Adrenalin Shot: Work Hard Brah!

So you can have the best art school­ing in the world? You study under the best teach­ers? Watch the most inspir­ing tuto­r­ial videos?

That’s good…but if you are unwill­ing to ded­i­cate time and effort over and above what is “required”, or place the impor­tance of con­stant prac­tice above watch­ing TV or play­ing video games or get­ting drunk with friends…then you’ll never make it in the com­mer­cial art field.

For every moment you decide to goof off, there are thou­sands of oth­ers who are prac­tic­ing and get­ting bet­ter and grow­ing and they are your com­pe­ti­tion for a very very very small pool of jobs and assign­ments. Do you like com­pe­ti­tion? You’d better.

Push past your limits.

- Daz

New site…

Hey guys, a quick update, you may have noticed a lack of blog updates lately and the rea­son is that I’ve been busy learn­ing how to build my own site in Word­Press with help from Lynda.com training.

It’s been years since I’ve tried to cre­ate my own page, but I thought it was time I learnt how to, and with Word­Press and other CMS soft­ware it’s never been eas­ier, espe­cially for some­one like myself who is pri­mar­ily a cre­ative con­tent devel­oper. Hav­ing a CMS is a big depar­ture from my Com­puter Sci­ence days when we were cod­ing crappy sites from notepad. Word­Press is a fan­tas­tic frame­work that lets peo­ple like me con­cen­trate on using my core skills — ie. cre­at­ing art­work and writ­ing, rather than half ass­ing code and markup.

My pre­vi­ous site was fine for my first pro­fes­sional web­site and WeCan­Cre­ate did a great job, but it did have lim­i­ta­tions that I wasn’t happy with. Cre­at­ing my own site was the only way I could have the func­tion­al­ity and flex­i­bil­ity I required / wanted.

If you’re think­ing about going this route with your own site / blog, I rec­om­mend sign­ing up to Lynda.com and going through the Word­Press 3 Essen­tial Train­ing with Morten Rand-Hendriksen, he takes his time to explain things to noobs such as myself and there is a lot of wel­come hand holding.

I’m still in the process of get­ting con­tent up-to-date, espe­cially the gallery which has a slightly dif­fer­ent for­mat, focus­ing on projects, allow­ing me more space to explain the processes I have gone through to arrive at a final design / illus­tra­tion choice. I’m lean­ing towards also incor­po­rat­ing light­box func­tion­al­ity for those who are only inter­ested in flick­ing through the images. Please excuse the bro­ken image links, I’m still updat­ing them

One big addi­tion, is that I have added a FAQ sec­tion, this part of the site holds a bunch of infor­ma­tion from my per­sonal expe­ri­ence. It con­tains excerpts from blog posts, inter­views I have done with mag­a­zines, and some have been writ­ten from scratch. I cre­ated this sec­tion pri­mar­ily because these ques­tions seem to crop up pretty often. Check it out and let me know what you think or let me know if there are errors I need to fix.

In other news my lit­tle sis­ter is get­ting mar­ried at the end of the year! Very excit­ing news! I’ve vol­un­teered to be her wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher in return for a new lens to shoot with, and I’m really excited to do it. I’ll be get­ting the lens shortly, a Canon f/2.8L 70-200mm with no IS, an awe­some zoom lens for those pho­to­jour­nal­ist shots. I’ll be tak­ing it through it’s paces when I get it, and when I visit Cambobia’s Angkor Wat later in the year with Kellie.

One other quick blip, I just reg­is­tered a new busi­ness domain. Excit­ing times ahead.

Hope your times have been pro­duc­tive, peace out.

D-giggidy.

Return to blogging.

Y’know, I love writ­ing and I love my blog. I really do, I find blog­ging to be cathar­tic and it allows me to indulge in one of the more intel­lec­tual plea­sures in my life…but dammit if life doesn’t have a way of force­fully inter­ject­ing itself between you and your best inten­tions of keep­ing it updated!

