 So, welcome to the second episode of the free art show podcast where I, Kim Diaz Holm, also known as den unge her Holm, talk about art, anarchy or whatever might interest me this week, while I'm drawing. So since last time I've settled on a name and it's perhaps not the catchiest name ever but it's referencing a show I used to do and hope to do again soon. It was called the free art show and I drew a request and put them up for free use on my gallery. So I hope to start doing that show again soon and looking at my schedule perhaps that won't be until 2021 but you know I will start doing it again. You can check out the old episodes on my youtube and you should also subscribe to that channel. I'm working on getting the audio podcast out on all podcast services and will be posting links as soon as everything is in place but for now you just have to use your detective skills if you sorely need the audio only version. This is only episode two. I'm still playing around with the format and I will continue playing around until I find something that works and that is sort of what we're going to be talking about today. Beginnings now I get asked all the time about how to get to start doing art but instead of answering it anew every time I thought maybe I should make a definitive guide in under an hour to starting everything. That sounds good. Anyhow I'm going to try as best as I can to get both specific enough to give concrete tips for art beginners and be broad enough in scope that you can apply it wherever you are in your art journey or even in other fields and hopefully be interesting and entertaining all the while. That sounds you know sufficiently challenging. I'm going to divide it into three different stages that can loop around in any order. Play, study, practice and then back to play again. First let's get into play. Now everything starts in play. As I said I'm still playing around with this new podcast because that's how you start anything new. Playing is how a child starts understanding the world around itself. Finding thrills and dangers and right and wrong and weird and fun and soft and hard and bouncy and springy and runny and good and evil. Play extends into all creative practices. You play music, actors play their parts, you write and perform morality plays, you do word plays and playing around with paint or pencil is the most essential part of making art. Play is where your art begins. It should be made a part of your daily process and it's what you should return to whenever you're stuck. And play, serious play can of course be hard work. So my 8 year old just started football and if you're a kid figuring out what sport you should focus on it's easy to get pushed into doing something that doesn't really fit. So he might start football but if he doesn't like it at all he might quit sports altogether. Maybe he actually likes the running part but not the kicking the ball part so he should have picked track and field. Or maybe he loves the ball part but can't stand teamwork so he should have focused on trick play. The variations are endless and ideally your kid doesn't figure it out through signing up for a new sport every month, paying the tuition and quitting after a month because that's hard on the wallet. And it's a bad strategy also because it gets you used to accepting failure. What your kid ideally does is figure out a lot of this through free play. Do they like the running part, the aiming and hitting part, the team part, the colourful clothes part, the strategy, the organisation, the fighting. That's not to say he should only play a sport where he loves every second of it but in order to progress there needs to be an element of fun in there. So we played around with the football over some weeks and months and there was a lot of skepticism but eventually he found out that it was fun enough to try playing on a team. The way you find the element of fun is always through play. If you're an artist at the very start of your art journey, having never picked up a pencil and applied it to paper, you should do just that. Move the pencil around on the paper. Does it feel good? Is making lines fun? How about coloured pencils? Watercolours? Pastels? What shapes are fun-making? Abstract shapes? Patterns? Colours? Funny faces? Trying to replicate reality? What feels good to you? Through free play, through experimenting with as many different expressions and tools as you can you will slowly start honing in on what the essence of art is to you and you might surprise yourself. And the question won't be answered by doodling for a few hours, in fact it may take a lifetime but you can start seeing the outline rather soon. And the first and simplest way to know if you should do art is to ask do you feel making art is fun? If no, perhaps try music, coding, sewing, whatever, there are a million creative things out there and this approach should apply to most of them. In fact this approach should be the start of most any project. You get a big new art job, well start playing around with it and figure out where is the fun? Where is the challenge? Because that's going to be the essence of the job. When I get a job doing say a new album cover I start by listening