Wrestling with Discipline: Art with Jeff McArthur
Jeff McArthur is a 31-year-old artist from Guatemala, currently living in Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada. I’ve only known him for about four years, but for three of those years I’ve been incredibly lucky to get to work with him on an indie game development team that he’s led, allowing me to see him “up close” as a fellow creator. One of the things I love most about Jeff (besides digging his art style) is that his passion for his craft is contagious, even though he freely admits to the same struggles we have with discipline and daily practice. He’s transparent about his journey, and even though it’s taken more twists and turns than he probably would have liked, he knows who he is and what he ultimately wants to offer the world. Our interview definitely left me taking notes for my own creative work, so I hope you find some inspiration, too!
How did you fall in love with art?
As long as I can remember, I always loved creating things — whether it be sand castles on the side of the lake, or whatever else. I have a passion for small things. I always loved moss, observing bugs, and that kind of stuff. I thought it’d be so cool to be able to create other worlds that people can enter and see and be a part of.
What do most people not know about your type of work or your personal creative process?
Originally art was more like a coping mechanism for me — I was very depressed and negative, and didn’t feel like anybody understood me. So my art was always very negative or dark, and the only way I could actually produce anything was to get to the point that I couldn’t handle life anymore. Then it would just come out in what I would create, be it poems, or drawing, or whatever. It was externalizing my internal struggle.
Since the process required me to be in a bad state, getting to where I could create positive art was a big thing for me. It actually happened after I had a serious car accident. I perforated my intestines, so I spent a week in the hospital and a few months where I couldn’t do a whole lot, physically. But through that experience I felt a lot of love and support from my family and friends, and in that time of not knowing what to do, I ended up taking a photo of a friend and tried digitally painting it. It took 20 hours, but it looked pretty good when it was finished, and it was the first “positive” piece of artwork that I’d ever done.
About that same time I went on a missions trip. I’d gone on a couple before and they were always super cool, but this time I didn’t click with anybody — and I was still recuperating from my accident, so a lot of things I would have liked to do, I couldn’t. But through all that I met this little girl who didn’t fit in and we clicked. For a few years we were like brother and sister, so I did another drawing of her that took 40 hours and it came out looking exactly like the photo. And I thought, “Wow, I can do positive artwork and create good things and I’m actually good at this.” That’s when I decided to study art.
So it’s been a process, getting from one state of mind where art is an escape, to one where it’s something you want to do to enrich others. And currently, I’m learning you just have to do it: art takes time, it takes effort, and it doesn’t matter how good you are or where you’re at. I always tend to look at the final product and I get frustrated because I’m not where I want to be and I’m perfectionistic — so right now I’m in the process of working on things out of passion, putting the work in every day but not seeing it as a stress, and more like just, “Oh cool, I get to draw this morning.”
With the start of 2017, you posted speed sketches every weekday on your Instagram. What’s the story behind that?
It’s a combination of a few things. I read an interesting book on habits [The Power of Habit by Charles Duhig], and I’d been listening to the OPTIMIZE podcast by Brian Johnson. I feel like I’ve found a lot of great info, and there’s a whole lot of research out there about how we work best and how to accomplish goals.
I also met Steve Swink, a game developer working on SCALE, at the Full Indie Summit. His talk really resonated with me. He pretty much was saying that you need to learn your craft. There’s different forms of practice, and you have to get in your 10,000 hours. I think that 10,000 hour thing is something we’ve heard a lot from different people, but the reality was that study was on kids preparing for a test to get into violin school — some really had to do less or more hours than that to pass the test. So we tend to think, if we do that many hours, we’re set, but the reality is we need to do that much to start to get good.
So all that and turning 31, looking at life — the only thing I’ve noticed that’s constant is that time passes and it passes fast. So I was like well, the only way I’m going to get good at anything is if I define what I want to get good at and I start putting time in daily to doing that. Otherwise another year is going to go flying by and I’m not going to get very far. At least fifteen minutes a day, every day. So I decided I would start doing a sketch every work day and then maybe more sketches I could turn into paintings, and then maybe I could do a sculpture every day.
