ARTISTS: Learn this FIRST

Hey Past-me,

I was a terrible student.

I’d wing it, mostly, but still get good grades. So I kept up with that strategy. But I never really felt like I “knew” what I was doing.

It wasn’t until I landed my first gig that I started learning what I really needed to learn to get up to speed.

I wanted to do a good job, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know and had no process to learn those things quickly. Trust me, I had so many assignments where it was the first time I’d ever made anything like it. Having a process to learn fast reduces stress 1000%.

I was really lucky to just get in the door and convince someone to give me a shot. The hard part is proving you deserve to be in the room.

So, if there was only one letter I could send you to help prepare yourself for the future…it’s probably this one.

In the box:

1. Spotlight on “Meta-learning”

2. Tips to Learn Anything Quickly

3. A-ha! Quote on Change

4. Strategy for Effective Practice

5. Hits of the Week: Ultra-awesomeness, Scale of Art, Epic Crossovers

Spotlight on “Meta-learning”

We’re often taught what to learn but not necessarily how to learn.

Meta-learning is the most important skill, and for some reason, it isn’t one of the first things you’re taught in school (or ever). Is it on purpose? Is it by design? Who knows? Maybe… But once I discovered it, it felt like I had a cheat code to life itself.

I just wish I had learned it sooner.

When you get the hang of it, you’ll start to see these benefits:

• Benefit 1: Efficiency — By understanding how you learn best, you can streamline your educational endeavors, absorbing more with less effort in less time.

• Benefit 2: Retention —Techniques that fit our physiology and our unique learning styles lead to better knowledge retention, meaning less time spent relearning the same concepts.

  Benefit 3: Adaptability — Learning how to learn makes you more adaptable to new technologies, techniques, and shifts not just in the art world, but EVERY PART OF YOUR LIFE.

Don’t be fooled though; it’s easy to make a mess of it too:

• Mistake 1: Overcommitment — Diving into too many resources at once can overwhelm and confuse, leading to burnout rather than progress.

  Mistake 2: Misaligned Methods — Not all learning strategies are created equal, and relying on a technique that doesn't suit your style or compute just yet, can impede learning.

  Mistake 3: Fear of Failure — Viewing mistakes as failures rather than learning opportunities can slow growth and innovation.

So, how do you navigate these waters and start to learn effectively?

Tips to Learn Anything Effectively:

1. Build out your knowledge trees

Whenever you’re learning something, start with a first-principles foundation.

1+1=2. Circles, triangles, squares. Light and shadow. Lines and edges. Color, temperature, hues, values. Story. The beginning, the middle, and the end.

Start simple. Start from the very beginning.

Broad concepts are then followed by specific techniques and skills. This structure helps you organize your learning and see how everything connects.

The more you note how your knowledge is compounding, the clearer it is to identify gaps.

2. Focus, relax, and sleep well 

The brain needs time to process and absorb new information.

Distractions stop us from going deep, and never stopping causes us to burn out.

I was a dummy and used to think, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

Allowing your brain to rest is like saving your game progress or saving that art piece you’ve been working on for the last two hours and the program you’re using doesn’t have autosave.

Quality rest and a clear, focused mindset enhance this whole learning process.

You have to rest on purpose, and you have to get enough of it, or that save file might get corrupted and become worthless. 😨

3. Imitate, innovate, and integrate

Begin by imitating the styles and techniques you admire.

Over time, change things up. Add your flavor, your story, your own unique message. Innovate on these foundations and integrate them into your unique style and point of view.

By using this iterative technique, you’ll compound your knowledge and be able to make a multitude of connections that can enhance your learning across every subject you come across.

4. Follow the fun

Turn learning into your hobby.

Maybe there’s a project you want to make, something that’s not yet out in the world that you desperately want to see, but it’s up to you to make it. By creating a project like that, you’ll learn whatever you need to to get it done.

By pursuing that passion, it will give you the fuel you need to keep going.

Fun is momentum. (That doesn’t mean it won’t be hard…but difficult can be fun too 😬)

A-ha! You can’t learn without change…

Learning is inherently about change — changing your understanding, your technique, and often, your perspective.

