Making daily progress with your art can increase your confidence as well as your artistic discipline.
Making daily progress with your art is a huge way to achieve goals and add energy to your process. As the son of a chemist and a fine artist, I find that my ideas tend to pull me around and they want to keep me in the “limbo zone of what-if.” What if’s and wouldn’t it be cool if are great but they should never take away from your actual creative process. But left unchecked, these ideas can become the bulk of the energy absorption for your work. A simple and effective way to combat distracting “genius” ideas is to make daily progress on projects that are at least 10% possible for you to complete in your lifetime.
An important technique is to find out your own personality type. I have the personality where I like to start projects and I also like to complete them. But there is a certain “rush” when a new project is in the beginning stages. It is an almost romantic stage in the process where anything is possible and you can almost taste victory without even typing a single word or drawing a single line. Some of us in the writing world call it “brainstorming” because it definitely feels like a mental synaptic crackling of energy when new ideas get to form.
Since I can identify that I have a personality type that likes the “sizzle” of working on a new project, I create an environment which caters to that predisposition. This environment is created by having several concrete projects that have very real goals and yet require different and interesting disciplines of art in order to complete those projects.
One project for example is to finish the “Javascript” lessons in Codecademy.com. Once I finish this branch of programming tutorials, I’ll be mentally prepared to work on “Actionscript” which is a similar programming language which is used to make animated flash movies and flash games.
Another project is a animated music video which is much longer than my last video, “Frazzle Msnaz” – this video has been taking forever. But working on it definitely is fun. It takes much more energy to work on this video than it takes to go through Codecademy lessons. That’s because it’s always easier to jog through a trail that someone else has carved, rather than blazing one of your own. Don’t be discouraged by how much food and energy it takes to make something new. It will be worth it and it also will increase your creative “gas tank” which will fuel more projects in the future.
And my final project is a pure science project of an hypothesis that it is possible to create a cost-effective method for sending space vehicles into orbit without requiring hydrogen solid fuel rockets. This project requires math and science areas of knowledge which will quite literally take me another 10 to 20 years to master so this is definitely a long-shot. The more distant in the future and the more skills that you may or may not already have…the less “real” the project may become.
Yet I started the Codecademy project a little less than a year ago and now I’m 89% complete with the Javascript tutorials and even a “wall” section on multi-dimensional arrays has finally become palatable enough for me to complete. So there’s really no limit to what daily painstaking progress can do in order to achieve artistic goals.
-Tyler