothing to do with the rest of the song. Also, none of the lines in the chorus rhyme. That causes a lot of instability and when I'm in a chorus getting the big payoff I want to create at least some stability.
  
  
• Rhythm of words - If you really want to dig into it, you could break the words up into iambs and trochees. An iamb is accented on the first syllable and a trochee on the second. Finding what you want then modify the lyrics to fit that rhythm will give your lyrics uniformity and a sing along quality. That's probably a bit advanced right now though any good rhyming dictionary should have a section on it
  
  You're going to get better the more you learn and the more you write. If you want to take it seriously you should be writing every single day. Again, I'm just a guy on the internet but I feel you would get a lot out of these resources:
  
  Writing Better Lyrics
  
  Ralph Murphy Lecture
  
  The War of Art

Hey frient,

I have the same problem. I think every human does; the difference with the people you see specialized in one thing is that they had a certain impetus when the going got rough, when they hit the inevitable plateau where the learning process slows.

This is difficult but not impossible to learn to get passed. Find your passion and set goals. If it's weed, learn to do other things than smoke it: bake, grow, work in a dispensary, improve joint rolling skills. Set big goals with intermediary small goals so you don't lose motivation. Abandon goals you care less about or have been languishing over for years.

I recently read an amazing book on the subject of procrastination, The Now Habit. I "highly" recommend it. Much of life is a game you play with your mind. Paying attention to your thoughts and how you mentally deal with situations throughout your day is the secret to improving your life.

Good luck to all my fellow Ents out there.

I totally agree with you! I also think that creating something is one of the most beautiful things in the world...
but live/society have its ways and so most of us do not believe or follow through with these creative thoughts (even though deep within we know this is what we want to do...)
I am/was in the same situation as you are.
BUT
and that is the good thing, there are ways to change this situation.
One book was already mentioned here and I want to recommend another one to you.
It is called 'The Artist's Way'
(http://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-Spiritual-Creativity-Anniversary/dp/1585421464)
It is a 12 week 'course' in order to get back on track.
It caught my attention when another one typed as INTP mentioned it in an interview, who is actually successful in the music industry.
I only completed a third of the book by now, but the changes are already immense.

So I can really recommend it to every struggling artist!

as an addition:
have you ever listened to the speech of john cleese about creativity?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9rtmxJrKwc
this one is very good as a starter and taught me a lot about the creative process.

Haha that's a much better response. If you ever do want to make a serious effort in lucid dreaming the payoff is incredible. It is by far one of the most fun, awesome, weird, interesting things I've done, and it drastically improved my sleep quality. I've been trying to get back into it, my current schedule/life makes it very challenging; I'm only about 15% successful these days.


The best book ever written on the topic, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, caused lucid dreams spontaneously just by reading it. It's also a super interesting read aside from providing instructions.

Going to echo what many are saying: start journaling your dreams and working on your dream recall. If you like to write them down keep pen and paper by your bedside. You can also type them into your phone if that’s easier but keep your screen brightness way down. I recommend writing rather than the phone as the screen might wake you up too much to go back to sleep quickly if it’s one of your first dreams in the night.

Also suggest getting a book to begin your journey. My personal fav is the Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming: A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming: Mastering the Art of Oneironautics https://www.amazon.com/dp/0761177396/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_nYyJBbD9Q2VSD

But an essential that is also fantastic is Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming https://www.amazon.com/dp/034537410X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_VZyJBbDYD9XR9

Have patience and enjoy the growth :)

Holy moly, I skimmed through these responses and am on the verge of tears because they're all such thoughtful suggestions. Very solid advice here, I'm glad I read it because this is something that's also been an issue in my own life.

I don't feel like I have too much to add, but I want to piggyback on what /u/bladedada suggested about being with the hard emotions and suggest to you an amazing book, which probably sounds empty because you said you've already read some food-related books but THIS ONE isn't food related so bear with me! :)

The Gifts of Imperfection is basically a book about recognizing and accepting your emotions, particularly in relation to your self-concept. It's a relatively short read and just a great book overall when you're trying to address the root causes of things like addiction!! Best of luck to you!

I am by no means an expert, been drawing for six months definitely still a noob but this is the only book I've ever read http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1585429201 and I highly recommend it.

It doesn't teach you how to draw, it teaches you how to see, and how to trigger the right side of your brain. Which is life changing and can be used to learn things like mediation, or yoga as it is such a great release.

When the right side of my brain is operating I get into this amazing zone where I can see life in a completely different way. It's hard to stay in this zone but when I'm in it time passes by unknowingly, the music I'm listening fads away and I'm completely grounded. In this zone I can see every facet of someone's face, and understand how lines bend, curve, and contract.


This is when my drawing comes to life, and I'm actually drawing what I am seeing. Unfortunately in the beginning and even now I can only stay in zone for short periods, but the more I practice the longer it stays and the easier it is to trigger.

I learn how to draw by trying to draw what I see then if I get stuck I look at everyone else's work to see how they saw it and compare the two.

For example that one chick who posted "I was told to post my mug here." The bridge of her nose was immensely hard to draw and also for me to understand what I was actually seeing there. If you go through you'll see some artists got it right while others changed the pose, or how it looked.

Or artectors post I saw it and just started drawing all those amazing shapes in the shadows of his face. I never finished it http://i.imgur.com/tdVRMXg.jpg but I learned a tremendous amount from it. Like the top right curve of his check starts the curve down to the chin. Or the right side shadow at the end of the mouth not only curves up but outlines the cheek and the smile. Now I can see that in other drawings I can't really draw it yet but that will come with practice.


So for me I'm learning to see first then the technical part of actually putting that on paper will come after that. I hope this helps.

Also I feel obligated to say I just got out of a bubble bath, I'm in a robe and bette mildler song came on my mp3 player while writing this . So it might explain all the feels. Lol


Oh and here's my first drawing like six months ago of the wifey http://i.imgur.com/sAbnfpX.jpg BOOM!


~Eric

Uncategorized:

Thoughts On Design: Paul Rand


Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design

How to Be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul

100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design

Paul Rand

Paul Rand: Conversations with Students

Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design

Bauhaus

The Vignelli Canon

Vignelli From A to Z

Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible

It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World's Best Selling Book

Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!)

Josef Muller-Brockmann: Pioneer of Swiss Graphic Design

Popular Lies About Graphic Design

100 Ideas that Changed Art

100 Diagrams That Changed the World

Basics Design 08: Design Thinking

Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965

Lella and Massimo Vignelli (Design is One)

The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

History of the Poster

How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer

The Design of Dissent: Socially and Politically Driven Graphics

George Lois: On His Creation of the Big Idea

Milton Glaser: Graphic Design

Sagmeister: Made You Look

Victore or, Who Died and Made You Boss?

Things I have learned in my life so far

Covering the '60s: George Lois, the Esquire Era

Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

[Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration]
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0812993012/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=VEJ64Y4T0U6J&coliid=I1WMMNNLTRBQ9G)

Graphic Design Thinking (Design Briefs)

I Used to Be a Design Student: 50 Graphic Designers Then and Now

The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design

Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills

Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference

Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Envisioning Information

The elements of dynamic symmetry

The elements of content strategy

Corporate Diversity: Swiss graphic design and advertising

Book Design: a comprehensive guide

Meggs' History of Graphic Design

I am by no means an expert artist so take this with a grain of salt but i can give you my advice:

it sounds obvious (and to be honest, pretty disappointing) but you just need to draw as much as possible, set aside an hour a day to just draw.

A good place is to start is to draw still-lifes with basic shapes at varying distances: something like this. this will let you start to develop an eye for lighting and how shapes and shadows interact. Search up how to properly shade if you're unsure.

while you're drawing these, start studying 1 and 2 point perspective: this slide makes it simple to understand and is pretty comprehensive. perspective is an essential tool which you'll need to understand.

keep drawing these basic shapes everyday, then start upgrading into more abstract shapes, things like wine glasses other shapes.
Maybe you can read Drawing on the right side of the brain?
It's probably one of the most highly regarded guide to drawing which really helped me to understand certain processes and logic behind drawing.

SIDE NOTE: Drawing from your brain memory/imagination is an incredibly difficult thing to do and not every artist is great at it. Use references and stills from life or books or the internet to develop your skill.

