Some excellent points!
Art -
In my experience is a combination of technical expertise and vision.
This entire concept can get rather confusing and convoluted.
To add to this, there are different kinds of art. All however still following the same basic rules.
If you are asked to make a perfect replica of an existing product, there might not be any profound impact on society. But the same approach to that, and let’s say something that has some kind of message, is the same.
The main difference between the two is the message.
And the fact that one has to follow reality quite closely and one does not. And where art with a message is different from illustration, is that the most important aspect of it is the message.
However, and here is the catch. Great art always employs a great level of expertise in carrying out that message.
And that is what separates it from amateur work.
And to segue into my next point, you can’t talk about art in this context without mentioning someone like Picasso or another extreme, Jackson Pollock.
These guys did not just trip and fall into abstract bliss and by some divine intervention, spill out works of great art onto the canvas.
Both were accomplished artists in their own right with good fundamentals in art techniques and knowledge.
Look at some of the early work Picasso and you see an artist with a great command of art fundamentals and style. Not the later abstract art he was famous for.
And this “abstract” art was not random. It took years to perfect the technique of expression in this sort of cubist style.
The relationships of shape and form and a kind of intentional random composition, I would not go a far as to say were labored over for very long, nor were they in the end analyzed much consciously during creation.
But rather his technique had risen to the level that all these things became second nature. And were the result of months or maby years of experimentation.
I can’t say, I am not an art historian. But I know enough to say it was not instant.
Pollock as well. Early work was not his paint dripping technique. But when he did finally come to the point that he developed the idea to stand over the paintings and drip the paint “just so”, it was after a lot of experimenting. And it was not just random in the sense there was no care taken with it. There was a technical expertise he had developed that then went to the point it was second nature and he was focused on expressing.
I bring these two extremes to the conversation to illustrate the fact that art is a process of getting so fluent in your technique that the expression of what you are doing is unfettered by undo attention to and effort on technique.
So what this means is, you have to make a lot of art. What ever you do, do it a lot.
Only after doing it a lot will you get past the effort stage.
And it does not matter if it is illustration or replication, there are 101 techniques that go into that.
And in the end probably project oriented work is best. But in that work even there might be new things to learn.
So it is very important to set a project aside. And usually the best approach, to learn the fundamentals of that thing first, then come back to the project.
So for example, you are new to UV mapping.
You might have to break off and do some tutorials and practice on UV mapping.
Then come back to the project.
In a perfect scenario you have a ton of UV mapping to do. Good. Because you are going to need that for UV to become second nature.
So if you are on your own and not working (I was never in that luxury for long), you have to give yourself project after project of UV mapping.
If you get lucky and can do that on the job, the gods have been good to you if you have a year of that work ahead of you.
After that year you will be a UV expert if…
You make notes and identify the patterns and ways to unwrap that start to become repetitive.
It should get to the point that you look at any object and spend no time at all planning how to unwrap it. You just know. Because now you see all the simple connecting shapes. They are all always unwrapped the same with the same result, every time. And a complex object is nothing more than a series of smaller shapes that all get unwrapped in the same way as all the other similar shapes you have ever unwrapped
Get your favorite beverage, put on some tunes and off you go.
Same is true with retopo sculpting or anything you are working on.
Lighting can become just as simple and intuitive after lots of lighting scenes.
And so…
After years of work, you will start to become an expert in all these things.
Then you can open a studio…. Ha ha ha
Ok that’s what I did. I don’t recommend it…ha ha ha.
