The Visual Scholar

As artists, we often have a love-hate relationship with the concept of the deadline, of being under pressure, of having someone else require us to make art in a set amount of time by a particular date. And it can be tricky to know how this relates to our creativity, especially early on in your career when you're looking at getting employed by some of these different creative industries, which often have a real name for being heavy on crunch and grind and just working a lot and having to meet really tight deadlines. On the other hand, I think that it can be said deadlines and structure and limitations can actually help inspire our creativity. And frequently, if we don't have deadlines, we don't have scope, if we don't have some kind of pressure on us, a lot of our personal projects, a lot of the things that we may want to do. Just don't even happen. And I think it could be said also that a lot of great things have happened in art. A lot of great art has been created under intense deadline pressure. So I think this is a really interesting topic. I want to tackle it in this video, especially from the perspective of someone who is maybe thinking about a career in art and how some of these big, scary ideas of being under pressure, having to create a certain amount of work relate to what we actually do. Absolutely. Absolutely. As professional artists, it's frequently been said that you can have things on time, you can have them cheap or you can have them be really high quality, but you can only have two of those. And what this means is that the deadline and your ability to produce work on time is a major component of your career success. Welcome to the Visual Scholar podcast. My name is Tim McBurney. I have been a professional working artist. I've been a professional artist for over 20 years. And on this show, we're all about demystifying the world of art, creativity and productivity so that you can get better faster and enjoy your artistic journey. Check out my free brainstorming toolkit. If you want to take your art to the next level and really improve your skills, one of the best ways is to create your own personal artistic project. And to do that, you need a great idea, an idea that you're passionate about, that is unique. And original to you that is going to allow you to see this project through. I've taken the same tools and frameworks that I use every day and created a workshop on world building, ideation and brainstorming. In it, you'll learn things like how to quiet the editing mind, how to enhance your blue sky brainstorming ability and how to use brainstorming anchors for things like story or even your preexisting ideas and proclivities as an artist. This is a free training. I think you're ready to go. You're really going to enjoy it. So if that is something you're interested in, go check it out. The link will be in the description. So I know that the idea of deadlines is a big concern for a lot of people who are really trying to get their career off the ground. But there's some ideas here that I think could also relate if you've already been working in the industry and it would be good to get your opinion and your ideas if you have been working in the industry, if you have dealt with deadlines again, let us know how that has gone for you. Whether you've got any tips and whether this has actually been a problem. Like how as a creative do you relate to these ideas? I'd be really, really keen to hear what you think about this down below if you have been working as a professional or if you've got any insight on this. But the reason I bring this up is I know a lot of people in the beginning are kind of really worried about the concept of deadlines. And I think this is fair enough because a lot of the entertainment industries and quite frankly, I think like most. I mean, most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs have deadlines. Most jobs are more likely to have deadlines. And I think as artists, we're not really aware of this requirement that you need to kind of do stuff on time. But it does seem like being a professional artist, a lot of these industries are really full of being grindy, there's a lot of needing to go into crunch, to meet deadlines. And I think as artists, we do often get a little bit exploited, because we like to work. And it's very easy for those industries to kind of say, hey, you know, if you want to work you've got to work really long hours. of the deal. And a lot of artists will kind of just sort of go along with that. So it's also that frequently in job ads and when you're talking about industry, there are often lots of requirements there that like you have to be okay with meeting tight deadlines. You have to be okay sort of working under pressure. So I guess I just wanted to kind of unpack what a lot of this means and maybe to give some people more insight into what deadlines mean. And I think how specifically they relate to us as artists and our creativity. Because as I kind of touched on in the introduction, I think that while going into crunch for three years of your life and having to work 16 hours a day and not see the light of day is kind of terrible. And I think a lot of the industries that we work in as artists have completely abused that kind of trust and employee relationship. It's probably the subject for another video, but also there's tons of really great studio interviews. So I think that's a really good way to kind of get a sense of how we're working. And I think that's a really good way to kind of get a sense of how we're working. And I think that's a really good way to kind of get a sense of how we're working. And some industries are better than others. So like, yeah, there is a side to it, to deadlines and pressure that is kind of a little bit sort of darker. But on the other hand, I think you kind of need to be able to work under pressure to a certain degree as an artist. And what I find is like often if people are just given an unlimited budget of time and unlimited budget of everything, often people don't really make any work. It's often having a gallery show that's happening at a particular time that, for example, you're doing a gallery show even your fine artists to kind of get it all together and kind of finish everything. And there's a certain performance aspect to art where like we are trying to finish it and the finishing of it is a really important thing. And that can be pressure. And you kind of often need a deadline or something to kind of say, hey, this work is done. It's finished. You put it out and then you can work on something else. And if you kind of don't have that, there's always the ability to chip away, like tweak. And what that means is we're not really completing and finishing work and really learning from it. So there's so many ways I think this can apply to us. And a lot of the advice that I give people, if they are just working on their own projects is like, we got to structure this. You got to figure out like when this thing would be done. Like let's scope it out. Let's try and figure out when it's going to be finished because otherwise it kind of just drags on and people get this burnout, this artistic block, all this kind of terrible stuff. So I think there's a really positive side to a lot of the deadlines or pressure. But I think that maybe these are sort of different things, like the idea of having a deadline that is related to your job or is related to you earning money and being able to pay your rent versus you having a deadline that is going to help you to actually get your work done and feel good about finishing something as opposed to just having this massive scope creep. These are maybe separate things, but even though we often call them the same. So I do want to sort of tease this out a little bit and sort of talk about the different aspects here. And also directly talk to that concept of, hey, if you are just starting out and you're thinking about like, is this for me? Like, do I want to make work in a production environment and what does that even mean? And what does it mean to have to work under tight deadlines and under pressure as an artist? So I thought this would be a fun topic and something that a lot of people are often concerned about. And it's something I certainly was concerned about really early on when I was thinking about getting into being an artist in a video game studio. Like this would take a lot of time. Yeah. And it was kind of terrifying me because I thought that I would just be having to produce all this art really quickly. And I always kind of knew in the beginning that like I wasn't going to be able to produce good work on time. And when I did get a job, even for a little bit early on, you know, I was always struggling with this where I had to hand it up and I had to do this thing on time. But, you know, it was always not as good as I thought it could be. And I often didn't know how to really sort of make that stuff work. So like this is. This is a real challenge, I think, for artists in the beginning, especially when you're dealing with your first few jobs, your first working environment. So, again, I thought this would be really good to kind of talk to. So let's get started firstly and look at why deadlines matter in the first place when it comes to professional art. The first point that I want to make here is that the deadlines do matter. And this is obviously the case. The fact that we can do what we say, that we're going to be reliable. That we're going to be able to produce something in a certain amount of time is often going to be the thing that gets us employed and make sure that we stay employed. Because often the people who are employing us either as a large corporation or if you're outsourcing or working for editors is that they actually have a problem, which is they need the concept art, the finished illustrations, and they need to know that you're on schedule. You're going to deliver these things because they're working in a production environment. So the reality is most of these large projects, like a video game, an animation, a book that's being created, whatever it is, they often have intense requirements to meet a particular outcome in terms of deadline. Like the game needs to come out at a particular time. And the reason for that is there's so many interdependencies that are really critical. Like if I'm doing an illustration for a book, that book is often created by an author. And that author needs the book to come out at a particular time. And it's often scheduled with printers, with distributors, with marketing. The marketing people have said, hey, it needs to come out in this window. And that's really important. If you know anything about video games, it's the same where games need to often come out and hit particular release windows. And these are chosen very specifically based on what is and isn't coming out. Like, for instance, I don't know whether if you follow video games, you probably know this. But if you're a video game developer, you're probably familiar with video games. You probably know that like Grand Theft Auto 6 is coming out at some point. And because they said it was going to come out kind of around this time this year, no one else released any video games and scaled any video games then because they were just too terrified that everyone would be buying and playing GTA 6. Like that's how important these things are. You can be working on a $100 million, a $200 million project. And they're like, we