You can’t keep doing the same things and expecting different outcomes.

If you’re having trouble with a piece, what’s working? What’s not working?

What are you going to do differently this time around?

Strategy for Perfect Practice:

Differentiating between practice and learning helps to clarify the goal of each session: one is for refining existing skills (practice), and the other is for acquiring new ones (learning).

Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent.

What’s your goal as an artist? What do you want to make or be capable of making?

If you want to learn anything effectively, it’s not just about volume, it’s about focus and awareness.

Step 1: Actively focus and minimize distractions

Imagine the depth of learning you could achieve with UNDIVIDED attention.

😳

In a world drowning in distractions, learning requires intentional concentration. Our world’s forgotten what it was like to be bored. To only be able to do one thing. Life no longer feels linear.

Mastering focused practice sessions leads to more profound, more effective skill development.

So, as you decide on what skills to build and things to practice, try to pay attention to only what’s in front of you. Turn off what’s unnecessary, lock-in, and enjoy the ride.

Actionable Tip: Use the Pomodoro Technique — short bursts of focused work followed by a short break to maintain high levels of concentration without burnout. Start with 25 minutes (even 5 and work your way up if it’s that bad) then see if you can go up to 90 minutes of flow. If you can stay engaged, challenged, but making steady progress, then you’re doing something right.

Step 2: Repeat and relax

You won’t see the effects of repeated effort unless you STOP and look back.

That’s literally what your brain is doing when it takes a break. It rewinds your life from your last moments and etches into your brain all the necessary information it needs to do it again sometime.

So, while repetition embeds skills into muscle memory, relaxation allows the brain to absorb the nuances of the learning.

Balancing intense repetition with adequate relaxation catalyzes both skill retention and creative thinking.

Actionable Tip: Grease the groove — practice your new skill lightly but frequently throughout the day, broken up with periods of rest. Say you’re learning to draw characters, but you’re having trouble with head anatomy. Try sketching a simple head for 5-15min in the morning, another in the afternoon, and another in the evening (less is more, increase as you gain in skill and complexity). Do that every day for a week and see how much smoother or faster your process becomes the next week, instead of a massive grind session once or twice a week. You’ll learn intuitively what to prioritize and the different types of marks you can make to get what you’re looking for faster, by spacing it out.

Step 3: Rehearse mentally

The mind's eye is a powerful tool for growth.

Mental rehearsal can solidify learning and prepare the mind and body to execute the new skill. Champion athletes do this to get in the zone, and artists can do it to get in the flow.

Engaging in mental rehearsal enhances physical practice, embedding the skill deeper into your artistic foundation.

Actionable Tip: Draw in your mind (seriously) — visualize the creation process from start to finish, imagining each step with detail and precision. It might sound useless, but trust me, speaking it into existence helps you identify all the small steps we might intuitively make. Before you get into an illustration, think about what shapes you’re going to begin with, what lines or landmarks to place, and when. Once you fully describe it from start to finish, give it a shot on the page and see how you do. Did it come out exactly as you’d hoped? Was there something you missed? Or did you make a completely different decision that felt better to you at the time? Would you have noticed these things if you’d never stopped to think about them before jumping right in? Maybe…

Learning is part of our nature, and ideas can help us evolve. With a simple, easily repeatable process, we’ll turn repetition into intuition, and what was once a slog can feel as natural as breathing.

Hits of the Week:

• 🤯 I keep forgetting that the Statue of David is this big 

• 🎞️ This risograph-printed animation by Zack Lydon is incredible

• 😍 I’m in love with this set of character designs from @dune5and

• ✨ Lisa Frankcore is in full effect with this epic Ultraman Rising Vis Dev piece from Sunmin Inn 

• 🤝 Cyclops and Ryu are BACK, baby - dope piece by @yeet_sonny

Remember, this is just the start. Learning is life long. And that’s the game. You don’t need to be in a rush. But if I can help you get things done a little faster, trust me, it’ll be worth your time.

You’ve got much better things to do than to struggle to put lines on a blank page.

That’s it for the stash this week. Hope you found something useful here.

Talk to you soon,

—Future-you

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