You’re one of the few artists I’ve talked to whose day job is at least partially related to your creative work as an artist — do you find that this helps your creative process?
I have a creative-ish job — a lot of it is more just construction — but it’s all fun because we’re building something awesome every time and I find that very satisfying. There are a lot of great benefits with my work even though it’s not directly related to what I thought I would want to do in the future. For example, my boss is around 60 years old, and he’s an artist who has drawn well over 10,000 drawings, so he’s super good. Seeing the work he does and being around him and hearing his opinions on things is great. Another awesome thing is that he has a huge library of art books — like right now I’m going through The Art of Fury Road — so I try to take advantage of that on my lunch break and look at a few pages.
I do find that it makes life easier in that I feel like my whole day at work isn’t just spent so I can stay alive. [chuckles] I can come home and be like, “Oh, I’m actually getting better at stuff that’s going to make me better at what I want to do in my life.” Even when it’s on a day when I didn’t do anything creative at work, it still all fits into that. So that’s been awesome, and I’m very thankful for it… it’s taken a long time to work somewhere I can feel that way, where I’m surrounded by people who are better than me so I can glean a lot from them.
It’s funny because what we build physically has so many similar steps to what we would build digitally. Like right now we’re building a 6-foot-high tree stump — we build a wire frame, and the frame is how you build things out of polygons in 3D and it’s like your mapping. So the work is different but the thought process is kinda the same.
What helps you recharge your creative batteries?
Creating helps me recharge my creative batteries. If I’m not creating anything or drawing or working on stuff I get stuck in the rut of liking the idea of doing it, but not actually getting some motivation on it. Then, I greatly enjoy being outdoors. I get inspired from what I see, even if it doesn’t directly correlate to what I create, it gives me a fascination of God’s creative side. So mountain biking is great, or even just the drive to and from work.
Another thing, which I haven’t had much of in a long time, is creative community. That can be very inspiring because someone else can spark you when you’re down, and you can spark other people when they’re down. It’s kind of hard to work in isolation.
What always gets you excited about your craft?
Seeing the incredible art of others gets me excited — when I see the amazing artwork in a movie, game, or in physical form, I just want to keep creating. People being genuinely interested in and asking me about my craft is huge, I find I just explode with excitement explaining or showing what I do or how it works. Often times I feel like I’m not very good at keeping a conversation going, but when it’s on a topic that truly inspires me, like art, I find this isn’t the case. I guess I don’t have enough people around me that share in my passions… that’s something to work on!
Pushing through the not-so-fun or hard parts of creating, where it all starts coming together into something amazing, is also so exciting. It’s like the wonder of discovery. I often sit and look at something and think, “Wow, that came from my hands, thank you God!”
So we’ve talked about some of your daily disciplines with your art, but are there any other disciplines you’re following right now in other areas of your life, not necessarily related to your art?
It’s all linked, right? You have to build a routine, and that’s going to look different for everybody. Build what works for you. So for example, I start work at 8am, and I get picked up by a coworker at 7:30am to go to work. Most people probably wouldn’t get up until maybe 7 and just rush. But I get up at 5:30 in the morning and I have a specific routine: alarm goes off, get up, go to the bathroom, shave, foam roller, do sit-ups, then I spend like 45 minutes doing my devotions, then I get dressed, eat breakfast, and then I start my speed painting. So if I don’t do any of those things in the time I’m supposed to do them, or if I don’t get to them fast enough, then the thing that suffers is that I don’t get my speed painting in before work. And if I don’t do it before I go to work — it’s really hard, I haven’t gotten a PM time block worked out yet that creates flow and works healthily. I have an AM one and it works, but the PM one is linked. So if I don’t get to bed by 9/9:30pm, I can’t get up at 5:30am and get rolling.