have to release here because if we don't release here, we're going to hit. The summer games sort of release where we're going to face more competition. We're going to be drowned out in the marketplace. Or for a lot of people, they're like, we can't release in this six months because that's when GTA 6 is coming out. No one's going to buy or pay any attention to what we're doing. So what this means is they're like, look, we either have to release before this date or we have to push it for six months. And if we push it for six months, the entire company disintegrates because we need to hit revenue and pay the publisher. Otherwise, you're all out of a job. These are the realities that you deal with. If I don't produce the book cover on time, then maybe it doesn't go to print in time. And then maybe the writer who wrote it is completely, completely screwed. And everyone's completely upset because they've basically printed all the marketing and promotion. There's a book tour. Plane tickets have been booked for that writer to go on a tour. Right? You have to produce stuff on time because we exist in a Western society in this kind of time-based system of deadlines and stuff. Not all cultures are based this way. A lot of them view time very differently. But if you're trying to get all this stuff done and produce these big things, right, the movies have to come out in that Christmas window if they're a big blockbuster movie. And those are the ones that are often going to get us the most money and pay us the most money. And often you do get paid. And you get paid well if you can produce things on deadline. Like if you're the artist who knows, especially this is often happens is they will hire someone maybe who is less professional to do that book cover, to do that thing, hoping to save a bit of money. And maybe they blow the deadline. And the editor is sitting there going, like, I don't think this person's going to do this in time. So they cut that person. And then they call someone they know is like super reliable, super good. But that person is going to be super expensive. And they know that they can hit out some really high quality professional artist who's a veteran. And they'll produce something really good really quickly. But as we talked about and as we'll uncover more, that's going to be expensive. And that person will meet that deadline, hit that thing. It will be really good. But it's going to cost them. But they don't care because they need that done. So hopefully that makes sense, right? Stuff coming out on time is super important, right? It's the bedrock of what we do, really. And it doesn't matter what you're doing, right? I think that's just really obvious. The question is, I guess, how as artists do we interface with that? Because estimating and gauging how long that's going to take you is really tricky in the beginning. And this really is the concern. Like, yeah, if you've been working for 10 years, 15 years, you really understand a particular industry's deadline, system, the structure. You've done these things 100 times. It's really easy to estimate. So when I was working in video games, for instance, as a concept artist, I got really good at being able to create and put as much effort as I kind of could into a three or four character design lineup where I'd be like I'd do one of those per day. Here's a new set of either variations or completely new character designs. And I just sort of built this as a muscle where I could kind of almost do this in my sleep, right? Because I'd just done it 100 times. Right? And I'd done it hundreds of thousands of times. But the first time I did that, that would take me ages, like days. And the quality would be terrible early on. So we're often dealing with this challenge. And the other thing is with art in the beginning, we often build professional competency, which you could sort of define as like being able to work under deadline pressure and understanding that you can be reliable. And as I often see, the real thing that delineated me feeling professional was that I needed to be able to work under deadline pressure. And I needed to be able to work under deadline pressure. And I knew that even though I wasn't feeling it that day, even though maybe something else happened that sort of messed up my schedule, I would still be able to sit down and produce those three character designs. And that even though maybe I noticed that the process was a little bit more stressful, that the quality maybe for me wasn't, I wasn't pushing any boundaries for me, that everyone else was like, cool, that does the job. Right? It's good enough that other people wouldn't really notice when I was doing it. Right? It's good enough that other people wouldn't really notice when I wasn't operating at 100%. But that takes a long time to build. And early on, it's really stressful because every time something new happens, you need to build visual library. You need to do research. You need to find reference. You need to practice that. Right? So you could be designing fantasy characters. And this is all fine. And you're designing this. And someone says like, hey, can you design a fantasy character that maybe is a bit more like a creature? And that could be a good idea. And that's what I'm trying to do. And I'm trying to do that. And I'm trying to do that. And I'm trying to do that. And I'm trying to do that. And I'm trying to do that. And I'm trying to do that. And that could just throw you for a loop and take you twice as long. If someone then says, hey, we're really trying to draw some horses. So could you show us how this character would look like on a horse? These are the things where like what you want to be able to say as a professional artist is like, yes, I can do that. Because that means you're going to be more reliable. And they're going to then give you more things. So you can have more of a sense of what you're going to be able to do. So, you know, the first thing you want to do is you want to build a visual library. And this is something that I think is really important. And I think it's really important. And that's something that I'm trying to do. And I think it's really important to do. And that's what I'm trying to do. And that's what I'm trying to build a visual library that's relative of what I want to really lose you in a real world environment or any kind of art. Oh, yeah. line where you have to have a good understanding of like how long you're taking on a new subject is going to take and to set expectations. Because a big part of what will also make you employable is being able to communicate honestly where you are. So I think one of the mistakes you can make early on is to think that like if you just kind of say yes and you kind of just hope you can do it, but then you kind of blow the deadline that it's more a matter of like asking for forgiveness rather than permission. But in a professional environment, it's much better to ask for permission than forgiveness because deadlines, they don't move, right? So often if you just kind of say, hey, yeah, but I haven't drawn horses, so give me a little bit more extra on this, you know, you may find people are fine with that, you know. And we'll dig into the expectations that you're going to have in professional environments as well. But either way, I think it's obvious to say that this idea of not really knowing whether you can meet those deadlines is the fundamental problem for people early on. It's also key here to understand that especially in a lot of the environments that are really deadline heavy, like concept art is a good example. The reason that concept art is messy is that the quality doesn't matter as much as you think. And often as artists, again, in the beginning, it's tricky to meet that quality that is professional. But the things that we're often seeing on art station trending pages in art books are often far better than the kind of work that you're likely to be doing early on as a junior artist. And the quality is often far less important. Often the reason people say, hey, a lot of concept art is really just people doing quick sketches is because it is just doing quick sketches. Because you may have an animator or someone who's trying to model something kind of a quick sketch where you have the concept art. And then you have to look at it and say, okay, this is what I need to do. And that's a lot of the time that you have to get yourself from the old to the new. So, you can't sit around and say, hey, how does this thing you designed work? And you then have to say, okay, I don't have a day to do that because this person is literally working on this thing right now. They can't sit around. They need to have this answered. So, you just kind of almost napkin, or this is often what happens. You're just doing a quick paint over, or like, hey, send me a render. I'll just quickly do it. And you're just working. And that's a lot of what you're actually doing as a job because you're not sitting there going, okay, give me three days or a week and I'll rend you out a perfect kind of thing and I'll really figure it out. It's like, we need to fix this problem. And this is about functional art. And I think it's that type of production art that often we don't get exposed to very much early on. And we don't have an expectation of like how to solve those problems. And it's very tricky to build those skills of like, let's do a very specific one hour paint over of someone's problem that they're having, building something in 3D that you designed or someone else designed. But yet, those are the skills that will often mean the game looks better. Everyone around you is happier and no one's going to be being frustrated because you're just designing stuff that kind of doesn't work in 3D or whatever. Every industry is completely different. VFX has its own production pipelines. I don't have as much knowledge about VFX work for like sort of film or live action. But, all these things are the same. There's often little things that we do and the quality is far less important than we imagine. It's much more a matter of, again, working under those tight deadline pressures and being able to have someone say, hey, can you fix this problem in an hour? And you're just kind of doing your best. But it's much less about making fancy art and it's more a matter of actually allowing that production to flow. So again, it's often really important to understand that like quality doesn't matter if it's late. It doesn't matter how good you can solve that problem if you're having to, you know, work on it. So, what I think is really important is to understand that you can't just make art work and then you have to make other people in the production workflow wait, because that is wasted money for them. So, often a lot of what we do is really a matter of matching very specifically the needs and the functional needs of the art that we make to the productions we're working on. Now, as I said, every industry is different and for book cover illustration, going back to that example, the quality does matter, right? You know, maybe if you're under a super tight deadline, you can negotiate. There's always room to negotiate and say like, hey, I'm just going to give you some really rough thumbnails and then we're just going to go because like, trust me, I can make something really good, but we don't have time for that, you know? And if you negotiate that, you may find that that kind of functions, right? Because it's all a matter of actually things