1. Pick your medium.
Photography, Graphic Design, Interior Design, Painting, whatever…..Pick the medium that most attracts you or that you enjoy and you already exhibit some natural skill in.

2. Study the tools & purchase appropriately.
Ask others in your medium about tools and resources. Learn the lingo for your particular medium. Make sure you are purchasing exactly what you want. These things typically can be pricey and you don’t want to regret an expensive purchase.

3. Learn about your tool.
The best way to learn about your tool is to use it regularly. Give yourself small bite sized projects to complete. Set objectives and deadlines for yourself. Use the web to do research on your tool.

4. Learn how to use the tool in your medium
You now understand the technical aspects of your tool. Do you know how to communicate with it in your medium? You may understand your camera but do you understand how to compose a picture. Work to be an effective ‘storyteller’ in your medium.

5. Practice
You will not be perfect or even professional when you start. Just do a lot of working. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, so get started.

6. Ask for Criticism
The biggest handicap many artists have is an inability to give or receive criticism. It’s also a great way to prevent you from becoming a skilled artist/professional. Find some friends who you can test your work on and get feedback.

7. Repeat 4-6.
These are the most important steps of the whole list.

Seth Godin highlighted some important points about types of workers on his blog:

“If you want something done, perhaps you would ask a professional to do it. Someone who costs a lot but is worth more than they charge. Someone who shows up even when she doesn’t feel like it. Someone who stands behind her work, gets better over time and is quite serious indeed about the transaction…”

The professional gets the work done for a price, the amateur is passionate and often cheaper, and the rest who are just there to do a job. I think this is a concept that a lot of folks in the arts need to take note of. You should never be in the third category, hopefully have the passion of the amateur, and eventually have the discipline, skill, and conduct of the professional.

Is it ok for Christians enjoy art produced by unbelievers? The short answer is yes, but Pastor John Piper has some wise words about how exactly we approach it.

…I think today we are going to have to work at not being shaped by the world because the world has made its world view so scintillatingly attractive…

What is culture making? In short it is doing work like Adam. It is doing work by the sweat of our brow. How do Christians work toward building a Christian culture? Well, we simply work obediently using the gifts, talents, and abilities that God has given us. Obedience is key. David Hegeman says:

“Culture [is] the product of human acts of concretization undertaken in the developmental transformation of the earth according to the commandment of God.” – Plowing in Hope, p 15

Do you want to affect culture? Well, the first step is simply doing what you do to the best of your ability. Be a faithful Christian, a faithful worker, a faithful employee. God made us to work six days and rest on the seventh. We can bring about significant change if we simply and ambitiously work faithfully Monday through Saturday and honor God with giving and taking rest on the Sabbath.

Where would you like to affect culture?

Doug Wilson has another great post of writing advice that is very applicable to all artisans. This post interacts with innate talent, practice, criticism, and humility, and excellence. Here’s a sample:

If you are good with practice runs, if you are okay with not being as good as you are going to be, if you see the need for playing in the minors, then it should follow that you are emotionally prepared for negative feedback. If you enter your first pie in the county fair while knowing it will not get the blue ribbon, you should also be eager and ready for your friends to tell you why it didn’t win the blue ribbon. What is true of your life over all should also be true of your writing life. Criticism should be received as a kindness (Ps. 141:5).

Check out the entire post.

I came across these videos by accident this morning. There are quite incredible. If you like this one, I’d suggest browsing some of the other videos on their channel.

‘Transmission’ from MORPHOLOGIC on Vimeo.

Where I’m from here in Moscow, Idaho there is a great local concert promoter called StereopathicMusic. Since I was trying out of some new stuff with Adobe Illustrator, I decided to use them as a project. Here’s a logoish thing I came up with. I got the idea for the red/blue record from stereoscopy. Afterwards I realized that Stereopathic’s poster designer beat me to it. Either way, it was fun making it.
I’d love your feedback.

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

What is a good way to improve your communication? The best way to demonstrate to someone that you have mastery or understanding of a particular thing is to show that you can communicate it concisely. Next time you seek to understand something, think of some ways to simplify it. Think of some everyday metaphors that others might be familiar with. In many ways this is true in creating art as well. Editing out the weaker sentences in your writing, the poorly lit photos you took, those notes or verses that just didn’t work in the song. Write a few rough drafts. You should be your own best critic when you create, and you should be your own best critic when you communicate.

Links:
Top 5 Qualities of Productive Creatives
10 Laws of Productivity

“Why is procrastination wrong? Edwards argues that procrastination presumes upon the grace of God, assuming that he has given us future time when in fact our time may be short. We do not know whether or not we have tomorrow, so we must wisely improve upon the time God does give us.”

This post convicted me pretty good yesterday. In addition to the procrastination angle, I think it also addresses our work ethic. Read the entire post over at JoeThorn.net.

Writing a nice, clever, well paced movie review is not my forte. Instead, I’m going to write a blog post – a couple of reflections, notes, and reactions as a Christian on this last weekends latest flick – Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

First, Christians should be aware of the stories being told by others. How do these measure up next to the Christian story? If the Christian story is the true story by which we evaluate other stories, then other stories can be false stories in contrast. Think of it as moral gravity. Competing stories can try and tell you that the bad guy wins, but this goes against the Christian story. They can tell you all you need to be a better person is to forgive yourself, but the Christian story says that no amount of forgiving yourself will actually deal with your guilt. That was my first problem with Inception. Self-forgiveness is false forgiveness.

The second area that gave me food for thought was the fact that Nolan more or less admits that the stories that people experience or hear can change their behavior. In an unguarded moment, we might open ourselves to having our thoughts changed by a well told story. He shows us that stories are effective means of inserting certain foreign thoughts. It’s interesting then that this story about that fact is told within a broader story and is being consumed by the theater-full by both Christians and non-Christians with their guard down. In the film, Cillian Murphy is the guinea pig, but in reality the theater goers are the guinea pigs. This is particularly worrisome to me given the false-story that Nolan is telling.

3. All concerns aside, Nolan has indeed proven that he is a very capable directory and storyteller. Just like Homer was a master storyteller who told a good yarn, I have no problem calling Nolan a master of his medium. But like I mentioned before, it’s whether the story you tell is true that matters.