One of the greatest difficulties you will face is drawing what is there rather than what you think you see.

PM me if you ever need help with something.

> I know there are a lot of things that are bad (like the values)

you need to STOP talking this way. I understand that now, after having finished, you see something that you think needs improvements (like the values), but:

1. Celebrate that you finished a piece.
   
   
2. Take stock of what you want to do different next time, could be an improvement, could be something that you want to try differently (experimenting).
   
   Keep on producing, and once something is done, it's done. Yes take stock of what to do next that's different, and even solicit critique from people that you trust (/r/learnart is a good forum IHHO), the most important part is to keep producing.
   
   That is my criticism, I hope you found it constructive.
   
   Bonus: one of the best books on Creativity that I have ever read https://www.amazon.com/Ignore-Everybody-Other-Keys-Creativity/dp/159184259X

The thing with the creative design process is that it is in many ways different from what you've been learning previously. Not just new, but essentially different. Actually, it utilises another brain process than the one you're used to.

People who just learns the tools and language of design, but not the way of thinking, usually ends up with creating stuff that lacks harmony.

Programming is creative; it requires logical thinking, problem solving, efficiency. These are typical left-side logical skills in your brain. Therefore, you are probably really good at using your left logical brain right now.

However, things like shape and form, composition, proportions, and the whole gestalt are not things that the left logical brain likes to handle. These are the skills of the right creative brain half. This brain half is hardly ever used by engineers, programmers, physicists, or linguists.

A book that takes you through the process of developing your right creative brain half is this one: https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201

This sounds like a really cool idea, I wish there would have been a LD club at my high school!

Make sure you require your members to keep dream journals, and take a few minutes to let people share something out of their DJs if they would like to.

I don't see how this could ever go stale. People are always dreaming every night, so as long as you're recording them, you will always have something to talk about.

Also, maybe have this also be a sort of book club, where you assign Lucid Dreaming specific reading material and then discuss whatever chapters you assigned that week. Here is a link to Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen Laberge, which is also linked in the sidebar. I am about half way through and it is very informative and has helped me a lot, 9/10 would definitely recommend. It can also be found as a PDF, which can be viewed and downloaded for free here.

Also, encourage your fellow students to come check out this sub!

Good luck man, I hope this comes through for you, very cool idea.

It's complicated.

Family and Friends are not literary critics, nor peer reviewers; therefore they are not equipped to give good feedback.

Moreover, Family and Friends often dismiss someone's efforts, especially creative efforts, by highlighting the negatives and dismissing the positive. There are psychological reasons why it is this way, hence my premise: It's complicated.

But wait, there's more!

Why do you care about what your family/friends think of your writing? Well, it's simple: external validation. Why? Again, it's complicated (psychological reason).

So . . . "Am I fucked?" you're thinking.

Worry not, there's a solution: do not seek out external validation, and surely not from friends and family. What you want is good honest feedback from someone who:

1. you trust
   
2. is competent
   
   I am neither competent nor you can trust me, but I can tell you that: you wrote something? Great! Awesome! You did it! You're the 1 percent (read about the 90-9-1 rule); and no, it's not as good as your next writing, so . . . keep on writing.
   
   NOTE: this is a great read, so is this one.

Well, step one is to stop talking about yourself like that. I don't care if you think you're a "fucking pussy" or a "moron", don't say it to or about yourself. All it does is make anyone you say it to feel awkward, which reinforces it in your own mind. Of course it's never as easy as it sounds, so if you catch yourself berating yourself, try to take your mind off of it by doing something small to improve (for example, if you feel like you're not creative, get a piece of paper and doodle something. It doesn't even have to be good)

Confidence requires you to remember that you are valuable. Unfortunately, being 17 means feeling awkward and uncomfortable in your own skin sometimes, but that's ok. You just need to keep doing things you enjoy, even if you think you're not good at it, because that's the only way to get better. Even if you feel like a copycat (every creative person feels like that at some point. this book might also help)

You're going to look back at your teenage years and cringe no matter what. It's better to embrace it than to try and be perfect.

Reference! When drawing a character always rely on reference! No need to reinvent the character unless that's what you are going for.

Draw what you see not what you think you see. This tip is a bit more ephemeral though and ties into references. When drawing from reference really look at how each body part curves and connects. There are usually a lot of subtle curves.

Anatomy is your friend. Once you understand how anatomy works you can kinda bend it to your will. You can mold it and still have it look "right."

Other than that, to get rid of the hairy/scratchy looking lines, commit to the lines you draw. Don't constantly redraw the same line over and over trying to get it just right! (unless this is a rough sketch, then scratch away!) Usually for inking a drawing you should have a rough idea of where you want your lines to go in pencil. Practice the line you are going to draw in your head. Ghost your line a few times. And then commit and put your line on the page. Dont go so fast you cant controll the line but dont go so slow you get all the tremoprs in your hand to show up in the line.

Hmm, for other tips I wish I knew when starting, dont be afraid to reproduce someones art. Copy (do not trace) it onto the page as close in detail as you can to the original image.

Im a huge advocate of this book as well, its hugely eye opening for a beginner if you have no sort of training. It does contain lessons and requires you to have supplies on hand but its well worth the effort of going through it.

Lastly here is the first time I drew Fidget and the most recent redraw attempt! The first was when I first started drawing about two years ago. The second was about seven months ago.


P.S. Keep ALL your drawings. Whenever you feel like you are not making much progress go back and look at them. You will definately notice your progress.

Good luck with it, man. I've only had a handful of lucid dreams that lasted more than 10 seconds or so. They're a pretty amazing experience, and I imagine they could be useful if you could really develop your lucid dreaming skills, but it takes a pretty dedicated effort to get good at it.
This book is like the bible of lucid dreaming, and here's a pretty good forum that you can learn a lot from.

This may be controversial but if you read between the lines of most of the biographies of the saints mystics you’ll see that many or most suffered from mental illness.

I’ve always thought of this as someone referring to St. Paul was talking about in 2 Cor. 12:7-10

> a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

The bigger our cross the bigger our graces to be holy.

It’s good to let your sisters talents and virtues inspire you but don’t let that tempt you to imitate her... vices (I don’t mean to be judgmental)

Beyond that Id suggest reading The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown

It is a powerful read and I use its wisdom constantly in my ministry

If you really want to work with your hands and have more of a physical connection with your work, have you ever thought about screen printing? There's both a digital and a physical stage to this process, and the end result of what you produce is both a visual and tactile experience. Some kids I went to college with screen printed a lot of band posters for local artists and started a business from the ground up. They're now a pretty big deal and have a national audience: http://aestheticapparatus.com/

Getting there however isn't done easily or cheaply, and there isn't a guaranteed formula that will assure your success. That's part of the risk you take in starting your own business but in it you get to be the boss and decide what kind of work you want to do.

Don't worry so much about feeling like a laborer right now - your college experience gives you valuable skills that translate well to the field - what needs to be trained afterwards is the knowledge of how to think about a design problem and how to communicate an effective strategy to your client, and then get them to buy it.

There's a good read out there for you - it's called Damn Good Advice for People With Talent. It's written by George Lois. Name ring a bell? No? Ever heard of Don Draper? George Lois is the guy they modeled the character after (but of course decided to cut out all the unappealing bits, like hard work).

Design is 5% ability, 5% creativity, and 90% knowledge and salesmanship.

It looks like wizardry, but it really isn't. I drew like a five year old until I resolved I was going to learn how to do it. I learned "the secret", and actually lost interest because "the secret" was actually more interesting than putting in the work to getting good at it. And that's really all it takes... practice. The OP is good because the OP has practiced for a lot of hours. And that's not to diminish the OP's skill, because it is definitely an extremely skillful drawing. Only that it's not magic, it's practice. I respect the amount of work that the OP put into learning the skill.

The "secret", by the way, is that you don't learn to draw, you learn to see. When you learn to see what is really in front of you, that's when you start to draw realistically.

There are numerous books that teach you the basics, but the one I learned from was Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. (Clean amazon link).

If you look at the sample drawings from that book, it looks like magic how much improvement people go through in the first 8 weeks. It's not. If you go through the exercises, you too can destroy the sense of magic of seeing someone draw realistically. :)

Edit: Look at page 19 and 20 of the sample display. Those are actually after only 4 days.

