ONE.TWO.THREE

Below are three pieces of advice I've been given/heard over the past year that I feel has helped and inspired me in my work from various faces around the world.

ONE.

 "Use the internet to your advantage" Kevin Dart

After hearing this from Dart it made me reflect on if I was using the internet for its full potential. I came to the conclusion that I wasn't ha.  It's opened my eyes to the amount of opportunities there are on the web to promote yourself and collaborate with other fellow artists through the means of social networks as well as getting in touch with design companies/agencies/publications. I think I ignore some sites like YouTube/Facebook/Blogger in the sense that I don't always use them to their full potential and need to realise how much I could benefit from then. In the modern age we live in I think it's important to take advantage of every possibility opening and I sometimes forget this and distracted.  Even though it sounds obvious, I'd also pretty much overlooked the fact that it's so easy to communicate with other people around the world so effortlessly. I've started to take this advice on board over the last few months by making myself a CargoCollective (online portfolio) and a Twitter account. I'm not the biggest "tweeter" in the world but I'm finding it dead useful for keeping in the know with whats happening in the art industry, upcoming exhibitions and things like limited edition art prints/underground competitions etc.

TWO.

"Do not seek praise. Seek criticism" Paul Arden

 I bought Paul Arden's "It's not how good you are, It's how good you want to be" sometime last year and it's been nothing but help in how I work. It's a book on how to succeed in life and includes an insight to the world of advertising with facts and pearls of wonderful wisdom. This one really stuck out to me amongst others and has helped a great deal. A typical situation for me when working on a brief is that I box myself and don't let people see my work until near the deadline thus leaving little time for improvement. I've learnt that it's important to get a fresh and more importantly honest opinion on you're work before it's too late.  There's no benefiting from polite compliments when what you sometimes need is harsh brutal criticism. From this you can get the full potential out of your work and push yourself to get better final outcomes.  

THREE.

"Don't get drunk of others work" – Me

Over the course of the last month when working on the 8x8 brief, I've come to realise that there's a point where you need to stop looking at other peoples work and focus on the your own.  I feel that I'm just starting to really understand how I'm most comfortable in working and that "my style" is slowly becoming evident in my latest pieces of work. Looking at too much artist influence has started to become a problem for me as I feel like I'm getting "drunk" off too many different styles and aesthetics. When I do see work I admire I tend to try and work in a similar method combined with my own process but its too evident that their work is making too much of an influence and my work changes depending on who I've looked at for that particular brief. I now limit myself to looking at others when working and its obvious that my own style is starting to appear and my work is slowly becoming consistent.