 Welcome to MAPCRO, the RPG MAP show. My name is Kyle, and this episode is brought to you by the MAPCRO Newsletter. Golly folks, I have been one busy MAPCRO this summer, and I would like a place to be able to talk about the projects and announcements that I have for things that wouldn't necessarily make a good video. So if you sign up for this newsletter, not only will you hear about all the cool stuff that I have going on, but also you will get this map that I am working on in this video for free to download for your very own. It is an ocean map of the Wine Dark Sea, and it's got all kinds of crazy stuff that I stole, and that is what we are talking about today. How to steal like an artist. I recently read Austin Cleon's book, Steal Like an Artist, and I'll have a link in the description below to this book. I listened to it on audiobook. It took me about an hour and a half, so basically just a nice long walk. The book is mostly a collection of quotations about how artists take inspiration from other work or from the world around them, and I'm gonna share some of what I learned. Now, artists like to sound important and dangerous, and keep a mystique about them. So they will use words like steal or rip off when they actually just mean take inspiration from. Stealing like an artist is a tongue-in-cheek turn of phrase. It does not refer to plagiarism or cultural appropriation, so be aware of that. It's kind of like death of the author in that it is something that a lot of people talk about without actually thinking about all that much just to sound edgy and important, and we're going to try to avoid that today. As best we can. The first thing you have to understand about stealing like an artist is how overrated originality is. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If something is absolutely original, it will be inscrutable. It needs to have some familiarity to it for other people to be able to make some sense out of it. This is especially true in gaming and especially true in gaming art. If something is completely like bonkers brand new, it might be evocative, but it's probably not going to be parsable or useful at the gaming table. Get comfortable with the idea that everything is a remix. As you start stealing for your work, you will realize very quickly that the work that you're stealing from is based on other work and that that work was inspired by different work. And then that work was inspired by a chain of attribution that connects you to this grand tradition of art making. I personally find that to be as humbling as it is delightful. Making art can be a very isolating and lonely thing when you're just hunched over your drawing desk and kind of cranking pages out. Well, this is something that actually makes me as an artist feel connected. It makes me feel that I am taking part in this sort of baton race or, you know, really slow conversation. It's beautiful and rewarding to contribute to this big potluck that we call art. And this brings us to my favorite place to look for art to steal from. And that is the public domain. There are mountains of books and illustrations and recordings that all belong to you right now. It's a giant library of resources that are yours to do with as you please. Oftentimes, my research starts on Wikipedia and quickly branches out to archive.org or Project Gutenberg after that. There's a lot of truly exciting and foundational work that is freely available all day, every day. And it's part of your endowment as a member of the human race in our time. And it's wonderful. Go check out some old adventure literature, go watch some old silent films, take notes, see what really gets you excited, and then just steal liberally from it and put it in your own work. That is your right to do that. And another wonderful thing about the public domain is also there's a lot of it, not as much as perhaps I would like. But there is a lot of it freely available, which means you can follow the next big rule of stealing like an artist, which is steal from a lot of things. Cartoonist Gary Panter says, if you have one person you're influenced by, everyone will say you're the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will think you're so original. Making a strict and observant adaptation of a single public domain work into your chosen media might be a really rewarding practice as an artist. And in fact, it's one of the best ways to learn as an artist is to copy very, very closely to one or two artists that you're really influenced by. But if we go with the idea that everything is a remix and creativity is not discovering brand new components, but recombining familiar components in a new way, well, let's just dump the bits box out onto the workbench and start kit bashing. Let's start clashing ideas together. See what residences we can find. See what shocking new combinations we can fuse together in the atom smasher of our creativity. And when you go looking for components, don't just steal from other art, like steal from nature, steal from your own life, steal from nonfiction. Just about every artist or writer that I follow at some point says, I read more nonfiction than fiction at this point in my life. And that is simply because they're looking outside, they're looking for new components that haven't been used in their milieu yet to find new flavors, go to new fields. But my final tip, and I think the most important tip for stealing like an artist is the theft is not complete until you make something out of it. If you've gathered the most elaborate and complete and perplexing corpus of ideas to steal from, but they're all just sitting in your Google Drive, what are they doing there? That's not that's not creativity. That's that's a cabinet of curiosities to stretch the metaphor to the point of breaking. If you steal a lot of money, you haven't really stolen it until you've laundered it, until until you've actually done something with it. You haven't gotten away with anything. You've just gotten yourself a lot of dead weight. If making art is something that makes you happy, don't let perfectionism or imposter syndrome or anxiety keep you from making things that make you happy. And I think that's something that's truly liberating about viewing creativity as a remix is you're not looking for the next big idea, the next great American novel or whatever. You're looking for an interesting combination. You're you're getting into the test kitchen and you're trying things out and seeing if you can find out that somehow dark chocolate and sriracha are an amazing combination. It's an experiment, it's practice, it's discovery, and that takes a lot of the pressure out of it. So if you found any of this helpful, maybe leave me a like, but maybe what you should really do is go check out Austin Cleon's book, Steel Like an Artist. If you want to hear more from me, go ahead and subscribe to this channel or subscribe to my newsletter, link in the description below, and you can get this beautiful CMAP. And of course, I would love to hear suggestions for other topics like this that came up from conversations in the comments below or on my Twitter page. Thank you for watching and maybe one day I'll see you out on the wine dark sea. Farewell.