So those are very key. And at least for me, I find that if I do something (like my speed painting) right away, even if the rest of the day goes lousy, I go to bed feeling like the day was worth it. My satisfaction in life is very linked to if I’m working on my dreams and my art. When I don’t work on it, I am not satisfied, so I go to bed feeling icky, which just makes you stay up later which makes getting up early harder, so it’s just this self-destructive loop. You either have a good loop going or a bad loop going and the tricky thing is switching from the bad loop to the good loop.
Another thing that I’m really focusing on this year is exercising regularly. I heard some research that said if you don’t exercise it’s like taking a depressant. You’re going to feel way less depressed just by having exercise be a regular part of your life, and I definitely have seen that in my life over the years. And interestingly enough, in that habits book I mentioned, they talk about keystone habits — so if you change a keystone habit, then all your other habits change almost automatically. It gets you in the groove and they all line up. And they have found that exercise is very commonly a keystone habit for people. So if you exercise you tend to eat better, sleep better, be less stupid with your money, you’re not going to smoke or drink as much, or whatever it is. If I’m disciplined in exercising, it teaches me discipline as well, so then it’s easier to be disciplined in art.
In what ways have you improved over the past few years? What do you still struggle with?
I’d say a turning point would have been about 3 years ago now — I kinda lose track of time since having left Guatemala — and it was about re-grasping dreams. I’d kind of given up on the idea of dreams or gotten frustrated with them. So I went through this cool Bible study that focused on art and it helped me be willing to dream again… to accept that God made me with a vision and that that’s not a selfish, negative thing. So that was key in starting what I feel has been a renewal, a revival of who I want to be and who I am as an artist and as a person. I’ve always been afraid to try for my dreams, because I’ve been afraid of failing, or been afraid of succeeding and then finding out that I don’t even like it. But through that renewal it’s like, well, I should just try it, you know? Worst case: I get good at it and don’t like it, so I can go do something else.
If I were to define my life right now, I would say I want to be the best mountain bike rider I can be, and I want to be the best artist I can be. And the artist one, I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I want to honor and glorify God in all these things, and I want to enrich other people’s lives. I want my work to edify the world. I’ve seen how important hope and dreams are for me, so I want to inspire other people to regain their dreams, too.
And then discipline has been a struggle but super important. I tend to be all over the place — I like to try tons of different things. On my wall right now I have this saying: “Discipline is choosing between what I want now and what I want most.” It’s a big battle. So the goal this last year, 2016, was to learn to be disciplined. And I’ve struggled with anxiety attacks because sometimes I took that goal too far, but it was good because I did learn discipline. So now this year it’s like, okay, I’m learning to be disciplined but also to enjoy the process.
Another thing I’m realizing is that to accomplish my dreams, it’s going to take really hard work, but I need to be okay with that and embrace it, because it means I’ll be doing what I actually want to do with my life. As my boss puts it, “Is it really work if you’re doing what you love?” I don’t think work should be a negative word, yet a lot of people think of it that way. Work is good, effort is good, and challenge is satisfying — and not just getting where you are going but the effort of getting there.
One of the things I heard in the Brian Johnson blogs is this idea of 1%. When it comes to my dreams, my tendency is all or nothing. I’ll go with everything and it works for a little while, but then it totally flops because I can’t handle that much and then I just go with nothing. But he was saying we need small victories, and the 1% is super important. So if I can do 1% of what I want to do, draw this much a week, then I’m starting to learn… and it ends up being much easier to do 10%, 20%, 50%, 100%, whatever. But in that, I’ve had to choose. I’ve had to be a lot more selective about what I do, where I’m willing to spend my money, etc., and that’s kind of scary because there are other things you like that are important to you — but you’re saying this thing is more important to me than those other things. Have a plan, go for the plan, and the plan will change, but the fact that you have the plan means you’re going for it and you’re actually making progress.
What are your creative goals right now?
