#187 - Never Worry About People Coming Up With The Same Idea
Or stealing your idea, for that matter.
Practice Drawing This 3D Model. Model courtesy of thebasemesh,com .
used to participate in short screenwriting contests. Each month, there would be a prompt, and several dozen people would write a five-page script and enter it into the contest. Each month, I worried that someone else might write a similar script.
It never happened.
In all the monthly contests, which went on for years, there were never two scripts remotely alike.
They all started from the same prompt and ended up somewhere radically different.
If you looked for the #vss365 hashtag on Twitter (when it still existed), there was a new prompt each day: one word you had to use in a short story. #vss365 stands for Very Short Story, 365 days a year.
No two short stories were even remotely alike. And that was with dozens, if not hundreds, of people, participating.
You can see it in the yearly Inktober entries, too.
During Inktober, there is a one-word prompt for each day, and you are supposed to make a pen and ink drawing based on that prompt.
All the thousands of pieces made based on that one prompt are very different.
Each artist has their style, a mood they want to convey, a thing they want to say, or a thing they want to draw. They have different ideas, use other references, and have different art touchpoints.
The chance that another artist will make the same thing based on the same idea is tiny.
This Week
My newsletters are as much notes to myself as anything, meaning I need to remind myself of these things.
I was contemplating reinvigorating my lingering podcast, but it soon became overwhelming.
I had to remind myself of my advice given in #186 - The Counter-Intuitive Way To Figure Out Which Creative Direction You Should Take. I looked at an activity—podcast making—and saw if I had natural (or unfair) advantages. I have not. The opposite.
There is noise outside, so I can’t record at any moment of the day, and I don’t have a soundproofed space. I would have to write scripts (instead of drawing), record audio (instead of drawing), edit audio (instead of drawing), et cetera. You get the idea.
The reason for doing podcasts would be to have something to share on YouTube so people can find Practice Drawing This.
Initially, I thought I could do an audio version of newsletter articles like this one so you could listen while drawing instead of reading, but those podcast videos wouldn’t do well on YouTube, and that would be the point.
Most people who have successful YouTube channels thoroughly enjoy making videos, and I want to draw.
Live sessions where you draw with me and we chat could work. To be continued.
Meanwhile, I get energy from drawing and working on Practice Drawing This, doing things like adding images to the flash cards.
Props
New Props were added to the flashcards. See the image above.
The leap between simple forms and normal, complex subjects like humans was steep. Then, I was walking around my home and noticed I had many things that had cylindrical bases or were easy to approximate using a box and a cylinder. I decided to add a few images to the props section of the flashcards.
I keep adding new images at the beginning of the flashcard set. The start needs to be as easy to get into as possible, and I keep finding great images that would go well at the top of the flashcard deck.
You can find the new images between the other props here.
I plan to make many demonstrations using these simple props and create a primer, a guide on how to construct things from simplified forms so that you can start to draw them from imagination.
3D Models
I created a 3D model of the chess pawn built from simplified forms. Starting with these simplified forms makes it much easier to draw the pawn from any orientation.
You can find the 3D model of the simplified form of the chess pawn here , and the chess pawn as a flashcard here, in case you want to try your hand at it.
I did the same for the camera:
You can find the 3D model of the simplified form of the camera here , and a camera as a flashcard here, in case you want to try your hand at this one.
For clarity, there is a demo and examples here on constructing the chess pawn manually.
Someone mentioned that the current cylinder model wasn’t very suited to the puzzle mode because it showed the box and construction lines in puzzle mode. I made a separate cylinder model for that. You can find it here. If you click on the puzzle icon, you only see the cylinder’s shape, and you can try to figure out the contour lines from that.
A model of a simple circle with useful construction lines was added, too. You can try it here.
