Hello There!
I am breaking the entire Artist vs Techie chronicles into multiple posts so it is easier to read. This series of posts aim to cover some topics about art and tech objectively and general conception about the two I have noticed around me.
In this post, I aim to talk about my journey as I learnt different softwares in the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite.
What is the Journey?
Whether it is the road to Hokage, unlocking Bankai or the infamous blossoming before prom night, it involves a Journey. A journey that forces you through the most perilous situations with millions of obstacles in your path.
Something you as the protagonist must shove off as you keep inching towards your final goal. You shrug off the cuts, bruises, and ignore others who are living in their fairytale world of happiness, just subsisting on just pure willpower till you finally cross the gates of glory.
The Journey that everyone who has achieved anything goes through. It makes you a different person, no matter what you are pursuing. The amount of hard work in a new and unknown environment completely changes an individual. Through this humbling experience, you learn how to get stuff done effectively and grow as an individual.
My Journey
I learnt about the journey first hand when I challenged myself to learn 10 softwares from the Adobe’s suite. I had to become competent in each one of them with projects to back them up within my summer vacation, post which I would be acting as a Head for the Digital Works Department for a club in my college.
At first, I was extremely confused, things were extremely hard to grasp, I had to rewatch the same tutorials dozens of times and little by little I was starting to get the grasp of things. However, as my summer deadline came approaching and things kept getting more and more tense, I would keep getting find myself in a state of flux, cursing myself for this tribulation I had forced upon me. Afterall, I had to be extremely precise with all this technical stuff about the software that I was going to use and teach.
Later on, the stakes started to get higher, and I was in a position where I had to teach juniors these very skills, without the luxury of time. I would often have to watch something and give a lecture to my team 10 mins later.
I remember giving one of my hardest lectures, when I had to create a character from scratch, rig it for animation, create the lip sync and animation, export it for editing and show the final result. I had never done any of this before. I only had rudimentary knowledge of the softwares, much less the artistic abilities to make something people actually enjoy.
I was panicking and watching rigging tutorials online, common bug fixes, why things work the way they do along with developing artistic skills such as character art, fundamentals of animation and sound design. Just blowing up my brain with as much info as I could cram in 30 mins before I had to login zoom and get started teaching.
The time was up, and I walked in the lecture, with a simple plan noted down and fully prepared to make a fool of myself with horrible drawings and unable to help up my members the technical bits.
When we started, I just took a deep breath, calmed my nerves and just took the leap of faith. I brought in a reference image of myself, and just put trust in myself to pull it off using what I know and common sense.
Before I knew it, I made my character. Along with everyone else, I was astonished by how it turned out. With this unexpected success, I went full throttle on cloud 9 to rig it, and animated it. I had never done any of it before hand, yet I pulled it off live in front of my students, just by having faith in myself as an artist and the basic fundamentals not failing me.
My completed character
I had just experienced the Pareto’s Law a.k.a. infamous 80:20 rule. 20% of what you learn is what you will be using 80% of the time. There may be a million ways to get something done. 100s of things you may worry about, but as long as you focus on learning and improving even just the 20% of the skills you will be able to do almost everything you need to do.
It is then when I just started to forget looking at these softwares technically and started viewing them as an extension of myself. I felt like I had ascended into another realm where things just made sense. I was able to roll out animations, mographs and designs just from my fingertips effortlessly, traversing the applications without any issues. It is then when I started to notice a large gate in front of me, the fabled skills used only 20% of the time, only learnt to the 0.1% of the world, and I wanted in.
At that point, I did not even mind forcing myself into the technical parts of these softwares, as it was enabling me to do things which I had deemed to be impossible before.
Like using inbuilt automation facilities to speed up laborious workflows, and using batch processes to create 1,000,000s of custom designs in a matter of mins.
Tech that maybe situational but, as a business major, I knew how to make use of every little technique in my arsenal.
I learnt just how impactful technical understanding can be when I was converting jobs that generally took dozens of hours with an entire team into a languid tea break for one person.
I had created Machine Learning models and used flow-based programming without even realizing it, because seeing what it enabled me to do was nothing less than a drug to me. I dived in deeper and deeper, into newer technologies, finding and breaking new walls constantly.
In the span of two years I had gone from a complete newbie to an extremely competent individual and gained at least 10 levels in my tech literacy with the special perks of garnering my peer’s admiration.
My Biggest Take Aways
The most important thing I learn during this time was to face every challenge head on, but more importantly, most of the tools around us are quite easy to understand.
For You See…
Most of the softwares are made to be easy to use for the end-users. Especially ones made to achieve artistic goals. 3D modelling or painting in photoshop is not supposed to be equivalent to performing neurosurgery. They are designed with simplicity in mind, after all the end users are going to be artists. People who would want solutions that allow them to create what they want in the easiest way possible.
It is only the initial plunge that proves to be the most difficult. Once you get the terminology, some hands-on practice and pull off a few projects, you realize how simple these things really are. Especially since it takes very little time to become competent with most things out there due to the 80:20 rule.
Just by watching an hour-long tutorial on modelling in blender can equip you with the tools to model simple things on your own. Similarly, in video editing, it takes 30 mins to learn about your workspace and the general things you can do. However, even with just the ability to cut clips is enough to help you get the job done in a majority of the cases. You still need practice to really get comfortable with these skills, but just by using 20% of the tools you will get most of your work done.
Later on, you will start to realize that it has never been about the tools, but rather what the tools can do for you and your imagination. Then you embark on the journey of learning and mastering different tools to help shape your imagination into reality in the most efficient way possible.
What Does It All Come Down to?
I always wanted to be the storyteller, but not the background tech guy or the man with the paintbrush. However, the way I looked at things changed. I may have gotten into this for making better audio visuals to support my stories, but these skills ended up becoming a powerful extension of myself.
Making art and getting the basic 20% of the skills needs no time at all. However, I wanted to dive deep down further into the technical rabbit hole because it enabled be to do stuff that I originally thought to be magic. At no point was I forced to dive that deep. I could have been perfectly complacent with the basics. However, I dug deeper because technology and art is a match made in heaven. The technology enabled me to create art that I could only dream about, such as making 2d character animation with lip-sync singlehandedly even for 10+ min videos in just a weekend.
I started off as a story teller trying to learn how to make good visuals, and ventured into an amazing world of art technology. I advise anyone in a similar position to embrace the confusion. For once it all clicks together, the pictures you can paint are going to be jaw dropping.
Whats’s Next?
In the following posts, I plan to talk about tech and art, the skill sets involved, industry outlook and why both of them go so well with each other. Stay Tuned!