The teamtreehouse stuff is alright. My college instructor has been using their videos to teach us stuff. Actually . . . my class is pretty much a scam. I'd also suggest running through freecodecamp.com

It is a nice little primer and then after they give you a few tools the website asks you to build your own projects. Once you do those projects, the site welcomes you back and into some serious javascript tutorials and on and on. It's a nice way of hand holding and letting go.

A couple sources you might be intimate with already are:

codepen.io --Write code and see it shape right away. You can run preprocessors such as pug on your html, jquery on the javascript, load in frameworks like foundation or bootstrap, sass . . . whatever your fancy is.

http://placehold.it/ --When building sites you will want pictures. Here are blank placeholder pictures. Nice site.


A smart phone app called "enki" -- Couple minutes every day for code exercises.

On firefox and chrome "inspect" -- get down and dirty with inspecting pages. If you are on chrome right click a webpage and go to down "inspect". Take a good look at the code. Highlight spots on the website, what is a child of what? Is there a responsive container holding everything ect. When making your own sites, using inspect will help you understand your widths and heights of containers and many other things. Good luck.

Also suggest a book called "The art of war". https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478741594&sr=8-1&keywords=war+of+art

Book just says whatever it is you are trying to do creatively do not give up, and do something in that field every single day. Even if it's shitty. Bonne chance mon ami.

The Bringhurst Bible

James Victore's book is amazing. It's a quick read but is packed with inspiration.

Envisioning Information is great for info design.

Megg's History of Graphic Design


The rest of these I haven't read yet, but here is a list of things I currently have on my amazon wish list:

Some People Can't Surf by Art Chantry

Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design by Jennifer Bass

Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut

Damn Good Advice by George Lois

How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy

How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman

The Design of Dissent by Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic

Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Century Totalitarian State by Steven Heller

Most people do not suck at drawing because they do not know the technique, but because they do not know how to see. What you want to do is train your eyes and I recommend the book "Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards. EDIT: Here is the Amazon link and I just noticed there is a 4th edition! If I needed another I would get this to check it out but I am sure she added a lot of good things. The author studied the human brain to have a better understand of how drawing works so I am sure she added new techniques and things from current studies.

Try to look for it at a local library, I am guessing you are either Australian or English so I am not sure if they will have the book but you can drop about 20$ and then some for shipping from Amazon.

About styles: you develop it over time. I am not really talking about manga style, but your own flavor of doing things. I recommend trying out the manga style, but I do not recommend making that your main form of learning. That is bad, because (1) you are copying another stylized piece of work (you want to draw from nature or non-photoshopped photographs) and (2) you most likely will be learning mistakes and it is really hard to fix mistakes. I read some manga and Kubo and Oda are two artists I love and if you look at their beginning work, it is almost flat out horrible to where they are now. There are small nuances to other people's work and you want to be careful what you copy. The only thing you can copy are the masters (Da Vinci, other Renaissance masters). Here is a website describing what Da Vinci did for practice which I recommend everyone to check out, but if you are a very beginner, I recommend checking out the book I recommended first. Practice, practice, practice. Try to draw something once a day, even if it is just a stick figure.

(3) Drawing from imagination is very, very, hard. In the beginning a lot of your manga/cartoon/stylized work will look so stiff and maybe not so fun to look at. That will be because of basics and experience. Life drawing will be what corrects this. Look into that after you got the basics. Backgrounds and landscapes are usually another set of classes/studies so check those out after as well.

Other than that, those are my tips. I want to be clear to you, and any other beginner, that I beat myself up when looking at my earlier and current drawings. Drawing can be a challenge because you need to know when to look past your mistakes and look at the tiny improvements. This is a sentiment shared with a lot of artists so do not think you are alone. Do not give up. If it is becoming stressful it is so great to take a step back, work on another project, or just take a week off. I find this to be the challenging part of drawing.

Any other questions? I will try to answer to the best of my abilities.

I like the last two, I can feel the mood they're giving. First of them is quite regal, the other really into their guitar. I want to give gesture advice but let's back up.

• Practice your lines. Draw less of them, and draw them more confidently. Draw lightly to compensate. Draw straight lines for practice. Lots of them. Straight lines, curved lines, circles, ovals. Try to repeat the same line / curve / shape over and over in your practice.
  
• Drawing is about seeing. Drawing what you actually see. Our brains are damn good at simplifying. Practice drawing objects in real life.
  
• This book was invaluable to beginner me: https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201/
  
  Gesture / quick drawing advice:
  
  
• Try sticking with straight lines. Short ones when you need a curve. It's easier for me and looks structured.
  
• Gestures are quick and simple but they're still 2d images pretending to be 3d. Instead of drawing a circle and a rectangle for a subject's head and body, gesture out an egg shape and a rectangle shape.
  
  Best of luck! You got this!

I was into it for a while when I was younger. I was never able to do it consistently enough to justify the effort I put in, but your mileage may vary. I think some people are naturally better at it than others.

I still had some pretty amazing lucid dreams. In fact, the most profound one I had was a dream where I didn't even do anything much. I just stood in my backyard looking around at stuff, feeling the ground under my feet, marvelling at how real and solid and detailed it all seemed while knowing it was all in my head. Probably the closest thing I've had to a spiritual experience.

I'd recommend grabbing a copy of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, it has a lot of good practical info.

I can relate to you on a lot of levels - pushing myself to extremes and putting pressure on myself to be perfect. However, perfection doesn't really exist! Even when I set goals for myself, once I got to those goals I still wasn't happy. I was never good enough. That applied in the gym and outside of the gym - slowly creeping into every facet of my life. It was physically and mentally exhausting.

The Gifts of Imperfection is an amazing book about letting go of the notion of being "the best" and focus on creating a healthy mental state that doesn't rely on perfectionism. It helped me cope with a lot of similar issues that you've outlined in your post.

As far as the gym is concerned - if crossfit brings you joy then think about how you want to be involved with it as a lifestyle now and far into the future. Don't burn yourself out or push yourself 150% at every workout. It's okay to miss workouts if your body tells you that you need to rest or eat more food to fuel your next workout. It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing approach. Find a balance that allows you to love yourself at all stages - not just when you are pushing yourself to the limits. Self acceptance is the most powerful tool you can have!

Check out the book The Now Habit.

In the book, he goes deeply into the reasons we procrastinate. A major point is that you always procrastinate for a reason. We procrastinate instead of working because we get a reward from procrastination. Sometimes that reward is relief from anxiety about fear of failure, for example. So in order to stop procrastinating, it's really helpful to emphasize the rewards of doing work. For example, when I sit down to work on my thesis, I say to myself, "I choose to work on my thesis for 30 minutes because every time I work on my thesis, I get a little closer to realizing my dreams of getting a PhD and an amazing job. Besides, I enjoy being productive and accomplishing things."

It's really important to emphasize the positives and eliminate the negatives of doing work. Best of luck!

Check out Bob Gurr's Google Talk, particularly at the 12 minute mark when he hears his interviewer use the word "Process." It's pretty funny. Watch the whole video. It's great. I'd also recommend any of the D23 panels that include the Imagineering Legends (Sklar, Gurr, Tony Baxter, Alice Davis, Rolly Crump, Joe Rohde, and others).

I was fortunate enough to hear Bob speak and meet him. Very, very nice gentleman.

In terms of books, in addition to those already mentioned:

The Imagineering Way is a fun book about the way they go about things.

The Imagineering Workout is a fun companion book.

John Hench's Designing Disney is a fun, visual look at his time with Disney.

Building a Better Mouse is a very specific story about the engineers who built The American Adventure show. This might be something you'd find interesting as an engineering student.

Project Future discusses the land acquisition in Florida. Very interesting book.

Three Years in Wonderland covers the construction and development of Disneyland in detail, more regarding the business side of things (leases, sponsors and partnerships).

*Walt and the Promise of Progress City is another fun book on the acquisition and the original EPCOT concept.

The main Walt Disney Imagineering Book is a great start, and Marty's two books are good as well.

I've also found Creativity, Inc to be inspirational. It goes back to the storytelling roots, but you'll find that most of the Imagineering books, articles, and posts are all about storytelling.

