I plan to post twice a week on YouTube for a while to see how it goes. I will go live on Sunday at 17:00 CET, which is 11:00 New York time. The streams will be around an hour, I think.
Then, each Thursday, I plan to post a short new video with a pen-drawing exercise that is fun, improves your skills, and has a higher chance of yielding nice results because it requires less accuracy.
I am not sure yet if I can keep up that schedule. Hence, as I ease in to it, I want to create a buffer of five or six pen drawing exercise videos so that I can at least post one video a week: if I don’t make it to the Sunday live session, I can instead post a pen drawing exercise video, and if I have six or more pen drawing exercise videso buffered, I will post one on Thursday. That way, I’ll also have enough videos to post at least once a week, while the aspiration is to post twice.
That’s the plan.
For this live stream, I decided to answer a question several people had asked on our Discord.
Several people asked on Discord which fundamentals they should practice first. They were overwhelmed by all the fundamentals. So where to start?
If you’re not sure, two other YouTubers, who you may know, also happened to come out with videos on this same subject, and they are saying the same thing I am saying, just in their own words, as I did. Their videos are definitely worth a listen, too.
Here, Steven Zapata says you need to be on projects; you can’t just study.
And here, Janos Gerasch says the same thing, but again in his own words.
And here, Can I Learn To Draw ? says the same thing in his own words.
And here, Steven Zapata has an entire video on it. Now you have three people saying this to you! If you find yourself only practicing, this is something you should honestly think about.
Usually, I add the transcript of the podcast I share here, basically sharing the actual script I read from. But in this case, there was no preliminary script, and the text would be too long anyway, and you should be drawing, not reading.
This podcast episode, which is the audio-only part of a YouTube live stream, answers that question.
This live stream is me actually following my own advice. I’m diving in and building, identifying what doesn’t work, and thinking of ways to improve, rather than practicing endlessly first.
I worried about the sound quality, but it turned out okay. Noise reduction removed the hissing from my laptop fan.
I reused a video recording, but I can also draw during a live stream, as noise reduction will remove the hissing of the studio light fan.
And then there was the length. Could I fill one hour with my jabbing?
I usually write a script, and if you write it out word by word and just read out what the script dictates, I find it hard to go over fifteen minutes.
I tried a different approach: I wrote down talking points. The weird thing about that is that I go off tangents and start adding afterthoughts, and I naturally fill the space! I started by talking slowly, but you can hear that when I get excited, I start to talk faster.
Give it a listen! And draw while listening to it!
Yours sincerely,
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