3 Words that Changed my Life

Here’s how I get started with making digital art.

Hello, I’m Gleb. I’m an 26 year old dude doing computer graphics and I want to tell you about 3 words that, literally, changed my life.

Before we start, let me say it: I believe that every artist can make a living doing what she or he actually wants. What I mean is the projects that inspire us the most.

How many times you was inspired by something, but then abandoned your passion just because you was scared to take a leap of faith and do things, that would be considered stupid by your parents or friends?

I thought the same way about my ideas.

But now I think: Weird projects? Being self-employed? Taking a leap of faith? Fine, let’s f#cking do it!

I was introduced to computer graphics when I was 16. Like many of us, I started with 3ds max and was spending very small amount of time learning how to do stuff and connecting with people.

My first renders were so crappy that I thought I would never make a single awesome image.

And this perspective scared the hell out of me.

Several years later, the mechanism was launched that would led to a big change in my life. I stumbled across the tutorial on the internet. If I remember, it was about ‘How to render an interior’ using Vray.

You can say, ‘tutorial, what a discovery, dude!’ I know that sounds stupid, but that’s how things worked for me. Something clicked in my mind and what was merely a hobby started to transform into something bigger.

When I was 22, I got a CG Artist job and started to make 3d models for computer games. You guess it wasn’t too hard, because I was able to render a cube rather efficiently at the time.

In the free time I was also learning Blender (free open source software which has an AWESOME community) by watching Andrew Price and CG Cookie tutorials. Now I was using internet to my advantage by absorbing every bit of knowledge, because I knew it will pay off in the future.

So, this is the word number 1: Learn

When a big CG competition called ‘Her Majesty’s Zeppelins’ was about to start, I've jumped in this boat because I knew I can learn how to do stuff. Trivial, but true.

Nevertheless, the possibility of winning was completely out of my reach, I thought.

In fact, I was so afraid to fail in public that I concentrated on doing the best render possible. The risk of public failure motivated me so much that I persisted for a month, doing nothing but zeppelins.

Huge zeppelins, tiny zeppelins, her majesty’s air fleet steam-punk zeppelins.

I crushed it by winning the 1-st place.

That’s when I learned the second word: Dare

Several hours later I created my personal blog using blogger.com service by Google and posted there my first tutorial.

Imagine, after years of absorbing knowledge I was about to share the experience, that I absorbed earlier.

Ironically, once again I approached the life-changing tutorial, but from the other side.

Hugely positive feedback from you, folks, motivated me to develop my own skills further. To delve into crazy experiments, to explore uncharted territories of computer graphics, to make stupid things.

As I byproduct of recording tutorials I started to develop my English, which is still far from being good, but at least you wouldn’t want to shoot me. Or would you?

So I bought a condenser microphone, recorded a crappy tutorial with the voice-over and posted it to the new WordPress self-hosted blog and also uploaded it to Youtube.

Then another one.

For me, sharing things online made the difference.

After discovering the passion for blogging and doing my own projects, I’ve left the full-time job to concentrate on what I love doing. Ironically, now this decision makes sense from the financial point of view too.

That’s how the things work: when you share your knowledge, your passion and your vision with others, impossible becomes possible.

The question is, will you listen to your inner voice that tells you to stop scaring the world with your personality?

What I usually do is tell it to SHUT UP, because I love this word number 3: Share

Now it’s your turn. Share these 3 words and thank you for being awesome and reading this article.

Gleb Alexandrov: an artist & blogger at CreativeShrimp.com. Writes on issues relating to digital art and social media.

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