(Hell yes Runaways shout-out! The first comic series I ever collected in issues and still so very dear to my heart.)

Another rad lecture! I especially liked the idea that a character should have 7-10 sources minimum and half of them from outside the genre.

I don't think I have any questions for now but I did want to link Austin Kleon's essay (the first point) on copying the good way, which I think connects really nicely with your topic in the lecture! (Relatedly, I 100% recommend his book Steal Like an Artist (non-affiliate Amazon link). It's short and full of really great, grounding advice for creatives, especially budding ones.)

Looking forward to seeing everyone's characters!

So I have this card game thing based on Chuck Klosterman's essay about weird questions to ask people that are better than small talk. For a while I started using questions from this game as openers. I wouldn't say it was super successful, but at least it was different. Small tangent: I sent one of these to a girl on OKC once and she came right out of the gate at me aggressively asking if how the other women I send the same thing to respond. We ended up having an exchange in the vein of maybe dating might be more fun and fruitful if you didn't go around immediately treating every guy like he's an asshole that deserves to be smacked down. The convo ended friendly and with a better understanding of each other, but she also successfully locked herself in as a "fuck no".

> Wonder why that awesome guy might not be messaging you? Maybe he's too worried he'll come off as a creep, or his bumbling nervous opener will be posted to a site and mocked mercilessly, even though he's just trying his best.

Thanks for mentioning this. I have felt similar things reading this sub, myself.

Can be disconcerting, eh?


We all (including you) have sleep paralysis EVERY NIGHT that we sleep. We just don't remember it. It's completely natural and the reason we don't run into walls when we dream we're out for a jog. Our body safely immobilizes signals to our non-vital (think stuff other than heart/diaphragm) muscles


Not trying to say it can't be scary, even terrifying! I've been there. But honestly, the more I confronted it, the less I find it distressing. It's just novel now. It happens anyways, there's literally NO WAY it can actually hurt your body. I actually want to get it now!


I always recommend people who experience it look into lucid dreaming, which is being aware while dreaming. When you have sleep paralysis, what is basically happening is your body is still in sleep/dream mode, but your "waking life" brain's awake. If you learn not to panic, it's entirely possible to ride awareness back into the dream state. Many people spend many hours trying to experience sleep paralysis as a means to lucid dream. It's basically like having a metaphorical foot thru the threshold of the dream world, and one in your bed, paralyzed, awake


I've transitioned back into dreamland with sleep paralysis many dozens, up to maybe a couple hundred times in my life once I learned that. Flown, sprouted a plastic flower from a dream dime. All sorts of neat stuff. The more experience you get, the more you realize it can't hurt you. I've woken up and felt my whole body buzzing and paralyzed, and heard guttural, demonic sounding auditory hallucinations, been able to say "Ah, just my silly body glitching out again: neat!"


I recommend " https://www.amazon.com/Exploring-World-Dreaming-Stephen-LaBerge/dp/034537410X for learning more if interested

Yes, it was to provide special needs kids with the education they needed. The creator of the SAT later renounced eugenics and the test itself, but assholes like Termen needed to apply it to the top end so he could keep getting research funding.

I learned about this stuff from Sir Ken Robinson's amazing book on the failed, modern educational system, "The Element."

I think special education for the numinous qualities of the gifted is certainly needed, but much harder to define. The space to let autodidacts teach themselves is probably the best thing schools could do for them.

Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration is probably the best work I've came across on the subject.

There are a number of books on the subject of practicing piano, check out the three in "Frequently Bought Together": http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/156224003X/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i02?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Here are some tips:

1. Enjoy yourself. It's a hobby, so enjoyment will help you stay committed.
   
2. Consistency is key. It's better to practice 20 minutes a day than 2 hours the day before the lesson.
   
3. Focus hard. Try not to "zone out," try to set a goal for yourself, something to improve upon, and stick to it. That could be a particular mesaure, a section, etc.
   
4. Break it down. Don't just play pieces over and over. Play the hardest parts, play them slowly, play them hands separately. Sing them out loud. tap the rhythms. Use a metronome. Always, break things down and think about things more simply. When you start layering the "simple" things together, you get a beautiful tapestry which could never have been made by not focusing in/breaking things down.
   
5. Be healthy. Don't hate yourself, don't pick pieces you hate, don't hate the piano. If you are hating what you doing, take a break and find an approach that you don't hate.
   
6. Ergonomics - make sure your set up is optimal. I am still making adjustments after 15 years, so every once in a while think about seat height, seat distance from keys, curl of fingers, etc.
   
   I could go on forever with tips, but get started and bring questions to an experienced teacher. They will guide you through all of this. And, in the end, if you love the music, many of these things will come together due to your desire to do the music justice.

Thanks, but the ideas are mostly cribbed from other authors. If you're looking for more details on specific methods to manage Mythos, I'll recommend these.

On the Mythos side, The Neverending Story is an excellent examination of the nature of narrative's relationship to the self and character. Though it's not explicit, I like to think of the two snakes in Auryn as personifications (serpentifications?) of Logos & Mythos preventing each other from going too far. Don't get the hardback edition... they printed it with illegibly light ink for some reason.

On the Logos side, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming is full of practical exercises, along with case studies and theoretical underpinnings. It can get a little dry and repetitive near the end, but it's a great resource for learning how to treat your dreams.

And at the intersection of Logos & Mythos, I'd recommend Postmodern Magic. I don't 100% agree with Dunn, but his is the clearest explanation of the nature and mechanisms of belief control (magic, if you prefer) that I've come across. There are lots of practical exercises to try, with good attention to detail.

You should read the Artist's Way, it's about exactly what you're feeling!

The author has helped dozens of people gradually rebuild their creative spirit from being crushed (due to parents, work, failure) through guided daily journaling, exercises, steps, and explanations about all the barriers that will get in one's way.

The book definitely has flaws and is not the only book you need to be actionable in creating something, but I think it's a good one for building and strengthening your creative foundation.

Best of luck!

That 32 hour number sounds really close to the amount of time that I feel best at.

As for how I track time, I've gone through lots of variants, the last being inspired by a really great book call "The Now Habit" and the system called the Unschedule.

It's basically just a table that represents your week, but most importantly you only schedule stuff you have to do like eat and sleep, and fun stuff. You then fill the empty remaining space with work as you do it.

In the books it's assumed that you do it on paper, I do it on my galaxy note phone with the stylus. I color code everything. Here is an example.

I would highly recommend the book and figure out your own ways to implement it. I like using my phone stylus because it is fast, always on me, and easy to edit.

appreciate you taking the minute to comment. definitely testing your limits and pushing on the limits of your comfort zone is an effective path to freedom + success.

if that section is of interest, this very fun + very quick read "It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be" is definitely worth looking into:
https://www.amazon.com/Its-Not-How-Good-Want/dp/0714843377

here's my real critique if you want it: You should try studying life drawing for a while. This drawing isn't successful, for too many reasons to get into, but that's ok. Just draw something every day.

Also go to the museum or wikipedia your favorite artists, learn about them, study their careers. DRAW EVERY DAY. Take in as much about art as you can, be open to ideas in art you think are bad. I see all the time people look at Pollock and go 'thats not art, i could do that' without trying to get it at all.

that last bit has very little to do with you, except in that I think it'd help you a lot to study as much as you can and DRAW EVERY DAY.

There is this awesome book called Drawing on the right side of the brain. It's helped millions learn to draw in proportion and perspective.

http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201

Then there's an art appreciation book called Move Closer. It's my favorite art theory book.

http://www.amazon.com/Move-Closer-Intimate-Philosophy-Art/dp/0374527822/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369903747&sr=1-2&keywords=Move+Closer


Good luck and have fun.


Edit: just looked at your submission history, you know how to draw, u just trollin.

Hi there!

I am also an AoNM, and an aspiring novelist. I struggled with the same block about writing for a LONG time -- in fact, I've really only gotten past in in the last few months, but I am now almost 80k words into a novel which I have been trying to write for years, and expect to have a complete first draft within a few weeks.

I'm honestly a little embarrassed to be recommending this, but do you know what finally helped me get over the block? This book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Artists-Way-Julia-Cameron/dp/1585421464

I will be the first one to tell you that it can be cheezy, and preachy, and that it places a much greater importance on God or a 'creative spiritual power' than I, as an atheist, was really comfortable with, but bear with me.

