Hi, everyone, Ed here! Today I’m going to talk about what you’re what you need to do if you’re going to reach the limit of what you’re capable of. Every creator will run into a blocker from time to time – you will find something that you’re not able to do. Personally, I’m not much of an artist!
So when I reach! the limit of my capabilities, I have two choices. There’s a saying that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. I have found this to be broadly true. Interestingly, if you multiply as up to 40 hours a week, every week, you come to roughly five years of time. So you need to ask yourself: Am I okay with dedicating five years to being as good at artwork as I am at the other things that I’m doing every day as a creator? In my example, that’s creating universes and writing within them.
In most cases for artwork, I’ve said, No, I don’t think I’m able to do that. I’ve even brought writers on board to help me out with some of the volume of what I’m trying to produce, because it’s a large amount of work on my own. That leads me to the second option, which I have been doing for eight years.So, if you decide the same, what do you do? Where do you find people to help you? And how do you approach actually getting the work done in a way that is sensible?Controlling freelancers is a huge topic and not one that I think I’m able to get into much detail in for this article… but if you’re interested, let me know in the comments and I will follow up and give you some advice on that front in another. Places that you can find freelancers are all over the internet. I use Deviant Art a lot for artists. While you get a lot of people applying who are not worth your time, you’ll get a few who are really really valuable and really worth working with.
I also use UpWork for things like writers, proofreaders and audio editors, which is a freelancing network online. I’ve hired writers and artists from these two places for over eight years.
Finding someone who shares your vision is very important… and that means that you need to be able to explain it to them! I recommend mood boards, so definitely put one of those together. I recommend that you also consider being able to explain what it is that makes your universe unique in your mind, the things that make it different from things that is like. For example, you may begin with a reference to something that it’s similar to – it’s similar to Firefly in that it has a spaceship flying around in in space, they’re mostly not savoury characters, and you’re going to have to show your universe through their eyes. However, the difference between this and Firefly is that the universe is extremely high tech, and everywhere they go, they’re going to have their identity scanned. That means that they have ways of getting around this. They are hardened criminals rather than just kind of unsavoury people who may be fought in a war. So they’re ready to pull out the guns and kill absolutely everyone in the location if they become threatened. This is obviously just a single example. But this is one of the ways in which you could explain what it is you’re trying to achieve.
I also think collaboration is highly central to the creative process. If you do it right, you can create something much better than you ever could otherwise. This is, in my experience, the best way to get past personal limitations. I think that sometimes creators put unreasonable expectations on their own abilities and sometimes you need to step back and say, You know what, I can find someone who can do this better.
I should clarify that when I say collaboration, I don’t necessarily specify between paid collaboration, as in hiring a contractor to do artwork for you, or a collaboration where you agreed to share profits. Again, that’s a central part of handling freelancers, which I don’t feel able Get into within the length of this article.Thanks very much for reading and please let me know if you have any questions. I’ll be more than happy to talk more on this subject in the future.