kind of working well. It's worth reiterating this idea also of the speed quality cost triangle, right? Which is a classic thing that people have kind of said, well, you can have it cheap, you can have it good, or you can have it on time, but you can only have two of those. And this is so important to understand, this is not going to change. This is, I think, an eternal paradigm or equation you can use. And what it really means is you can see that if you can create stuff on time, it's going to either allow you to be not quite as good, but still highly employable, and also this is the thing that can mean that if you are good and you are on time, you can charge a huge amount of money for it. Because these are often the times where, again, someone will call you and say, like, I need something really good and you need to do it on time and I've got a really tight deadline, right? That's when we become much more employable for those kind of high-end jobs. And that's when you're much more likely to be a much better paid concept artist, a much better paid concept artist. And that's when you're much more likely to be a much better paid person within whatever industry you're doing. So, it's probably good to look at that and understand that probably in the beginning, we're not really after the highest salary or the most money. We're really just after trying to be as professional as we can and meet things on deadline and make sure that we just try and get that quality to a really bare minimum level when you are able to meet things on deadline. So, that's a lot of what we're going to be looking at, but these are just basic things that we can do. And I think that's what we're going to be looking at. concepts that I guess are worth reiterating that probably aren't going to change that much that at the end of the day, being able to meet the deadlines, it's not just important to having an artistic career. It's probably the most important thing. And for many jobs, it's really all that matters because if you don't, then the whole production chain and workflow kind of stops. And that's something that no one wants. The second point here that I think is worth going into is maybe trying to unpack the reality of these professional environments that involve a lot of artistry, your entertainment industries, your publishing industries, and this could be anything. This could be live action VFX, like animation, 3D animation, 2D animation. It could be working in small advertising studios. A lot of these things are the same. Working in video game studios, small, big, epic size studios, working as a comic book artist, or an illustrator for the publishing industry in some capacity. Often illustrators are working for design agencies. As we sort of talked about, a lot of these are deadline-based industries. That's just kind of how they work. They're service-based industries, or there are just release windows and schedules and things where if something goes wrong, everyone kind of often has to crunch and work over time in order to meet it. And I think just I found it seems like most creative industries are the same. And I think that's a really important point. A lot of these are a little bit like that, unless the place that you're working for is extremely well-managed. The default for all of these things is that, again, as I said, if anything goes wrong, what it means is everyone in the studio, everyone in the company is kind of working a little bit over time in order to kind of meet some little deadline and sort of crunch for a little bit. It often is not meant to be, let's just work all day, all night for months and months, but that is often what happens on a lot of these kind of larger projects. So a lot of what your goal is to do and your job, pun not intended, maybe intended, is to find the right career, the right actual job within those companies that fit your proclivities. And this can be also the industry you choose, how far up that ladder you go, because often the more you get to the higher levels of AAA game development, the more you get to the higher levels of game development, the more you get to the higher levels of game development. So it's a lot of different things. So I think that's a little bit of a good point. of film and VFX work, the more that there are intense deadlines involved. And although there's plenty of money involved as well at that level, there's also just a need to get things done at a particular time. And you are just going to have to put in a lot more work at those kind of higher levels. That has been my experience anyway. So your job is to kind of figure out and get optionality so that you can figure out how to get the right type of job for you. But there certainly is a bit of a minefield here where like many of these options are going to be very sort of work hard based. And a lot of the people who get to those kind of higher levels working in those studios are really passionate about what they do. They're really dedicated. And certainly in the beginning of their careers, they're often just sort of doing whatever they're doing full time, right? Like they're either doing it full time at work, they're working extra hours, or they're working on their own projects after hours and just constantly developing their skills. Because that's kind of what... You tend to see at those high levels. Now, we'll touch a little bit and tease this out because I think there's certainly some reasonable reasons why these companies get into crunch and you can kind of look at that. And hopefully that'll make you understand that it's not this just kind of mystical evil thing happening. But certainly the video game industry in particular, and certainly like VFX and film are often heavily deadline based and they have massive, massive, massive, histories of like terrible crunch. But this really is specific to the industry, the people, the job, the specific studio. And the real challenge here is for you to understand that maybe in the beginning, you're not going to have much option, right? You're a junior artist. You're trying to figure out how to meet deadlines. You kind of just have to take a job, any job. That's often what we're trying to do. Like get a job, get any job. And there you're trying to figure out and build skills so you can get maybe more options and understand, you know, what's going on. And so, you can start a studio that's much more sort of chilled or whatever, see whether you can make it work. Again, I think what you find is there's a lot of good reasons of why this kind of crunch happens. It doesn't mean that it's good, but you can understand that it is just naturally going to be a part of how many of these sort of industries function. So again, we'll unpack this a little bit, but firstly, as a counterpoint, it's important to remember that that's not a waste of case. Like I certainly know a lot of people, and this is a real difference that I find in terms of culture, right? There are people who work hard and there are people who think that working hard is really good and that's kind of what you need to do. And I think that's a big difference. So, finding a place that really aligns with how you view this is good. For instance, when I started working in French comics, everyone kind of has this kind of pretty hard, you know, kind of hard, you know, kind of hard, you know, kind of hard, harsh view that I don't know where it has come from that, you know, people in France are kind of lazy, right? That everyone's just sitting around, everyone's having these kind of three-hour lunches, not much work is getting done. And I think that's often the view of a lot of these kind of like European, EU-style countries that have a lot of regulations about how much you can work and how much overtime you can work and all that kind of stuff versus your kind of USA, American, work hard, sort of crunch, everyone should be working sort of 60 hours a day. And again, those are gross generalizations. But what I kind of found is like, you know, working with people in France is most of the people were really into comics. They were really dedicated. They all worked really long hours and they put in as much effort as they possibly could. And everyone was working really, really hard. But I guess the attitude was like, yeah, but this is probably not good. And, you know, maybe we should sort of chill out and have a three-hour lunch and talk about something. A little bit deeper. And, you know, you have a glass of wine and it's just a slightly different attitude versus if you don't work 60 hours a week, you are a failure and a loser and sort of lesser. Right. So there's always different attitudes to kind of the same outcome. Right. And that's where I talk about company fit, cultural fit. And there's also studios and companies where like, yeah, their whole mandate is to make a really good place to work where it's like nine to five, there's no overtime. And they are taking on responsibility for that. And I think you're more likely to find that in sort of smaller independent studios, you know, again, small being, you know, between sort of like 20 and to like 70 people these days. Yeah. It's all about finding the right type of people there, but understand that everyone there is human and everyone has been, doesn't matter what level you're at. Everyone has been a junior artist. Everyone knows it's really tricky to meet deadlines. Everyone understands that it's going to be challenging to really find, a good fit in the beginning and also understand that, and this may be, again, a little bit controversial looking at more from the corporate side. Let me know in the comments, kind of how that sort of stuff sort of helps you think through it. But certainly you can see many of these large companies these days, like Microsoft, which, you know, has a market capitalization that's massive, right? You know, it's like a trillion dollar company, multi-trillion dollar company. And it just kind of is like firing studios. Easily, right? Like, let's let go of these 500 people, these thousand people, it's kind of doesn't matter, right? So that, yes, a lot of these places can get cut and someone makes a decision. And that means that everyone loses their job and you just liquidate everything. On the other hand, like good hiring practices are that you kind of want to find people, train them up, integrate them into your system and make that production workflow like a well-oiled machine. That's what I'm talking about. And I think that's a really good thing. And I think that's where you're going to get the productivity. That's where things are really going to work. And not everyone is going to understand that, but that is the nature of the beast when it comes to these creative production environments is that it takes a long time to really gel, to really make everything work. A lot of these new studios that start with like huge funding budgets don't really make it. And a lot of that could just be like, everything doesn't really fit. Everyone doesn't really gel and you have massive turnover and that kind of destroys everything. Like you don't want to just be hiring and firing junior artists all day. You don't want to just be hiring and firing junior artists all day. You don't want to just be hiring junior artists all day. You don't want to just be hiring junior artists all day. You really want to invest in them and then they become an asset to the company and you sort of integrate them. So you've got to understand that like good hiring practices and good