The basic tenants are that you keep a stream-of-consciousness diary every day, to get all the anxiety and stuff out of your way, and have an 'artist's date' each week, to get used to setting time aside for yourself regardless of what is going on. But it is full of essays about letting go of perfectionism and the overly critical voice in your head, of acknowledging the injuries other people have done to you in the past which make it impossible for you to create freely, and has lots of exercises to help you do that. It's hard to describe well, I feel, and I was extremely skeptical of it at first, but I can't ignore how very much it helped me once I really gave it a chance.

Sorry I was being overdramatic haha. I still love music, it just takes a really phenomenal band or artist for me to sit and take it all in without analyzing every aspect of it. I have to use the "Sorry, I've pretty much ruined..." punchline anytime I go see a show with non-musician folks and I start tearing the show apart as soon as it's over. They always think it's funny and it's a reminder to myself that what I'm passionate about may be ruining the experience for them.

I actually really enjoy figuring out what I'm going to steal for my own show, I see it as important research! But I do wonder what it would be like to go see some of my favorite bands without knowing anything about music.

I've also "ruined" beer (I homebrew) and movies (I've scored some films and learned too much about movie making) as well hahaha.

You could take up drawing, it's extremely cheap and is a very good way to spend time by yourself. I find drawing to be meditative and rewarding, you have the satisfaction of making something yourself as well as learning to see the world differently.

All you need are a set of pencils, a decent sketchbook, a kneaded eraser, and some decent instruction. I'd recommend learning first from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and then moving on to figure drawing. Try Dynamic Figure Drawing or Bridgman's Life Drawing. You can also look up the work of Andrew Loomis for more instruction, which are available as free PDFs.

Later you can experiment using vine charcoal (which can be erased easily) to get the hang of a different instrument than a pencil. Try laying charcoal on its side and making big strokes. This is the first step towards painting. You could even try painting with black and white acrylic only which really isn't much different in terms of skills or cost. If you can get good at drawing I promise you can get good at painting. It just takes a bit of dedication.

The Idea Writers - Tons of Case Studies, but they're all told excellently.

It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be - Inspiration not to settl and to do great work.

Baked In - A lot like an updated Purple Cow. All about integrating product, management, and marketing.

Blink or Tipping Point - About the little things that cause shifts in culture to happen.

Also, some Seth Godin action never hurts. Definitely recommend his blog.

If you want more "How to make ads" type stuff there are more down that path, too. Just let me know.

IMO, the best way to start drawing is with a pad of unlined paper and mechanical pencil.

But if you want software: GIMP is free (yay), Photoshop is the well-known standard (and these videos are good), PaintToolSai feels more natural to draw with, and I just started using Mischief (which has a natural drawing feel, infinite canvas, and vector-based). My recommendation is Sai, since it's cheap, easy, and fun to use.

To learn how to draw people, start working through the Loomis books, beginning with Fun with a Pencil. A classic for learning how to 'see' like an artist is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. And when you start to feel frustrated with your work, turn to Art & Fear and Daring Greatly.

Let me know if you have any questions, and good luck with your art journey :)

I started drawing when I was 25 you can do it too if you try! Most people can only draw stick people if the only drawing they ever did was in grade school. You’ll find at first that you draw like a grade schooler, because well, that’s the last time you drew. You just pick up wher you left off. I find that is what discourages people from continuing. It’s to be expected though. You can practice your way up in no time. I know you’re not exactly asking, but thought I’d throw it out there for anyone who feels the same and feels like they can’t draw. You’ll catch up quicker than someone who’s really a child but it’ll take some work and some practice obviously! Just don’t give up because you draw like a child... to be fair you pretty much are drawing like a child at first. I recommend picking up a couple book and checking a couple YouTube channels!

Edit: r/ArtFundamentals is helpful used to be known as drawabox. First book I picked up was Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I’ve picked up many many more since then!

Hey! Nice to see you again! It's a really cool thing you're doing, and you'd be surprised... not many people legitimately want to know how other people's day has been. Which makes this project (for lack of a better term) double cool. =)

Today? Not bad... I'm going away with the GF to celebrate her new job (call back to previous post!) this coming weekend, so spent a lot of the day getting those plans together while she's at work. Went out for breakfast with my folks, which was all right. Parents can be tricky things. But I made it through. And I'm currently at a Starbucks, trying to get some work for myself done (but got distracted by the daily /r/reddcoin checkin).

Incidentally, I've had a rough time lately trying to motivate myself to do all those things that you need to do to better yourself. For some reason, I've just been procrastinate-y. But I took out my copy of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield which I find super motivating at times like this. It's technically about how creative folks can overcome that same procrastination, but it's applicable even if you aren't in the creative fields.

Anyways, I hope your day has been spectacular! Good luck out there!

I think you did a pretty solid job on both images, especially the dancer one. I would recommend that you use more really dark blacks in small amounts just to create more contrast. Also, more gradual and soft blending (try a blending stump) although much of gradual blending takes practice. When I took Drawing I, I read this book...

http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201

and it is truly amazing. It makes you think about drawing and seeing the world around you differently. If you are serious about drawing I would definitely read it.

Good work and good luck!

Sorry, I hope I didn't come across hostile. I didn't really like that book but that may just be because I've been spoilt by reading so many better books, it's probably quite interesting to someone who's not heard all this stuff before.

Yes jargon is a bit of a curse. Someone started a thread asking something similar earlier but they deleted it, so I'll just copy and paste my suggestions here...

There's no one-best-guide but there's a lot of trash.
IMHO you probably want to get about 2/3 books to get a balanced learning.

I'd recommend these:


Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming?
http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-World-Dreaming-Stephen-LaBerge/dp/034537410X/ref=pd_sim_b_2

Are You Dreaming? Exploring lucid dreams, a comprehensive guide http://www.amazon.com/dp/0957497709/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

Advanced Lucid Dreaming: the power of supplements

http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Lucid-Dreaming-Power-Supplements/dp/1430305428/ref=pd_sim_b_4

The Conscious Exploration of Dreaming
http://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Exploration-Dreaming-Discovering-Control/dp/1585005398/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381059873&sr=1-1&keywords=conscious+exploration+of+dreaming

First two are must reads, third is useful if you're interested in supplements, fourth is less of a guide but has some useful info. The author Ryan Hurd does some good e-books too.

A lot of the other books out there are really dumbed down or get all wishy-washy and paranormal. Oh and don't bother with "learn to lucid dream in 30 days" or most of the other cheap e-books as you'll only end up wasting your money.

>My stalemate, my plateau was a lack of vision. I hope I can gather from that infinite well, too

​

Inspiration comes best to those who don't wait for it. Read this book, The War of Art asap, it helped me a lot.

​

Kind of a digression but there's some fairly subtle occult themes, nothing that would scare off mainstream folks, but he invokes the muses, talks about ritualizing your creative time to more easily move into a creative mindset, and personifies creative resistance as a sort of demon to be overcome. It's been a while since I read it but from memory I think there's even some bits in there about working with your daimon or higher genius. I highly recommended it.

In order of impact:

1 - The War of Art - https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549035419&sr=1-3&keywords=war+of+art

The most important book I've ever read. If you are pursuing any creative endeavor, I would say this is required reading. It's a super quick read, with every page or two covering a quick idea or example. I read it a bit of it every day before starting work on my music. It's like my bible.

2 - Atlas Shrugged - https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549035527&sr=1-1&keywords=atlas+shrugged

Taught me the value of hard work. Gave me the confidence that if I put the work in, I could achieve great things.

3 - How I found Freedom in an Unfree World - http://metaphysicspirit.com/books/How%20I%20Found%20Freedom%20in%20an%20Unfree%20World.pdf

Even if you don't agree with all of it, it definitely helps put some new ideas out there that can change how you view things.

I spent 4.5 years in college and graduated with a music degree. I then floundered around for a couple years living with my dad, my friends, my GF, etc. working part-time gigs and dreaming about a life I wasn't working toward in any tangible way. Eventually I went to graduate school in music because at least it was a direction, but I knew before I even got there that it was never going to work. I dropped out after a single semester.

