Things to keep in mind as an artist...

... or in any other profession I think.

Important things I told people today on their sketchbooks that might be useful for other people as well :D

(told you I wanted to make up for lost time! hehe)

about taking breaks and increasing productivity

anyway... I noticed you spend a few hours on your studies and that's brilliant and normal! but I wondered... do you take breaks? coffee breaks, stretching breaks, whatever? It's really important to give the brain some distraction every - let's say - 40 minutes of hard work and focus on one thing. When you come back your brain is fresh and you can actually see your mistakes better! Besides quality work, it also improves productivity because you don't push yourself to exhaustion!!

so... if you've never heard of it before, look for a technique called Pomodoro. You can actually add an extension to your chrome browser called "strict workflow". When you activate it it blocks websites (you can configure that) like facebook and youtube so you won't get distracted and procrastinate, and after 40 minutes it rings and tells you to stop working... you can do whatever you want in that break and then you tap the little tomato again and it starts you on your next round of work.

I found that my focus and my productivity increased greatly with this method and it prevented me from forgetting about the world for too many hours in a row while painting. I once forgot to eat or take a bathroom break for 10 hours!!!!!!! When I got up I almost tripped and fell cause my legs were cramping up badly... hahahahaha

So... Pomodoro, baby!!!

about receiving comments and critiques

take it into consideration and apply what you think will work for you!... one thing that I find greatly important in participating of forums:... you don't have to listen to every critique you get. you can ponder on what people tell you and decide for yourself if that's something you want for your art or not =)... it doesn't mean people are wrong, it just means you have a different outlook on where you want to go from where you are...

Once I got this really negative guy commenting in my sketchbook on conceptart.org and he just... politely said everything I did was shit. it just made me so freaking sad and angry... I actually let it affect me more than I should have and I stopped drawing as much.

So... don't listen to everyone. I don't know why I'm telling you this... maybe it just crossed my mind because I'm telling you so many things to do and to not do that I started feeling guilty :P hehehe

well... you know... do your thing, keep studying!! you're doing great!! we're artists, yay :D