companies are going to want to hire good people who are interested, enthusiastic, keen. But again, if you're hiring a junior artist, you know, maybe they're not a hundred percent production ready. That's fine. This is less and less the case. Early on, like when I got my first job, there wasn't a lot of understanding of what a video game industry was, right? And I think these days are gone where you're going to be hiring a junior artist and you're going to be hiring a junior artist and you're basically knew how to use Photoshop and I was interested in drawing. I don't think I was professional at either of those, but those skills meant I was probably one of the only people in the entirety of Australia who could work in video games as a 2D artist, because not many people could draw and knew how to use Photoshop, right? So they would just invest as much time and money in me as possible as a junior. Cause you know, that was kind of how you develop that talent. These days you, you kind of need to hit the ground running a lot, but just understand everyone there was a junior artist. Everyone knows it's challenging and people are going to sort of work with you. And it's not like sort of company corporate culture is to make sure that someone gets in and is producing professional work on day one. As a general rule, if you're hiring, this is at least my understanding is you're kind of meant to expect that no one's really going to, you're not really going to tell whether someone's a good hire until three months or six months at the very least has ended. It's going to take that long to integrate something, someone. And even if I joined a new company and I had to integrate my skills into their workflow, it's going to take six months to me for me to really figure out, okay, like, what are you doing? How do you do this? How can I help in the beginning? Like, yeah, I'd be able to do some stuff, but it's only after like a year of being there where you're really like, okay, I understand how this functions. I can now operate by myself. I can help out the people that I know, I understand the whole team. And then I'm actually going to be sort of worth the salary. That I'm sort of drawing. And again, that's just very rudimentary understanding of how a lot of that sort of what your actual role with inside a company is, but it's always good to remember that because as artists, we're often just imagining like I just draw art. I don't really know about that, but from my understanding, that is pretty common hiring practice. Again, not everyone is going to adhere to that, but I think that's a good sort of rule of thumb to use. So you're not always going to be expected to turn up and be a hundred percent professional. On day one, everyone knows where you are, but it is a matter of being able to put in a lot of effort and energy. Your focus has to be on those kinds of jobs. And I think again, in most cases, if you do that, you'll be fine. Another thing that's worth looking at here is to maybe go deeper on this idea of the hustle culture, the crunch culture, deadlines, all that stuff. Right? So a lot of those VFX industries and gaming industries have their, they have their roots in the industry. In passionate people working really hard, often while not getting paid that much money and really doing it because they want to do it. So this is how a lot of VFX was created in the first place is people just being really passionate about it. Not really worrying too much about the money kind of side of it, because like they were building these industries from the ground up and these jobs kind of didn't exist. And so they were kind of just really interested. And there is this background culture that I think pervades a lot of those, industries where it is about passion, this vision, working on a big project, being together and caring about the final result. And often that does mean that people work long hours because that's just what they're really interested in doing. And I think if you look at the early development of VFX, you're kind of like Star Wars films, you're Ray Harryhausen, stop motion animation. You're looking at a lot of people who are really passionate. And in the beginning, they're kind of like, you know, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. You know, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. And then in the beginning they're kind of like, oh, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. And then you're kind of just doing this stuff because they want to. Now, again, I know that's complicated, but I think it's just important to understand that's where the company cultures often come from. And you can also look at the video game industry. And if you read the books on the formation of id Software, right, which is a great example of this, and just the way that, you know, crunch was a big part of some of those development cycles for the games that they worked on, like Doom and Quake, where they kind of did crunch. And that became a little bit of the company culture and kind of what was required because the people who founded those companies were workaholics, right? Like they just worked all day, every day. They were just 100% totally fascinated with coding and making games and figuring this out. And it's kind of like, that is what built this, the whole concept of a 3D engine. Likewise, if you look at a great, a whole bunch of great animation, you know, like one of the great examples is I'm a huge fan of the game. I've been playing games for a long time. I've been a huge fan of the Ghibli Miyazaki films. But if you look at the amount of work that takes, the amount of crunch, the amount of being up late working on this stuff, it's like, you know, these people are fully dedicated to this task and everyone is kind of just expected to work and make this thing really good. So all these industries, I think how this background culture, which is that we're kind of doing this because we want, and we're doing this and everyone's sort of passionate about it. And if you're kind of like, not like that, then you're kind of like, you're not going to be able to do this. And so, you know, I think that's kind of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, maybe there's not sort of a place for you. Right? So I think that is important to understand that a lot of these cultures are built on the foundation of being totally obsessed with this and companies that get built up that have much larger budgets and maybe shouldn't be approaching it that way because it's a much larger company where that's sort of much more challenging. There's, it was still some of that expectation, right? And, and again, I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just saying that's kind of where we are. So there's a lot of horror stories there of big AAA games that you've probably sort of heard of where people are working for years. No one sees their family. No one sees the light of day. And, you know, often it seems good. Like a lot of these big studios, you kind of, they have catering companies within them. So you can kind of, you almost don't need to leave the building. So like, it's quite great. You're in there, you're working all day, every day, but you get great food, great everything, great benefits. Yeah. Again, you're kind of expected to work there all day, every day. There's a huge range of these things. And it's good to also look at the fact that it's not some massive mistake that a lot of these kind of crunch situations happen. You can see that it is just sort of part of how these industries function. I'm not saying it's good. Good management should be a part of that. But it's also a part of how these industries should ideally be able to make sure no crunch happens. It is really a failure if someone at some point miscalculating something, but as we sort of touched on briefly, you often do have these big battles between the funding, the investors, the publishers, and the developers, and the studios who are making things. And you often have hard release windows that can't be moved, but you can have maybe the people who outfunding it, make changes and say let well, okay, it needs to come out here, but then we're going to make you backtrack, or you can use the computer to edit it or something like that. Well, in a lot of cases, So, as I mentioned earlier,Те неmm��iale Because Jak Dancing is a big quantum, плюс in terms of bells who are using them repeatedly themselves. that changed something. And so you're just naturally stuck in the middle where in order to meet that milestone or in order to actually keep getting paid money based on the publisher or the investors giving you money, you kind of need to change what you're doing, but that's going to take more time, but they're not going to give you more money. There's so many things like this that happen where it sounds like that shouldn't be the case, but it's pretty cutthroat at the top of these things. And you're often battling against those scenarios where, yeah, some big company like Microsoft will just cut everyone because they don't care that this is not sort of working out. Okay, cut. So often I think in many cases, the crunch and these things are happening and it's natural for them to happen every now and then, because if you're a little bit behind, everyone needs to push to catch up. And if you don't catch up, often the wheels fall off everything, right? You don't ship the deadline and this can happen for service companies who are like VFX companies working on shots for movies. Again, you know, if you're, you're missing those, like that's it. You don't get hired again. It is really intense. And the higher up you go, the more you get paid again, the more you're expected to be able to do stuff on time. And that either means you need to be hyper productive or it means you need to work longer. So it's good to understand that this is probably just going to be part of many of these industries. And if you're not interested in that, you probably really have to specifically seek out or build a career or an industry where, you are going to be able to avoid that. And that is certainly possible. There's many studios that are way more sort of reasonable with that stuff. But also what you find is at the top of a lot of great development, a lot of creative work, there are often real sort of workaholics, real work hard cultures, and a culture of, you know, really putting most of your effort and energy into these creative projects for better or worse, which again, I, I'm not really, you know, I'm not really saying that's the right word, but I'm not saying that's the right word. I'm not saying there's a good answer there, but that is honestly sort of the truth. I guess if we step back and say, what does this mean? Like, like how can you kind of solve or get through a lot of these problems? It's one thing to be rational and step back and say, okay, we kind of maybe understand why a lot of these industries are built like this. We can understand the reasonable nature of there being crunch periods, or you're having to kind of hustle for a week to meet a deadline. And also why some of those nightmare scenarios exist, because we often come from cultures, within these creative industries where great things have been done by people crunching for six months or a year, or just working really hard. And so often you do get these kind of large, very inefficient, very kind of, you know, I would say unprofessional environments where kind of people think, well, you