For me to actually focus and put in the time and be disciplined, I’m finding I have to simplify my life. This year I’ve completely blocked Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of other websites, and that’s been helpful — maybe some people have the self-control to check them for a few minutes, but I just cave back into wasting time. So that helps me, simplifying, cutting things out, being vicious with who I want to be, and asking “Does this take me where I want to go?” Then if it doesn’t, just get rid of it.
That’s something I would encourage people to do. It’s scary, it’s hard, but so far it seems real worth it. I did keep Instagram, but I’m just using it to post my stuff — and I turned off my notifications, so it’s not like “You have this many likes!”
I think the thing about this current age is that we live our lives based on how we can present it to other people. I always think when I’m working, “I want to post this, I want people to like this, is this something that is post-worthy?” and then get frustrated because my drawing’s sucking and I don’t want to share it. So then you don’t even end up drawing for the joy of it, or even things you want to draw you end up trying to produce to publish, then you publish it and maybe people don’t like it or don’t respond or they like someone else’s — and I just don’t feel like it’s healthy. So that was the other thing this year, I want to create for the sheer joy of creating.
Are there any tools, books, or other resources you would recommend to others starting out in art or game design?
So a lot of people would think “go to school.” That could be good, but I would say no, don’t go to school. [laughs] What matters is if you can do stuff. And the problem with school is that you go and you learn a ton of different things but you don’t learn how to do anything well — because there wasn’t enough time to get good at anything.
So if I was to say something to any other artist, it would be to stop, try to define what it is you really want to do, or at least something that you’re willing to try, and focus on trying to do the 1% on it. You can learn absolutely everything you need to know through books, online, and tutorials — there’s some amazing training online for way cheaper than what it cost me to go to school, and I went to school in the third world where it was dirt cheap! (I’d say the only thing school might be really good at is connections.)
If you’re interested in painting, there’s Ctrl+Paint. I have to be honest, I haven’t looked through it (it’s on my list of things to do), but it’s completely free and there’s an incredible amount of stuff there.
Books are awesome. I never thought of this but my boss brought it up: books have stuff that the internet doesn’t have, or it’s organized and presented in a way you’re not going to find online. So he’s really instilled that in me. Find artists you like and get their artwork books and just kind of soak it in. Definitely worth the money, though of course it’s nice to be able to see them before you buy them.
If you want to do human figures well, there’s Figure Drawing Design and Invention by Michael Hampton. It’s incredible, also on my list of actually working through. One of my classmates had it and once I saw it I was like I HAVE TO HAVE THAT.
The internet can be good for networking if you’re not being too distracted by it. I found that ArtStation is super awesome (amidst all the scantily clad women that I wish they wouldn’t put on there), and Polycount’s been quite useful for game art.
You kinda just have to Google and try to find things for what you’re interested in. Anywhere you can interact with people who are way better than you is going to be useful. And post your stuff, even if NOBODY responds because you’re like a speck in a desert of people and not a very impressive speck at that. [chuckles] So yeah, just put yourself out there and eventually someone might see it, might respond, might help — you never know where you’re going to make those connections and contacts.
For 3D, I’ve found masterxeon1001’s stuff super useful. He makes stuff for Blender. He has a thing called Blending Away the Pain, which is the most useful tutorial I’ve ever done, because it’s not dumb-ified. Which means if you were totally new, I don’t know if you’d actually learn anything from it, but he actually shows his process and I think that’s something I want to do once I figure out my processes, is to show it.
What other advice or words of encouragement would you give to other creators in your field?
Be willing to fail and to fail often and don’t see it as a negative thing. Think of it as, “I’m trying stuff, and as long as I’m trying stuff, that’s good.” The only way you’ll get to be any good or find the right way to do something is if you find all the wrong ways or a number of the wrong ways first. That’s definitely not a perspective I always had, and even when I heard it the first couple times I was like, “ehh, I don’t know about that,” but it’s true. I would encourage creators to embrace that.
