#make cool stuff

ok here we go!

Draw! All! The! Time! Draw a ton from life especially. Draw your couch or the tree outside or your dishwasher or the toilet in the bathroom. Literally just get a pen and a cheap sketchbook and DRAW DRAW DRAW. Go to the zoo or local conservatory to draw animals and plants, sit at a coffee shop or park and draw people. Drawing stuff/people/animals from life on paper really helps your brain process and learn what you're seeing. And just burn through those sketchbooks! Go through one a month or more, I really cannot stress enough to draw from life and how much that'll help you down the line with whatever medium you choose to do your projects in.

Completing small projects = big improvements. Pick a small story and design the characters, locations, and paint the important story-beats. Or storyboard sequences. Or turn it into a short children's book and make the illustrations, or turn it into a graphic novel. There's endless options! You can use anything in the public domain - there are LOTS of cool stories to choose from. Doing this is good practice adapting something not written by you, which cuts down on work for you, and it keeps your project scope from becoming too large. I like to choose a story and adapt it to a new genre. Like Call of the Wild, but the dogs are dinosaurs. Changing just that one thing alters EVERYTHING else, and raises some fun design challenges.

But the important part is to adapt a work in a way that's interesting to you.

Do this a few times. Each time you finish a small project, the next one will be easier and you can do more. I like to see how my favorite artists do this - how they lay out their pages, or how they show their characters. I also love looking at animated film art books for that reason as well. What do other artists think is necessary to show or not show for their story? You'll learn SO MUCH and it's fun.

A great example of this is a book called The Skillful Huntsman where a group of students adapted the Grimms fairy tale into a sci-fi epic. Granted, there was a team of 4 artists, and they were under the direction of their professors. So I don't expect a project made by a single person to look like this, but it's still a fun representation of how far you can take something and interpret it a new way.

Design your project for a "product". This might sound odd, but if you decide you want to make a book or a series of posters or a deck of trading cards, etc., that limits and changes what you'll be focusing on to design, down to how large you make your drawings so they fit nicely in whatever format you choose. AND that allows you to research how to get that physical thing made, even if it's printing it at home and stapling a book together or cutting out your cards and laminating them. Having a finished item that encompasses your project that you can hold in your hands feels AMAZING and it's SO worth it and motivating. You don't even have to sell it. Just make a cool thing for yourself!

Now you have pieces for a portfolio! You can create a portfolio on Instagram or even have your own website, but it's good to have your best work in one place with nothing else distracting from it. And now that you've got a project or two (or three!) under your belt, you'll have lots of content like designs and product photos to share with the world (and anyone hiring).

There's so much more I could go into, and I didn't even touch jobs and industries. I hope this helps!!