So there I was: manchild of 25 or so with no skills or experience that mattered to anyone, and just like you I had grown to hate the one subject I excelled in. So I floundered some more and felt sorry for myself, made myself out to be the victim in countless plots.

Eventually I found myself working at Subway making sandwiches for a guy I went to college with. He told me how everyone thought I was the one dude out of all the music majors who was gonna make it big. I guess that was a "rock bottom" of sorts for me.

I started rebuilding myself at that point, into the person I wanted to be. I got a lot of shit from family members and old friends who expected me to never change, but fortunately I had one person on my side who believed in me. It wasn't an easy process. There was a lot of backsliding and self-pitying, but anyway, some things that helped (and still help) me improve myself were As a Man Thinketh, the top comment in this Reddit post, and The War of Art.

4 years from that rock bottom now, I'm happily married with a steady job in programming, my own house and savings and working toward higher goals now. Most importantly I'm happy. Fulfilled, even. Things aren't perfect, but I feel like I know where I'm going now, I'm comfortable with myself, and I can work daily toward where I want to be. Hang in there man.

God do I despise the mods of this subreddit. The reproduced below apparently is a duplicate post that is not permitted, presumably because it could be placed here instead:

​

BioWare what's your mailing address? I'd like to donate ten copies of Creativity Inc.

Link here to the amazon page for this book. Written by Ed Catmull, the head of Pixar from before it was even Pixar, Creativity Inc. is essentially a story about Pixar's history and how Ed and the other leaders of Pixar tried to first make a successful animated movie, and then maintain that success. It talks about how one movie they made required a lot of crunch and burned people out, and they resolved to never do it again, and haven't. It talks about growing a company where two different projects are worked on by different teams, and ensuring nobody feels like there is an A team or B team. It talks about making sure the driving force of a movie is the experience, not the technology or pleasing some shitty executive. It talks about giving responsibility and accountability to a single person who owns the project and makes decisions.

It basically talks about how Pixar tried to navigate every god damn pothole BioWare tripped on, and maybe if you read it when it came out in 2014 we wouldn't have this dumpster fire of a game.

Hey Centurion,

Long story short yes.

When I was about 24 I got the notion that I needed to understand this Lucid Dreaming business. I got Stephen Laberge's book and got to work. It took maybe three months but I finally started to LD. Once this started happening, naturally I wanted to push the envelope. If I can control my dreams I thought, maybe I could even control what they would be about.

So, what I did was recited a sort of mantra in my head which outlined the desire to Lucid Dream about a certain thing or concept:

"I will have a Lucid Dream about x."

"I will control my dreams."

"I will remember my dreams when I awake."

I chanted something along these lines before going to bed each night. I think it was the third night, I manifested the dream I desired. After that phase of Lucid Dreaming in my life, it never happened again. I can't even LD anymore. However, I was able to do just what you are asking.

-Kadel

thanks for posting. I think you have a great attitude, and honestly, attitude counts for more than you think.

I'll not critique the website, but, knowing you're new to the fundamentals, try to share some more general thoughts.

1. do more. I think you're starting this already with some of your sketches for mini cooper. but always, always, do more. 50 iterations, 100 iterations. Keep pushing beyond the obvious, and use sketching as the tool to do that. I read an old design book, from the 70s, that said "only one solution is the symptom of an inflexible and untrained mind." /r/52weeksofdesign
   
   
2. Time to get up on the basics. That means the basics of drawing (if you so please). It's not a requirement as a designer (I'm a piss poor artist), but it definitely helps sometimes. http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419898682&sr=8-1&keywords=right+hand+drawing
   
   What sketching is important for is flexing ideas and testing compositions before going to the computer.
   
   
3. Learn the basics of typography:
   http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Graphic-Design-Communication-Courses/dp/0321934288/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419898490&sr=1-1&keywords=stop+stealing+sheep
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Version-Anniversary/dp/0881792128/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419898879&sr=1-1&keywords=robert+bringhurst
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Type-2nd-revised-expanded/dp/1568989695/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419898800&sr=1-2&keywords=typography
   
   
4. Grids
   http://www.amazon.com/Grid-Systems-Principles-Organizing-Design/dp/1568984650/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419898762&sr=1-1&keywords=kimberly+elan
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestaltung/dp/3721201450/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419898837&sr=8-1&keywords=grid+systems
   
   
5. Photography (if you like)
   http://www.amazon.com/Black-White-Photography-Manual-Revised/dp/0316373052/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1419898921&sr=8-2&keywords=black+and+white+photography
   
   and
   
   
6. remember that this is detail work. So things like spelling errors in this post, and on your website, should be resolved.
   
   Above and beyond the basics, I see your passion is impacting the world through design. So the question becomes HOW can graphic design impact the world, and does it at all? and what can you make or do directly? I think above all, a designer is an entrepreneur these days. Especially with that main driving passion.
   

Let me know when you figure it out....I literally don't enjoy anything but reading, video games, sex, and playing with my son without chemicals. After years of abusing myself I barely enjoy those things a lot of the time and I'll spend hours psyching myself up to read a book or play a video game only to find out my time is up. And then 'I don't do anything.'

And I can't stay sober longer than a week. This isn't the only reason--a big reason is that drugs literally just are shoved in my hand due to my job. But if I actually enjoyed doing something, anything, I would be happier and it would be easier to just say no.

I think for now just go to meetings and don't be too hard on yourself, you come back gradually. That's what I'm doing and hoping for. Longer you're sober the closer you get to the person you used to be that liked all that stuff without any help. We've been running the other direction for a long time.

(p.s. check this out, it's helped me before
http://www.amazon.com/The-Artists-Way-Julia-Cameron/dp/1585421464

TL; DR: We're not going to enjoy stuff until we're sober for a while. Everything sucks in the beginning. Stick it out. You aren't alone.

Only 5~ months ago did I decide to get serious about improving my art in my free time. For most of my life I only doodled occasionally. So I thought I would describe my plan of action with books and resources that I will likely be using. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

My process will be basics of construction-> perspective -> figure drawing -> digital art and rendering. Approximately 45% will be improving, 45% will be doing what I want for fun and 10% will be a daily sketch(this subreddit) that takes anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to complete. for fun I will be doing anything from digital to water color.

Construction and perspective: First I am starting my art journey by completing draw a box . Next I will go through Marshall Vandruff's Linear Perspective Videos and Perspective Made Easy simultaneously while referencing with how to draw by Scott Robertson. Briefly I will gloss at Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or keys to drawing pulling ideas of where I might find weakness.

Figure drawing: Once those are finished, I will begin my figure drawing phase. I will move onto free proko subsided with loomis books such as this, other photo references sites like http://reference.sketchdaily.net/en and Figure Drawing: Design and Invention. I will also reference Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist and maybe more depending on my budget.

digital art and rendering: For the final stage of my journey, I will venture into ctrlpaint. Simultaneously I will be reading How to Render, Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist and Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

After that.... I don't know. We will see were I am in a year.

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Sir Ken Robinson. He also did a very popular TED talk a big ago on how schools kill creativity. I find that reading stories of people finding success with their own skills is very inspiring and it makes you look at people in a brighter light. Robinson's book had some great stories in it. That and he's a great speaker. I'd recommend both the talk and the book.

For getting over writer's block, I strongly suggest doing morning pages like in this book. (A lot of helpful stuff is in this book, I strongly recommend giving it a read, but if there's nothing else you take from this book, it should be this, I'd say)

https://www.amazon.com/Artists-Way-Spiritual-Higher-Creativity/dp/1585421464

Basically, buy yourself a little journal. Every morning, fill three pages in it by hand, it should take around a half hour to do. Doesn't matter what it is. Write literally anything that comes to mind no matter how pointless or foolish or self-concerned or nonsensical you think it is. The point here is just to fill 3 pages with whatever is in your mind. I have even heard of people who have on certain days simply filled all three pages with just cursing, like "FUCK YOU" over and over again. Sometimes that's just how you feel.

Then, and here is they key, do NOT read it. Don't throw it away, but don't read it, either. Part of the point is to write without judging whether what you have written is good or bad. Make sure you do it consistently. It works best when you keep to it every morning.

