SwiftOnSecurityIt's my experience that artistic expression has both a hugely analytical approach that can be broken down and taught and benefited from hearing, paired with an utterly unexplainable inexplicable one.
You can start off – and maybe most should – with imitation in honing ability, but eventually to actualize you have to gain the skill to find your own self and depart the proven. There is little success without knowing failure. You're going to need it. You're not going to skip it.
Grant@SwiftOnSecurity spot on. Every first timer at open mic is a mashup of their three favourite comedians. It’s hard work finding out what your own voice is.
Piers Cawley@gl0ck @SwiftOnSecurity not at the open mics I go to; they're covering Wonderwall or attempting to be Ed Sheeran. Admittedly, the Wonderwall botherers are tailing off these days.
Salacious Crumb@pdcawley That does not sound like a very good attempt at comedy.
Dio9sys@SwiftOnSecurity Once upon a time I played a lot of Ms. Pacman on twitch. Not because I was inherently good at it, mind you, but because I wanted to see what would happen if I kept practicing a specific thing for long enough, and streaming it on twitch was an excuse to keep a consistent practice schedule.
First it was the homework. Learning how different ghosts move, learning the theory behind how to line them up in different corners to get all four in one power pellet ("perfect eats"), etc.
Just from reading that and practicing the purely theoretical parts, I got ok at ms pacman! I still wasn't amazing, but I was getting better.
It was only after hours and hours of playing that the theoretical parts started to click in a more fundamental way, and I started getting better at finding my own way to keep a rising score without losing too many lives. Eventually, while I didn't know the *exact* conditions that made this possible, I was able to get a decent feeling for when I had a high chance of noclipping through a ghost when I turned straight into them. To this day, if someone asked me how to do it, I wouldn't know how to say it. There's the theoretical part with the center of your sprites, the slight teleport that happens when you change direction and minute differences in speed, but it was the sort of thing that you could really only *feel*.
I haven't regularly practiced Ms Pacman in forever, and now I'm back to a base level of not-amazing, but getting past that beginner plateau and starting to really feel the game as a system that can be beaten was such an interesting journey, and only started by copying exactly what a bunch of guys in mullets had written in the 80s.
@Dio9sys thank you 🙏
Brad@SwiftOnSecurity imitate, emulate, innovate is how the progression was explained to me in music classes.
self-made skeleton@SwiftOnSecurity yeah. i started with normcore furries on deviantart and i cant tell you how the fuck i arrived at nothing has pupils or irises anymore anymore and also thats an impossible amount of teeth
@SwiftOnSecurity for real though - i get told my art style is unique constantly and to that i always tell people it's probably bc i don't think about art style or influences. i draw what FEELS right. if i dont like the shape of something i just change it until i do and there's no logic i can explain about that part of my process.
i don't go into an artwork thinking about what i want to draw - i go into it with a feeling i want to express. and that feeling is uniquely mine. others will feel the same thing, ofc, bc i'm human, but we all feel it in our own unique ways. and arriving here, where i draw Feelings rather than Things, is how i broke free of emulation. because it's kind of impossible to accurately emulate another person's feelings, you can't possibly understand them in the way they do.
anyway sorry i think abt this a lot
Matt Good@SwiftOnSecurity you're not a Jedi until you build your own lightsaber. Or something.