Thank­fully though, the inter­jec­tion of life in this instance, has been a pos­i­tive occur­rence full of learn­ing, love, grow­ing and a cement­ing of prior expe­ri­ences and ways of thinking…which means a great deal of writ­ing fodder.

Blog­ging is like any­thing that requires ded­i­ca­tion and habit, once you break the chain, it is easy to careen seri­ously off course into a ditch until you make a con­certed effort to pull your­self out and get back on track.

Well, I guess this lit­tle post is that con­certed effort, not much to look at, but I sup­pose it is a tan­gi­ble action to pierce the puss filled skin sack that has grown over my key­board pre­vent­ing me from bash­ing out lines of non­sen­si­cal jib­ber­ish and sen­tences mas­querad­ing as intel­lec­tual teeter-tottering.

A thought just entered my head — I think one of the big traps to blogging…or indeed going back to any­thing that you pre­vi­ously spent a lot of time engaged in, is to come back in a huge way, go back to the gym and hit the weights TWICE as hard, swim THRICE as far or come back to blog­ging and post TETRICE (…is that even right?!) as much!

In other words, make a grand re-entrance into the foray, which in itself can seem like a huge bar­rier to com­ing back to it.

Ah, I say screw it, just get the first one outta the way in what­ever hap­haz­ard way you can and take it from there.

I hope you out there in Inter­net land have been kick­ing ass and tak­ing names. And thanks to all the peo­ple who have asked when I’ll be back on the blog, I guess now I can say I am

Shar­ing is caring.

Peace, Dee­man.

Be happy, smile!

Some­thing I read a lot about these days is that a lot of artists hate their work. Why? I LOVE my work, warts, prob­lems and all, just as I would love my chil­dren, warts, prob­lems and all.

Life is too short to stress out over such things, you will die early if you stress out like this! So smile and be happy =)

Life update =)

I’m not earn­ing a hell of a lot of money as I am spend­ing a lot of time on a per­sonal com­mis­sion that is time con­sum­ing but very impor­tant to my client, so I want to do a very good job on it as I know it means so much to him. I’m treat­ing it as a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­nity to also prac­tice my char­coal and graphite which I have not had a chance to use for a while. I’m hope­fully going to fin­ish this off by this week.

I am also going to be doing a cou­ple of indie title box art pieces this week and I’ve also started to reg­u­larly teach a few peo­ple pri­vately which is lovely fun. All great peo­ple of all dif­fer­ent ages all want­ing to learn art, it’s really enjoy­able. I am look­ing for­ward to doing more per­sonal art work in the com­ing weeks as well as hav­ing the time to solicit more per­sonal and com­mer­cial jobs heh.

I’ve become really inter­ested in delv­ing into my cul­tural back­ground as of late see­ing as I have never done that before, so I have pur­chased some books on Chi­nese and Japan­ese art and I am tear­ing into it so that it informs my work a lit­tle bit more. Also, I have become a lit­tle more inter­ested in Bud­dhist teach­ings and mediation.

Sketch­group has been going really well, we’re hav­ing new peo­ple join all the time, seen new faces just about every week, been pretty awe­some, recently had some new dudes turn up, they’re great artists and great peo­ple too, I have a feel­ing that they will become good mates.

Wonderful little presentation.

I came across this lit­tle video on a speech deliv­ered by Eliz­a­beth Gilbert, best sell­ing author of Eat, Pray, Love this morn­ing while I was lying, warm and snug­gled in my bed.

I had just woken up after another crazy late night work­ing till 5am — which I love by the way, so I’m not com­plain­ing, and I was check­ing out my emails and any new inter­est­ing Face­book updates so I guess I kinda dis­cov­ered it by acci­dent since I don’t really pay too much atten­tion to peo­ple post­ing vids.

Most likely it is because I have grap­pled with such issues in the past, regard­ing cre­ativ­ity blocks that I really enjoyed lis­ten­ing to this alter­na­tive method of deal­ing with suc­cess and failures.