know, great things were created by crunch. So therefore, if we crunch, we're going to make great things. And the reality is like, that's not kind of how it works. Right. And there's a big difference between, you know, being in the young, early rock and roll days of id software, where you have like a couple of people and some, you know, high-tech computers, and they're just kind of literally building the future of interactive entertainment one step at a time. And these people are super dedicated and they own the company. And, you know, you just being sort of forced to crunch for three years because five layers of management have kind of like messed up the scheduling and people can't kind of really build a great team and they have to be really, really good at managing them. And so it's, it's like, you know, they're just like, you're, you know, you're going to be a really good coach. And they're, and you're going to be a really good coach and you're going to be a really good person. And so I think that's a good thing. And I think that's a good thing. And so I think that's a good thing. So again, it's good to understand the full scope of that, but ultimately what this means is that our job is to navigate this as best we can and to make sure that this is about skill building. So the thing that will often, I guess, solve a lot of these problems is us being able to meet our own deadlines and do what we say we're going to do. And what this really means is if you look at that triangle, like the basic kind of triangle where you think about you can have it cheap, good or on time. If you really do build your skills to make sure that you can create work in an efficient professional way and you can make good work, it means that ultimately you're going to have a lot more optionality to work in the type of companies you want and have a little bit more control over this. But again, I think that's just my best take on the reality of the situation. And I think it's complicated. I don't think there's a real good, like, here's the good thing, here's the bad thing. Like, this is right, this is wrong, this is how you'd fix it. There are intense deadlines involved in a lot of these industries. That's just kind of like part of it. And again, it doesn't matter how much we rationalize that. I think that's just our job to try and navigate that and find a place within it, a good professional environment. That kind of works. And that can be a real challenge in the beginning. You often have to really make sure that you get any job, a job, and you figure this out. You build your skills, right? And you spend a lot of time and energy and effort, again, spending your entire focus on this so that you can produce work professionally. You can do it on time. You can make it good. You can have fun while you're doing it. Because then again, a lot more options open up to you. The last third thing that I want to touch on here is how we actually do. That like, how do you actually build your skills and think about being professional, meeting deadlines and all of that? This is, I think, really the key to unlocking a lot of the best options here and also to make sure that you are having the most fun. So let's go through and look at if you are just starting out and you're thinking about, like, how do I make sure that I'm going to be the most production ready? Which will mean you have the most fun and the least stress when you do get a job. And. If you do keep working on these, that you have more options to work at more interesting studios and hopefully places that are going to better fit your particular desire for work life balance or whatever, whatever you want to do. So the first thing to understand is it takes time to become production ready. This doesn't happen just by itself. And a lot of schools and a lot of places, because the reality of these creative industries are quite intense. They kind of. Sort of sugarcoat it and they don't really teach students that this is a pretty intense job in terms of you needing to perform. And the reality is like all jobs you need to perform, like all jobs you need to do things on time. And it doesn't really matter how well you do it if you don't do it on time. Right. If you go to a restaurant and you're with a group of people and all their food comes out on time, but yours just isn't. It really doesn't matter how good it is. Right. If you're sort of sitting there while. Everyone else is doing something else. Right. Like the whole experience for you is ruined. Likewise, if you if no one's food comes out on time, it really doesn't matter how good it is. You know, if it's not on time and you've got somewhere else to go, then that whole experience is kind of ruined. Right. The deadlines are important. It doesn't matter what you're doing. There's always some point, some aspect when you're selling your time that you have to make that time count. And, you know, we could go on and list. A. A huge number of examples. But, you know, it's very rare that that's not going to be the case. It's very rare that you're not going to have to work a little bit more at some points and and others. But certainly the creative industries are much sort of more intense. But it takes time to build this up. And often for creative industries, especially if you're just going to a standard educational sort of school, something that's not going to teach you industry related skills. Often they're not going to tell you, they're not going to train you because it's it's too intense. Right. So one of the things that I know we tried to do and we were sort of building the concept design workshop, which is, again, like a entertainment design school in Australia that I kind of was there for when they were kind of like starting it was making sure that because every teacher was from industry. So we all kind of knew like what the deadlines would be like. We knew what was acceptable, what was not. And that's really what you're after here. It's just some real time. It's just some really simple understanding of what you're expected to do, how long you are going to have for a particular task and then to kind of practice actually creating in those environments. So I think one of the goals that I had there was to make sure that no student would get a job after they sort of graduate and be really surprised by what the industry was like. And because that's kind of what happened to me. I was like, I got my first job and I was like, oh, my God, what is this? Right. And I noticed a lot of people. I was like, I got my first job and I was like, oh, my God, what is this? Right. I was like, I got my first job and I was like, oh, my God, what is this? Right. And I noticed a lot of people were like that is they were kind of just messing around and often in university or college, everything's kind of a little bit more chill sometimes. So often these industry specific. Educational environments really try and make you do a lot of work to make you understand what these things are like. And I think that's something that, you know, we managed to do pretty well. And a lot of students who did graduate and get jobs are kind of like, oh, yeah, it was actually easier once I got my job than it was when I was studying because we just sort of put so much of that kind of normal life into it. And I think that's something that, you know, we managed to do pretty well. And it's not always time. Right. But it is just having to be creative under pressure that makes a difference. Right. It's having to every day create more designs every day, work on more art and understanding that's kind of probably what you're going to be doing in a job, ideally, if you're a professional artist. So I think. The first thing to understand there is just it takes time. So if you think about the iteration process for making a particular piece of art, so we use a couple of examples. But for me, when I was doing character design, I knew that I had a certain amount. And I kind of knew this because I asked people and it was like, well, if you can kind of create three designs, like a lineup of three or four designs, you can do a pretty good job of that in a day. Like, that's kind of what everyone's doing. And the really good artists are doing really good jobs of that. And the people who are just beginning are kind of like, maybe it's not as rendered as well as possible. Right. Maybe they're having to copy elements. Maybe again, they're not able to make everything as polished or rendered as possible. But the key for design is just interesting, different designs. So they're actually functional and useful for people being able to explore different options for characters and monsters and creatures or whatever. So I kind of knew that was the key. I kind of knew that was the key. I kind of knew that was the key. I kind of knew that was the key. I kind of knew that was the key. I kind of knew that was the key. And I just would practice trying to create a lineup of characters in a day. And I got better and better at it. Right. Better and better and better. And this is the same for anything. So a good way to kind of think about this is just to understand that if you're given an hour to do a character, you're going to have a particular production workflow. You're going to make sure that you do it in a series of steps and you kind of get better and better at knowing, like, okay, 45 minutes are up. This is kind of where I need to go. This is kind of where I need to be. Or, you know, by the time 10 minutes is up, this is kind of where I need to be. And that seems like it's a lot of pressure and like fuss and like intensity. But the reality is, like, once you get used to that, that just becomes like breathing and you just become really good at going, okay, in order to do this, I need to do a really quick sketch in like 10 minutes. Then I do this. Then I do this. Then I do this. And everyone has different processes for that. Again, some people might use a 3D base, a photo base. Everyone's got different speed speeds and ways for speeding it up. But, you know, you kind of get good at doing a half decent character sketch in an hour or doing a half decent character sketch in two hours. But the key thing to understand is that those are different, right? Doing a character sketch in an hour is very different to doing it in two hours or three hours. And the process and the amount of detail, the amount of reference, the amount of things you would do in order to maximize the end quality are very different. And you would need to practice them. You need to constantly repeat. You need to keep that to get a feel for, okay, I've got three hours to do this. That means I should really slow down a bit at the beginning, right? Make sure I give myself half an hour or 40 minutes. I do a really good drawing. Actually, let's give me 20 minutes to go and find some references, find really good costume references for these things. So that means maybe, you know, actually, if I'm doing it for three hours, maybe I'll do a few little sketches, think about the references I need. I'll go get those references. I'll do a really good drawing, you know? So it's often like understanding what are the steps you can add. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would really maximize that. And you kind of just develop a, I guess, a knowledge. This is the case for me. I'd be keen to know what other people who've worked professionally experience of this. But you kind of just develop a catalog of these ideas in your head for, okay, I've got a day to do an illustration that's painted of a landscape with some characters in it. Like, how do I do that? I've got three days to do that. Okay. How does that change what I do? How can I get three? three days worth of extra quality out of it. I got to do 20 thumbnail sketches in a day. I got to do 100 thumbnail sketches in a day. Like, oh, I've got to refine the armor sets for a series of monsters that I created. How long does that take? How long have I got for that? How long can I do those things? And so you kind of have all these different sort of tasks that you're likely to do as a character designer or a concept artist. And you have a really good idea after practicing them hundreds and hundreds of times how long that's going to take. But it takes time to do that. It takes time to really figure out all those different bits and pieces. And also where you're going to find the real speed is that you have some of that visual library in your mind, that drawing the anatomy is very easy, that you are very well versed in perspective and construction. And you're putting together. There are a lot of those pieces very easily or kind of without having to look for reference as much because you've kind of done it before. Or you have a pre-existing reference sheet. So there's so many of these different things where it just takes time, right? It takes time to figure this out. And this idea of meeting different timeframes, though, I think should be viewed as something that's part of your core tool set. This is why I put a lot of effort into the different educational stuff that I do, talking about developing a simple. Reliable process, because a simple reliable process is something that allows you to do this. It allows you to step through these things and how this battle tested in industry style way of making art. And I think that can be very intimidating for people in the beginning because it feels analytical. It feels like you are kind of not being able to be creative with that process. But the reality is you need to think all the time about what the output is for your work. As a concept artist. I need to come up with a really interesting set of ideas or a really interesting variation on a particular idea or to create production ready concept art that's going to be able to be modeled. And that's the output there. My creativity needs to go into making that the best that it is. It's not really about me painting or doing that. Those are the things, the competencies that I kind of need to build. But the functionality of my art is really about me expressing the creativity there. And so. I'm going to build these fairly systemized ways of working that allow you to really play and experiment with the key thing that you're actually doing, which is like designing or doing whatever. Again, that would be a completely different. And this is the key that we'll sort of touch on is you have a completely different catalog of things and view of making art. If you do that, like concept art versus if you do finished book illustration, and this should be obvious. But what I kind of found is that talking to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like artists who are just starting out is that this is not obvious and they kind of like, oh, I'm going to kind of do illustration or concept art. And most of the time I'm just like, stop right there. That is a different animal. It's a different. You will become a different person if you become a finished illustrator or finished concept artist. And again, there's people who do both, right? But again, they're few and far between and it's maybe not actually even what you want. you want to do as a career, right? It's hard for people to know what you do. But a lot of people kind of are just like, oh, I kind of want to do this and this, because it looks like an illustrator and a concept artist are kind of doing similar things. But that's not the case. There's a completely different output, different process, different series of things they're working on. So a professional book illustrator or cover illustrator or illustrator in general is going to really think about understanding the brief, exactly what this person is wanting to get, where does the cover logo go, and what does this need to feel like, because they're only doing one. So we're not looking to ideate and create a whole bunch of random ideas. You're really looking for like a very specific output. And if you kind of don't hit it, you know you're going to get art directed. So you're going to do maybe a three. You're going to do much more exploration in thumbnail form. You're really going to create three relatively polished thumbnails that they can pick from. You're going to know how long it takes to do that. And then you're going to know how long it takes to do all the other steps. And that's a completely different life experience, right, of what you spend your time doing and what you sort of build up to. So I think it's important to understand that firstly, this takes time to become production ready and practice is what creates the speed. So the first few times you create a really polished illustration that could be used as a book cover, it's going to take you ages. But as you get better at it, you develop a more refined experience. And that's what I'm going to talk about in a minute. But the second thing is that you can build these competencies. You can build these competencies. You can build these competencies. You can build these competencies. You know how long it takes to do thumbnails. You can estimate the time because you've done it 100 times and the time gets faster and faster as you practice it. Super obvious stuff, right? But the trick is that it's really challenging to build these competencies. It takes a long time for you to figure out and have a network of like, okay, what's my one hour character design? What's my two hour character design? How do I polish a character design? And having a catalog of times for that, that you can kind of run through and figure out how to do that. And then you can reliably sort of work with. So this is why, again, the last thing of this that I think we'll sort of touch on is the industry standards really matter. And they're worth paying very close attention to early on. And it's worthwhile really thinking about which of these industries you actually want to get into and pay close attention and ask people who are doing these jobs, like, how long did this take you? Like, exactly. And the reason that often people won't ask, won't answer that question very effectively is because the answer is, the question is vague. People are often saying like, hey, how long does it take you to do a cover? No, no. Ask that. How long did it take you to do this cover? What did you do with this one? Because every cover is different. Some of them cost more. Some of them are for different clients. Sometimes you get more time. Sometimes you get less time. Sometimes the artist knows like, hey, this is going to take me longer, but it's worth it because I'm going to develop this. I'm going to make it really good. I'm going to put it in my portfolio. This other one, I'm less interested in it. I'm just going to get it done. I'm going to get paid. I'm going to get out of there. There's so many different variables. Really talk about like, you know, how maybe either, how long should I be trying to work towards creating a finished illustration in this particular industry based on what you know, or like, how long did this particular piece take, right? If you can sort of get that information, but try and get as close as you can to whatever industry you're in, what you're likely to need to do and how long it's going to likely to take. I know that seems super vague, but that is the golden information. You need, because once you do that, you can start practicing. Okay. And if you can't like, okay, step back, I'd say here's a really sort of good rule of thumb is to just think about practicing different timescales. And as I said, with characters, think about, okay, let's make sure if you're going into concept art as a character designer, you should have a really good one hour character sketch. Like what could you do in an hour? Can you really optimize that and repeat that and do it a hundred times, you know, a hundred, a hundred hours really get good at this. So, you know, okay, five minutes are up. This is where I should be 10 minutes are up. This is where I should be. And what you'll see is concept artists do this with speed painting, with exercises that they're often saying, like, I've got an hour to do a painting. What can I do? And they keep, they keep spinning that wheel until they get really good at it. And then maybe do a two hour or three hour. Like what could you do in three hours for a character design? Could, and what if you had a whole day to do a single character design? Could you do three hours for a character design? Could you do a whole day to do a single character design? Could you do three in a lineup in a day? If so, how much, right? Like, can you do a page of thumbnail sketches in a day? How long do these things take you? Just get used to it. Cause you, you start to get comfortable with that particular time and with that particular schedule. And I think that will be something that will serve you really well and make you feel much more confident that you can work in those production environments. So the reason that this is important is like, often people are worried, like, Hey, I might get a job or I might, someone might say, Hey, you can, do you want to illustrate this thing or do this thing? And maybe I'm going to do it and I'm going to blow the deadline and everything's going to end. Most of the time, there are actually tests involved. If this is important, because if someone's employing you to do this and it's actually a situation where you could totally destroy everything, there's going to be tests. You often get a concept art test that you maybe get paid for. Maybe you don't either way. They're going to see like, what can you do in a day? Like, you know, here's a brief, like boom, go. When I did the seven pirates book, the first French book I did, this was the same. I knew I had a test page and that test page was like, Hey, here's Monday morning. I don't think it was actually Monday morning, but like, here's the script and everything I need to complete the page on Monday morning, right? Like next Monday morning, we want the finished page. And, you know, by this time we want you to send us the lines and here we want you to send us the color and, you know, show us along the way and we'll give you feedback. And this is just simulating what you'd actually have to do. So it's often that you will get sort of tested on this and this information actually shouldn't be that hard to find. I think the problem is often in the beginning, everyone's like, well, maybe it'd be a comic book artist, maybe it'd be an illustrator. Maybe I'd be a, again, maybe it'd be a concept artist in film or like video games. It's like, no, no, pump the brakes. Those are different industries, different concept art in VFX, different concept art in live action to video games, mobile games would be different. Social games would be different. It's completely different. Timeline's completely different. What's expected of you is completely different. How much you use photos, 3D, completely different, totally different process you're using, totally different functionality. So pay really close attention to the actual