A lot of people will tell you that the best way to get over writer's block is to start writing something, anything. And, this exercise done consistently I think you'll find will clear your mind of the unhelpful thoughts cluttering up your mind, later for when you want to express yourself. I find myself thinking, "Oh I already thought about that," or "I'm tired of harping on that, I'd like to think about something else now." Or sometimes by needing to fill the three pages, it forces you to think about something preoccupying you in a new way, and you feel encouraged by your fresh perspective.

Any kind of drawing you do is great! But if you wanted to draw in a more realistic way, take a look at the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It's for total beginners and you advance SUPER-rapidly. The neuroscience behind it is not accurate, but the exercises are really amazing. You realize that the main thing is 'seeing' better, not 'drawing' better. And you can really 'get it' pretty quickly! Just in case it's something you want to explore. :)

I have no fear you'll find the videos that suit you best. We generally are resourceful enough when the need calls for it. Best of luck to you on that front.

The most difficult thing I found is the same most difficult thing every person of every new venture finds: sticking with it. I didn't. I started getting used to it, started getting good at it, and then I froze 12 hours (not consecutive) into a fantastic painting and stopped. I still have the file unfinished on my external. Do not make my mistake. I regret it. BUT... I'm making up for lost time and have since restarted learning to use it and my programs again. So, trust me, Pastanro, I'm right there with you.

Consistency! If you practice one thing, practice it hard! Do it for a month, not a day. Nail it into the ground so it will be a useful step to stand on for the next part of your journey. And no cheating! Start from the bottom again. It will not be wasted practice. If you're a master of anatomy, spend time practicing what you've already mastered and it will help you acclimate to this new tool that much easier. Don't take off learning things you don't know just quite yet. Ease into it. Be proud of the starting work you do. In 5 years, you'll look back and be even more proud of it.

The rest - the workflow - is more or less up to you to decide. Which program you enjoy (I use ArtRage; the tools and canvases have actual texture and aren't as stale as a soft round "brush"), which brushes you use (if in a Photoshop-esque program, try playing with the jitter settings, I hear that helps give it more life), to how you hold it (ideally in such a manner that makes using the buttons on the stylus more useful), to how you paint (I don't paint portions of the drawing at a time, I paint full layers: sketch, rough paint, final paint, etc), which keyboard shortcuts you assign to the tablets buttons... these are all things you'll discover for yourself as you evolve with your tool, as it becomes an extension of you.

I also recommend accountability. Setting up a conceptart sketchbook or a deviantart profile (I prefer this) serves as a means of "showing up for work." If you can build an audience or a few friendships, they'll notice when you're being lazy. This makes the process a little less "I'm roaming around in the dark alone"-ish. It also feels fantastic to know you have fans, especially when they stick around and prove they're keeping an eye on you.

None of this is technical advice per se, but that's because I firmly believe the biggest challenge is mental. You're battling far bigger demons at the soul level when you set out to learn something new and follow a dream. Fanning those flames inside you is more important than what you're forging. So if you listen to only one piece of advice I have to give, get a copy of this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Art-Through-Creative/dp/1936891026

If you put yourself out there somewhere on the net, send me a link. I'd like to follow along.

The proportions are perfect. Probably because it was traced, but the drawing lacks soul. The contrasts are off. The line quality is poor. All in all it probably still took you a long time and the practice will pay off down the road.

I suggest paying more attention to the subtle changes to the contour of your subject. A great drawing or painting also has good contrast transitions aka shading. Pay very close attention to the transitions from light to dark... especially subtle transitions.

Keep practicing my friend. This painting was only a stepping stone.

A great book that helped me a bit is Drawing with the right side of your brain.. Give it a read over and then get back to drawing. :]

I have the exact same problem in my life. I grew up thinking I'd one day be able to take hold of all those cool movie-ideas I had and make them real. Still hasn't happened, and it aches deep down. Sometime I feel like I'm not even a failure because I never really tried. I feel like if only I'd let myself try, I might be amazing at something and discover my real passion. That's all I really want in life...to find my passion. I discovered this program at Barnes and Noble and I'm on Week 1 right now. There's this tool in there called the "morning pages" that seriously does seem to work. It's been hyped quite a bit, so I decided to try it and settle its claims to praise: The Artist's Way: A course in recovering and discovering your creative self

1. Done! It's not traditional reading material maybe, but this book has been on my list since the dawn of time, lmao.
   
2. The Name of the Wind & The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. :-) I was just talking about this series the other day! It's like hearing an epic story being told, but you're being told by the person at the center of the epic. You don't actually know if what they are telling you is the truth or not (especially since this person has a reputation for being cunning). You want to believe that it is, but at times evidence points to the fact that the person is either lying or is no long the epic figure they once were. Basically, unknown events have fundamentally changed them but we don't even know what that is yet! The wait for book three has been tortuous. :-)
   
3. Check check CHECK! :-D
   
   
4. YOU go read! :-D Here's the prologue!

Sure! As mentioned, I do think the book I linked before is the best one, but here are some others that I personally own:

• The Book of Questions
  
  
• If... Questions for the Game of Life
  
  
• If^2... 500 New Questions for the Game of Life
  
  
• The Book of Horrible Questions (this one is pretty depraved, so be advised it's not for everyone!)
  
  And there's this one, which I don't own but it might also be good:
  
  
• If^3... Questions for the Game of Love
  
  Lastly, I have the Q&A a Day journal and enjoy filling it out on my own. There's a Q&A a Day for couples that might be fun to fill out with your SO, among many other couples' journals.
  
  I think it'd be cool to have one copy of whichever journal for each person; they could be filled out independently and you could compare answers with your SO!

We are two peas in a pod here.

Much like what you've described, I too have also chosen the hardest route possible, while trying to maintain some semblance of my own personality. No matter what, there's a plaguing feeling that I need to feel hardship in order to feel accomplished.

I wanted to be a photographer for my entire young adult life. For years, I spent time out in a park nearby our home, with a course catalog to an art school where I would later be accepted. Only a week before I was supposed to attend, my NMom drove so hard into me with guilt and anxiety about my chosen profession, that I caved and went into the traditional academia. I later graduated on a path to law school, but dodged that bullet and am now headfirst into a creative career. Still, I'm not exactly where I want to be with it.

I just said to my partner today, in the midst of a grief-crying, that I feel as though I've left myself behind a long time ago. I've taken on positions that make me, purposely, anxious and frustrated because that's the only emotion that makes me feel like I've made any progress. In my family, if there is no struggle, there is no achievement.

Recently, I've been working through a book called "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron (http://www.amazon.com/The-Artists-Way-Julia-Cameron/dp/1585421464). If you aren't an artistic type, don't worry – this book transcends the techniques of art and really drills down into some of the core feelings behind childhood guilt, shaming, gaslighting, and how to begin treating yourself with unconditional love.

It sounds nuts, but her voice throughout this book resembles the type of mother that I always wanted. One who supports me in my creativity, and nourishes my thinking instead of sabotages it.

Although I'm far from recovery, it has REALLY helped me gain a new perspective on who I am, what I enjoy, and that pain is not a prerequisite to happiness. That said, I'm having a terrible day today, so know that settling into your true self for the first time in your life will come in stops and starts.

Let me know if you end up buying the book. I would love to cheer you on as you go!

The solution to your problems is quite simple: make a list of things that you need/want to do, then just fucking do it. Yep, there, I said it. I know it sounds harsh. But after years of reading, researching, and experimenting, I've found that precisely this is what it all boils down to: just. fucking. do. it. We end up building all kinds of mental scaffolds around the concept, with tricks and rewards and what not, but it all boils down to the same in the end.

Having a system in place to help you "just fucking doing it" can help tremendously, especially in the beginning. If you're willing to put in some time to work through them, I recommend The Now Habit, and Getting Things Done. Each of these books presents a different approach to productivity. You don't have to implement either system verbatim. Learn from them, try out things that sound interesting, and over time, build your own system.

Building and sticking to your system is a habit you will have to build. If that kind of thing is hard and/or interesting for you, please read The Power of Habit.

Don't just read them once and put them away. Read them, then take notes, then go over them again, and refer back to them every time you find something is lacking in your system. Don't read them cover to cover. They're quite long, and drag their feet through some sections. Skim them, check the index, and read through what sounds interesting, then go back and fill in the gaps if necessary.