It’s sim­i­lar to some of the sen­ti­ments and ways of think­ing laid out in The Artist’s Way, but deliv­ered with some good natured humour, warmth and emo­tion that is dif­fi­cult to get from the writ­ten word.

Hope you enjoy it and if you wish to dis­cuss it or com­ment about it, please feel free to use the com­ment sec­tion below.

Stay chilled.

D-Man

Norman Rockwell

Hey guys!

I’ve been asked on occa­sion who my major influ­ences were as an artist and the name that I con­sis­tently cite as a major influ­ence in men­tal­ity, if not so much in style, is Nor­man Rock­well, who has been endowed, at numer­ous times with the moniker of America’s Most Beloved Artist.

His main schtick was to cre­ate highly detailed, rose tinted glass, stylised paint­ings that depicted ide­alised scenes of Amer­i­can life. This also won him his fair share of detrac­tors who attacked him for the sweet natured under­ly­ing cur­rent of all his art which they said didn’t reflect real­ity in all it’s grittiness.

Read more

Carpe Diem!

I’m feel­ing par­tic­u­larly inspired today, been lis­ten­ing to a crapload of inter­views from Side­bar with many of my favourite artists, if you still haven’t checked out their goody good­ness and are an art fan, do so!

http://www.sidebarnation.com/

I went to sleep at 4am yes­ter­day, woke up today at 7am…to the sound of the garbage man com­ing and real­is­ing in a panic that I had for­got­ten to put the trash out! So I pulled on my shoes and sprinted out to catch him. Mis­sion accom­plished oh yeah! Any­way, then after that I couldn’t get back to sleep because I’ve been on a sketch­ing binge — I’ll post some art and art process here later for you to check out.

Also, this is really just a quick adren­a­lin spike of me wish­ing you a good day dear reader! Carpe Diem, sieze the day, do what you need to do, whether it’s art, busi­ness, quit­ting a job, ask­ing a girl out, danc­ing like the world is about to end, do it today cause tomor­row might never come.

A friend once said there are three types of peo­ple, those who give you energy and make you feel pumped for life and it’s myr­iad of pos­si­bil­i­ties, there are those who sap your energy and can dull even the bright­est day! Then there are those who do noth­ing for you at all.

Aim to be the per­son who bright­ens and uplifts and inspires and ener­gizes oth­ers, you’ll find it does as much if not more for you as well =)

This Nike Ad ROCKS this:

Catch ya on the flipside!

Daz

My Friend…

I just arrived home from catch­ing up with a close friend of mine who lives on the other side of Aus­tralia. Because of his loca­tion, we don’t get to hang out much but when we do it’s like we see and work with each other every day.

We both joke around, talk­ing the most juve­nile stuff known to man, our sex­ual exploits, our embar­rass­ing stories…sometimes it’s dif­fi­cult to talk through the laugh­ter. I have lit­er­ally had to stop laugh­ing at some of his sto­ries, not because they weren’t funny, but because my jaw mus­cles, belly and cheeks were aching.

In the next breath we have dis­cussed at length, to uncon­scionable hours of the morn­ing things like courage, integrity, the exis­tence of God, broth­er­hood, male pride, intesti­nal for­ti­tude and what it is like to hear a man scream­ing, know­ing that he is about to die and how it feels, being the cause of it.

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Observe the pros…

Take time to observe the habits of great atheletes.

Sure, they may have skills and tal­ent that we may never have, but what they do, and what we can do, is mas­ter the basics. They prac­tice them over and over again, for hun­dreds if not thou­sands of hours, out of the spot­light, out of the view of a cheer­ing crowd until one day they are con­sis­tently brilliant.

They do this until the basics become sec­ond nature, and they can rely on them under pres­sure and adverse con­di­tions. And they return to them when­ever they hit trouble.

Over the years I’ve observed that is exactly the same in any arena: Learn what the basics are, prac­tice them con­stantly, use them well and suc­cess will come.

- Brian Sher, What Rich Peo­ple Know & Des­per­ately Want to Keep Secret