job you want to get, figure out what those times are, or like just estimate some good ones so that you feel like, again, hey, if you want to be a character designer in video games, someone came along and was like, can you do me a character in an hour? You're like, yeah, I can. And you kind of know how to do that. It's not a huge stress. You know, hey, like what's the best character you can do in a day? Just have a go at that. That'll sort of get you started. And once you have a feel for that, then you can maybe look at other people's designs and be like, hey, like how long did this take? Again, you probably have to ask them in a private email, you know, because again, no one necessarily wants to kind of tell you exactly how long everything took. So anyway, those are a couple of ideas that, you know, whether that kind of helps. Again, my goal here with this video is not to try and sugarcoat everything, but also not to be doom and deadlines and expectations just to kind of talk through some of the issues and give you some practical advice with kind of what you can do. So, yeah, let me know what this has been helpful. Before we bounce out of here, though, let's do a couple of quick takeaways. If we start with an analytical point of view, I think it could be said that speed and being able to meet production deadlines because they kind of go together is a learnable skill. So it's something that you just need to practice, but you do need to be very specific about it. There's no such thing as like a fast artist. There's someone who could be a fast artist who is fast at doing really polished book covers, and that may be two weeks or a week. And they're just like obscenely fast versus that same art taking a month. There are also concept artists who can just smash out some painting that looks amazing or draw some character. And it's like that took you half an hour. How is that even possible? These are all skills that you build and everyone has had to build them. Since the very early days, what you're seeing often when you see people able to produce really high quality work in really short amounts of time is like these people have been doing this for decades, and they've often put a lot of effort into practicing those little steps and systems. The way I like to codify this is that what we want is the simple, reliable process. This is often what a professional artist will kind of end up with is a pretty systemized way of making things. You can change this over time, but if you just kind of start with a really simple, easy way of making art, don't make it too complicated. And again, focus on iterating. If you can make art a little bit quicker, it allows you to make more art, right? It's kind of win-win. If you kind of smooth out all those edges, it allows you to focus on the ideas, the concepts, the feeling, the emotion, the functionality, the design language. It allows you to focus on the actual stuff that matters. So I think getting faster, more efficient with your process, being able to estimate deadlines is not something that you can do in a day. It's not something that you can do in a day. It's not something that's just going to kind of help you in a professional sense. I think if you want to do a personal project, if you're wanting to create art as a hobby, it's all the same thing, right? This means you're going to be able to create your personal projects, complete them, make more work, get better, right? One of the things that becomes really fun is if you do get really good at understanding how long it's going to take you to make something, it's not just that you work professionally that way, but you know when it's a personal piece you're working on, when it's going to end. And that's just so much better for motivation. If you kind of know where you are in the process, step by step, it means you can say, hey, I've got an hour. Oh, I could do a cool character design in that amount of time. Well, I've got three hours. This is what I could do. And making art becomes, from my experience anyway, let me know where this tracks for you in the comments. But for me, art becomes so much more fun when I know I'm going to be able to finish something, call it done. And I have like a really good sort of process for that. So again, I think that it's important to understand that the speed is really the thing that connects a lot of that up. It's the thing that will allow you to kind of get your foot in the door a lot better, where maybe the work you're creating is not that good, but you're enthusiastic, you're fast, you're producing a lot, you're getting it done on time, you're meeting deadlines. People are going to be willing to give you a shot, right? Because they can see that you're keen. I've personally found, I think a lot of jobs I got were just, they were just because of, you know, me being able to kind of enthusiasm and kind of do a whole bunch of stuff. And on the higher end, this means that you're probably going to be able to charge a lot more for your work. If you can do really high quality work and you can do it really quickly, that's where people are going to pay you a lot because that's quite rare. So these are things that doesn't matter where you're at or what your aspirations are. I think trying to be able to meet deadlines, create artwork, not necessarily fast, but in a way that kind of fits whatever industry. That you are interested in. If we want to look at this from a really simple point of view, we could say that speed is craft and you should probably spend just as much time thinking about and working within time constraints as you do kind of working on other areas of your craft. Because as we talked about, this is not just something that will help you to get hired. It's also something that will help you to create more art. And the more art you make, the better you get. It is in some ways a virtuous cycle. One of that matters really though, unless you can get this happening. And I know a lot of people early on are immensely frustrated with the concept of deadlines. And this seems like sort of first world problems, right? Like being able to paint a painting in like one hour versus two hours. What about just being able to paint a painting at all? Like it's often really challenging to even make any art and let alone know how long it's going to take. But I think it is just important to understand that this is a trainable skill. And the other thing that's often frustrating is knowing like, oh, I'm going to make this. I'm going to make this. I'm going to make this. I'm going to make this. But what if I, what if this happens? Or what if that happens? Or like, what if, what if this just takes me a bit longer? So a good place to start, I think, is understanding what in your particular industry that you're really interested in, what your goals are, what are the standard times and try and figure those out and then practice work within those times. So we think about, again, going back to character design as an example, if you can get really good at creating a nice lineup of three characters in one day, a giant page full of thumbnail sketches with a couple you pick out and sort of refine a little bit more, you do that in a day, get really good at doing a nice character sketch in an hour, a nice character sketch in like three hours. Like that's going to give you a really good place to start. Right. And maybe then, you know, like, okay, the other thing that's really good to know is like, how, how long does it take you to develop a really finished turnaround or sort of model sheet? Right. And again, there's so many different ways you can do that these days. You can kind of mock that thing. You can mock that thing. You can mock that thing. You can mock that thing. You can up in 3D and use that to create your turnaround. You can just draw the turnaround. Again, doesn't matter how you do it, figure out how long that takes you. And often for me, again, it would kind of take me three days to a week at least to kind of do like a really nice kind of model sheet where I kind of had to draw out the front, back, side views, do some call outs, you know, like draw the weapon and all that kind of stuff. Like it takes ages to do that. You know, I could do a character sketch in an hour, but doing a model sheet was like, for me, that was like a week. Right. Um, and I know like, that's not again, some, some people in some industries do it in way less, but you know, getting a couple of weeks to do a really nice model sheet is not completely unheard of. Again, let me know what your experience is in the comments down below. So if you kind of have a couple of core pillars there, that's all you need, because if people know like, Hey, you can be productive, like you can meet a deadline when you say like, Oh, okay, actually, you know what? I might need a little bit more time for that. That's fine. Because they know that this is just you learning. It's not just a matter of us being completely all over the place. And we've got no idea what's going on. It's like, if you can kind of get some of these timeframes good and say like, okay, but this thing, this brief you're giving me as a little bit more, like, I'm not quite sure how long it's going to take. I might need a little bit more time. That's what most people are going to be fine. They're going to be like, okay, yeah, no worries. Like I get it. You know, this is something new for you or you're not quite sure about the time or whatever. Uh, yeah. You know, that in many cases, that'll be fine. In some cases, you know, you're going to be fine. In some cases, if there's an actual deadline involved, it doesn't matter, right? Like you're, you're totally okay. But also often frequently part of, again, so much of this is different depending on whether you're working for an outsourcing agency versus if you're in house full-time versus if you are kind of working as a freelancer. But often if you're a freelancer, you know, I will just often make sure that I get the brief early on. I'm like, okay, send me the brief like right now. Yes, I'll do this job. Yes, I'll start on Monday or Tuesday, or I'll kind of say like, Hey, I'm booked out for this week or this month. Um, I'll be able to start this day. Like, is that okay? I can do it from this day. And this is kind of how long it will take me that that should give us enough time. They're like, okay. But I'm like, but send me the brief now. And I'll just think about it and look at it, build my reference library. So it's again, if you're working in house, that may not be the case, but this is often a situation where your project looks like it's doing well or not. So you can take that as a warning. You can get fair warning. Like, Hey, you know, I've got a couple of projects coming up for you. It involves drawing horses. Uh, do you want to take this on? It's like, okay, cool. I'm going to learn how to draw horses on my own time. And then when that sort of job rolls around, I'm going to be able to do it. So there's often flexibility. As long as you come with a core competency of like, okay, I can roughly meet these industry expectations, at least with a couple of things, when someone throws you a curve ball and you're like, oh, that's going to take me 10 These are often skills and competencies. If you're working for yourself as a freelancer, you have to build up. Or if you do want to get that next level of work inside a studio, which is often the thing people often imagine, I got my foot in the door, I got my job in a studio, like my