Top comment is correct, you really just have to do it. Also, read the "The War of Art" by Daniel Pressfield. It's a pretty short read but masterfully written. It's 1 of 3 books (the next is called Turning Pro) about overcoming creative blocks and really focusing on your passion and overcoming the resistance to be great. Please just trust me on this one.

https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

This book really helped me https://www.amazon.com/Gifts-Imperfection-Think-Supposed-Embrace/dp/159285849X

> Wholehearted living is about engaging with our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.’ It’s going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.

https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487777403&sr=8-1&keywords=drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain

An absolute must have book for every artist. I wouldn't trade this one book for an entire year of art school, it's that good and it's that helpful.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003GEZP1G/ref=ox_sc_mini_detail?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A2FQ5GG01HBOZ1

I'm in love with the tri-grip design of these pencils! Comes with sharpener and eraser, now just snag a Strathmore sketch book and boom you're all set!

Just always remember a few things. It's not about the product it's about the process, meaning have fun with it and don't worry so much about how it'll turn out. Don't let anybody discourage you, especially yourself! You obviously have a passion for this, I think all you need is the right tools and a push in the right direction and you'll just take off. Draw everyday, draw everyway. Art is simply a way to communicate feelings and perceptions when words simply won't suffice.

As far as this particular sketch goes. It really isn't that bad and there is no right or wrong answers, it's all about what you want to do better. The only thing I would have done differently is turned the entire face about fifteen to thirty degrees to the left and I would have chosen a light source from the very beginning before I even begin to draw the subject. Yeah for some reason humans are the most difficult thing for us to draw and paint. Which is way it's such a good place to start!

I see you have a good start to what could become a great passion for you. I personally love drawing and I think this book could be just what you need to teach you how to REALLY see things. There are things in the book that regular drawing teachers don't tell you how to actually visualize things. If you actually read it and do all the exercises I think you will find it very helpful! I did. :)
http://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Right-Side-Brain-Definitive/dp/1585429201

Gift one:[have been dreaming of the day i get a rainbow dash backpack] (http://www.amazon.com/My-Little-Pony-Rainbow-Plush/dp/B00AD9DVUY/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1ACYBPXW50GS&coliid=I3AJSFZGMS037R) or even [to become boba fett] (http://www.amazon.com/Darker-Fleece-Hoodie-Multi-Colored-XX-Large/dp/B009ST66GG/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=YCQA0VLK1CQ8&coliid=I3RPOIYG8GZ332&psc=1)

Gift Two:[very cool card activity] (http://www.amazon.com/HYPERtheticals-50-Questions-Insane-Conversations/dp/0307587924/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1ACYBPXW50GS&coliid=IHY3DIW5NGM5L)

C'mon...gimme.

you guys always look beautiful and amazing and i love u both<3

I personally think the opposite. Photo realism is not "advanced". Painting impressionistically is not beginner either. What you need for impressionist painting comes off the back of photorealism. Copying a photo does not make you advanced. Infusing a photo with emotion and meaning makes you advanced. This painting is just that. And I love it. I am honestly tired seeing a photorealistic drawing and then clicking the comments just to see "Wow! I thought it was a photo" over and over again. Not to knock it, but this sort of work takes a different kind of skill. You need a handle (hah) on your brushwork and how you react to what you see. Difficult as fuck. Im still learning how to do this myself.

Learning "how to see" is definitely the cornerstone in becoming a better artist, though. That I agree with. Don't equate impressionism with not being able to do this. In my opinion they do it the best. I recommend anyone learning to pick up "drawing on the right side of the brain". Thats what personally helped me with getting things right. I used to draw photorealistic but I felt that it was an empty sort of exercise. Where do you go from there? Here. You go here. You express yourself.

Love the painting

Re: the whole "ideas aren't affected" thing, I think it's a somewhat misguided screed for originality. There's a weird idea among some creatives that all of their ideas must be original homunculi and come out of their brains fully-formed with only a little bit of tending until they reach their utmost state. I see it a lot with musicians and writers who don't want to be seen as obviously inspired by or "stealing" from other artists, though I personally think "stealing" is an important part of creativity.

But inspiration can come from anywhere from any reason. There shouldn't be any shame in saying another artist inspires you, and I can't think of any greater compliment an artist could receive than to think that their work inspired such action in someone else.

Learning from someone better and plagiarism are two different things. And I don't think Ogilvy meant he copied word for word from Bob Sage.

He meant copying as in style. If you're copying to learn and understand how to write successful ads then go for it. You ultimately have to find your own voice, but you have to learn a process first.

Plagiarism is just copying word for word what someone has said without doing your own research.

But, it's okay to learn and copy styles from other advertisers, artists, comedians, etc. Gary Bencivenga talks about people copying John Caples, "When Doctors Have Headaches, What Do They Do?" It's in his marketing bullets #7.

In the end, your voice will probably be a mixture of many styles or an extension of what others have already created.

I haven't read this book yet, but check out Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon. Here's a TED Talk laying out the idea of the book.

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” -Picasso

Also, what's the purpose of having a swipe file if you aren't going to use ideas from it?

Great start. Consistency is key.

The values look pretty good for just starting out. The main thing that stands out is the eyes seem too big and the nose is a bit too narrow.

Be sure to look at the shape of the features rather than drawing what you think it looks like.

If you want rapid improvement read “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

It made me actually believe I could draw.

We believe in you!

I've been lucid dreaming since about 4. I've been using it as a safety mechanism to get out of nightmares but i was still controlling my dreams and being lucid. I never realized there was any interest in it until high school. That's where i started trying the weird lucid dreaming techniques, and i had several "Wake Into Lucid Dream" (sleep paralysis) dreams so ask me anything if you're interested in hearing anything.

I never heard of the book you mentioned but This Book would be something on the topic i would recommend.

Oh man, man, man. I've encountered so many, but it still surprises me when I run across someone who's going through exactly the same thing I went through. We always feel so alone, right? I lost my virginity at age 27. And not just my virginity, she was the first girl I slept with, cuddled, made out with, my first girlfriend, the whole deal. I wanted a girlfriend since before I was 8 years old, but I had a lot of issues that got in the way. I won't bore you with the details.

I can't offer any comfort except to say that I know exactly how you feel. I still deal with envy sometimes even now. I'll throw out the books that really put me on the right path, just in case you're looking for something to read. The Gifts of Imperfection, No More Mr. Nice Guy, and Models. Models is the best how-to guide to dating I've read. The other two were necessary to get me to a place where I could put those lessons into practice. Take care of yourself. Sex might seem like a huge deal, but you are really doing fine. Everyone figures out different things at different times.

Read "The gift of imperfection" by Brene Brown. Seriously. Read it. You are good enough. If there are things you like to improve: Do it. Get your ass up and do it. Love yourself (which will lead to improving yourself automatically because you care. And I don't mean masturbating. Flossing maybe, but not masturbating.), people will notice that. You will be more confident. You will be who you are. And soon enough, you will attract someone that will like you almost as much as you do.

Edit: I switched from mobile to laptop instead of going to sleep to also add this link, so you better read this: http://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af

I agree with /u/blitz372 that maybe the darkness can alert you to the fact that you are dreaming. Also, the vacuum idea sounds fun.

My dreams are sometimes dark too and, although I have not changed that aspect, I have successfully changed disproportionate settings. I have a tendency to enter small spaces in dreams, which I now recognize as a dream sign and make larger so I can pass through.

Chapter 6 of Stephen la Berge's book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, gives advice on how to influence the environment at will such as manipulating small details then working up to greater changes and imagining the dream on a TV screen with the remote in your hand. See what works for you.

RESOURCES!

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - I hear it's an awesome book. Definitely on my wishlist.

Mark Crilley - Awesome dude, and just plain fun to watch. He doesn't really go into much detail on most of the stuff he does, but it's really cool to watch his workflow. Check out his videos on perspective drawing.

Proko - In my comment above. Does really nice figure drawing stuff.

Ctrl+Paint - Mainly for digital painting, which I'm trying to get into.

Draw with Jazza - Really good illustrator. Hard to follow sometimes, though.


I'm probably forgetting a lot, but resources are everywhere! Go find em!