life is now complete. That is not the case. It never stops that you're trying to get more and more interesting jobs within a studio. And the way you often do that is to take on those more challenging things. And often that may mean you building up your competency, your skills in your own time or at the end of the workday or whatever. So anyway, it's not often this kind of hardcore, okay, it's Monday morning and you get your brief and you kind of have to start. You often know about a job weeks in advance. You can often get advance notice. And I'd say in most cases, if I'm working sort of full time somewhere, like jobs that are going to happen in a couple of months or a couple of weeks internally, the people who are giving me those things, they know about it way ahead of time. They got this stuff scheduled out and they're like trying to figure out who's going to do it. So they can kind of say like, hey, I've got a job coming up. Do you want to try and do this? You know, you probably know about it really far ahead. Again, not every studio is going to be like that. Some people are just going to be like, boom, here's Monday morning. This is what you got to do today. But in most cases, this is super reasonable. People are going to be able to tell you what's coming up. You're going to be able to work things out, practice a little bit, sort of figure it out. And then kind of, you know, if you notice that you're not going to be able to meet this deadline, you're going to be able to say, hey, I'm in trouble. You know, can you help me out? Whatever. There's always options. There's always negotiation. This is just rooms full of people. They don't really care as long as the work gets done and it's done right. So, again, there's some situations where like, look, this is. The publishing deadline, it needs to be done at this date. You cannot move this date. Do not move this date. And what I've seen often, you know, working on outsourcing agencies and things is that, you know, like if someone blows their thumbnail sketch phase, like that's it. You know, like you don't get enough chance. It's like, OK, this person is not really meeting the deadline. Yeah. You know, that's OK. So often, you know, you get fair notice. You'll get fair warning. You get plenty of opportunity. You'll be able to negotiate and say, OK, let me get this sorted. And yeah, there's a lot of flexibility there. What you need to do is just build a baseline set of core competencies that you can kind of build on, because once you know you can do a character design in one hour, you probably have a decent idea what you could do in two hours, even though it'd be very different. And you can kind of build out and build different skills and competencies from there. So figure out exactly what industry you want to go into. Don't be vague on this. I know this can be challenging, but if you're looking at really building a folio, getting that job. It's important to focus and figure out what you're expected to do in certain time frames. You only need a couple of these and just practice those until you feel as if you are somewhat confident doing stuff within those time frames. If we look at this from a spiritual or philosophical point of view, if we kind of zoom out a little bit again, I think this is really important to understand is that on the one hand, a lot of these industries, a lot of this work. A lot of this whole thing where we have careers, we get paid a lot of these big companies, these big projects. There is just an inherent sort of crunchy overwork nature to a lot of these industries that are creatively fueled. And that just kind of sucks. That is just kind of how it is. The other thing to think of, though, is that I think deadlines and schedules can enhance creativity in many ways, and they're often the only reason that we actually do it. And that's the only reason that we actually do it. And that's the only reason that we actually do it. And that's the only reason that we actually make things. And a lot of these big projects that we do work on kind of need you to really immerse yourself at some point and to really put yourself into the project in order to create great things. Often when we look at great animations, great films, great books, great art, there is a certain degree to where someone has really gone deep and immersed themselves in that process, in that project. And there is a degree to where that means they. And there is a degree to where that means they are encountering creative tension and creative stress and challenges along the way. And even if you're just a novelist sort of writing away and maybe you've even made it where you don't have to make money anymore. Maybe you're one of these like Dan Brown, you're kind of J.K. Rowling. You're still working on that latest book. I think the deadlines, the pressure that people need to actually produce things and the pressure, the creative tension, it's just part of the work. Right? It's often part of making things interesting. We're often after dramatic tension in the work that we create, in the work that we consume. And that's often honestly what makes it interesting. And so there's a lot of different nuances to this as we sort of discussed. But I think fundamentally being able to produce work in a set period of time and understanding deadlines and how they relate to your creative practice is really critical. Because it's the thing that will allow you to very easily build your creative process. Right? Build a career if you kind of master this. And also the thing that even if you are an auto solo maverick artist, it's the thing that's going to allow you to actually put a line in the sand and say like, this is what I'm going to finish this thing. And it's often that line in the sand that we need in order to make creative decisions. In order to really kick everything into high gear and start thinking at the speed and veracity and creativity that we actually need to make good decisions. And I think that what you find is like a lot of really high end creative people have some aspect of this to their life where, yeah, like sometimes they're sitting around and we're chilling out and then the deadline happens and you kind of got to really think about it. And you need that immersion to kind of get the work done. For better or worse, right? Like not everything is like this. But the other thing is if you really manage the scheduling, like so you could sort of look at like that as being the creative maverick stage. Right? Like the maverick style deadlines are enhancing your creativity and we're always kind of in a little bit of chaos and tension and stress and that's kind of what feeds us. On the other hand, the thing that would allow you to escape that, right? So, one of my sort of dreams and the thing that I always like the mystique of and the romance of is, again, working as a comic book artist or one of these things where like you kind of have a very clear idea of what you need to do day to day. You have a set number of pages you need to complete per week, per day. Per year. And if you kind of just manage that really nicely, the secret to making that a win for you is being able to manage the deadlines in a really analytical way. And make sure that you are just chill. You know what needs to be done. One step after another, a systemized thing. Like the only way to kind of really be productive, professional, and relaxed is to have a very tightly controlled, structured, systemized way of making things. So, this idea that I guess there is some magical thing where like you can just be a sort of airy fairy kind of artist and sort of follow your whim and someone's going to pay you for that. There is no thing like that. There's never been anything like that. Even your fine art gallery artists who spend all day, you know, engaging in recreational drug use and have these kind of chaotic lives. And it feels as if they're just kind of doing whatever they want. Yeah, they all had to hustle and smash some deadline to meet some gallery show that they committed to. So, they could make some money to kind of fuel all of that recreation. There's no way to escape this, right? So, that's the important thing to understand is like part of being a professional artist and producing a lot of work and being prolific is like mastering the deadlines, the schedules. And this will allow you to either work in those high performance environments. Or allow you to just get really good at it. Or allow you to just get really good and efficient at producing art so that you can fit into a professional environment and kind of chill a little bit. Because you know you can do it fast enough. Anyway, that's all we got time for in this particular episode. Let me know whether this helped you think through this topic. People often ask me about the idea of deadlines or am I going to make it in this industry? Like am I cut out for this? You know, like, I don't know. I don't think I'm kind of able to deal with that kind of pressure and intensity. And I think this is just one of those things where honestly when I try and sort of answer those questions, like I think it is really complicated. I don't think there's a lot of great like, oh, here's the simple easy answer to that. There is a huge dark side to deadlines and crunch and overwork and workaholic. And there's also this other side as I talked about where often great things happen from that. And a lot of the great artworks that I've enjoyed have been created by people going through crunch, overworking. And I think also the great advances in technology and entertainment have often been created by people who are hyper-focused to a workaholics who just crunched for months at a time in order to make that happen. But it is terrible for your work-life balance. And if you have family responsibility, this can be devastating. And it often is devastating for those people. And it's devastating for those people who created that amazing work. I just don't think there's a really great answer here. A lot of it is just understanding this is something you're going to have to navigate as a creative professional. Because we're always balancing the types of industries we're in, our need to create work that we're interested in, that we're engaged in, and also to balance the work-life that we have. And I don't think our culture has really found a good fit for this. So, I think it's important to understand that. So, this is just something you are going to have to sort of navigate and think through. To me, again, as I said, the real key to all of this, the thing that gives you the most optionality, is to work on that speed and the efficiency. Although it may seem as if it's a little bit systematic and antithetical to being creative and having freedom. It is often the thing that actually will allow you to get the work done. So, then kind of chill out and look at the clouds and smell the roses and think about things a little bit. If you're always under deadline pressure because you haven't got your art sorted or you're kind of not really 100% professional with your process, you're not quite able to meet those deadlines. Yeah, it means you are going to be more enmeshed in that whole process. And sort of crunching and having to deal with the ramifications of being late and stuff. So, it is often systemizing that will allow you to have more freedom, kind of ironically, which is sort of interesting. Yeah, but other than that, let me know what you thought in the comments. And I'll see you in the next one.