to the music and doodling, letting the pencils jump around making generally silly and unintelligible things in rhythm to the beats. Most of the time I won't even get a single good idea during the first sketching session but that's not the point. The point is to play around, getting familiar with the music and then the good ideas they can come whenever they need to come. Before take my whole art journey all artists are constant beginners and there's always something we're trying out for the first time. Whenever I feel stuck in my artistic development I try to go back to this state of play. The reason I started drawing concerts from the side of the stage was a variety of this sense of play. I was broke but I had tickets to the Hole in the Sky Festival so I took a sketchbook with me to play around with and do something constructive with my time while enjoying the concerts. The reason I started my daily ink monsters was that I felt stuck in certain aspects of my artistic life and I wanted to go back to the playful joy of inking and integrate that into my daily routine. When I started to learn how to paint with oils one of the first things I had to do was just play around and see how the oil feels hitting the canvas. Oil feels completely different from inks, different from watercolours, different from acrylics and it was in fact through playing around with oils that I finally in a ha moment figured out the huge difference between painting and drawing. But that difference is so huge that it's at least an episode in itself. To sum up this first part, the first thing you should do is always play around. If you have the finances, go out and buy some fancy new art equipment and play with it. But know that you're going to mess around with it so don't buy anything you're going to feel too precious about. You're going to waste it. Now if you don't want to sacrifice your wallet to the gods of art or you simply don't have the money, do the smart thing. Find the cheapest paper you can get. Steal free pencils from IKEA. Start messing around. Get old newspapers from the dentist's office and draw moustaches on everyone. Draw with chalk on the pavements and walls of your city. Steal your baby brother's crappy crayons. Draw with sticks in the sand. Just draw. Mess around. Play. The second part is study. Study can be reading books. It can be watching tutorials on YouTube. But it's not limited to that. It's any seeking out of information that pertains to whatever you're trying to do. Most of the time it's actually just sketching. Sketching flowers or trees or birds or hands or noses. But it can also be asking your local art shops about the tools and paper. It can be taking a class on medieval pottery. It can be whatever you want. Through play you should be able to identify what you like doing and what you would like doing. So let's say you like moving the pencil around on the paper and you would like to draw realistically. So how do you know what to start studying? Drawing realistically is an endless field because it's not just drawing realistic faces and hands. It's drawing realistic sunsets and plants and animals and boats and bugs and bacteria and supernovas and hair and skin pores and fabric and concrete and wood grain and buildings and bridges and shadows and textures and guns and spoons and every goddamn thing in the entirety of existence. So how do you know where to start? Well there's a simple tool you can use to identify two separate and important fields of study. First, what do you like drawing? What actually gives you joy? And second, what do you hate drawing? What fills you with dread just thinking about? For me, both as I started and now really, I love drawing bodies and I hate drawing cars. Bodies is a wonderfully broad field which includes drawing constructive anatomy, life drawing, croquis, portraits and some degree of medical anatomy and the rules of animation and so on and so on and so on. And you have to sort of narrow your search even more. So a good idea to narrow your search is to look at your heroes. My heroes were all US comic book artists. As I started to study drawing, it was Frank Miller, it was Eric Larson, Todd McFarlane, Sam Keith, Simon Bisley, Jay Lee, John Bushema and so on. Marvel Comics was my first love and luckily for me, John Bushema had written a book on how to draw comics the Marvel way. My whole approach to drawing anatomy still lies within that book. How to draw comics the Marvel way is an interesting book. Bushema, who wrote and drew it, is one of the all-time greats of American superheroes. He was a failed painter who never wanted to be a comic book artist, but he became a powerhouse of artistic technique at Marvel. Being able to crank out four comics a month, sometimes adding up to 120 pages or more. His original pencil sketches show hastily scrolled stick figures still displaying perfect proportion, anatomy, acting and storytelling. While Jack Kirby's idiosyncratic style and imagination-defined Marvel Comics, it was Bushema who took that storytelling style and showed how it could be applied to a much more realistic drawing without losing any power. All his career, Bushema basically just wanted to draw Conan the Barbarian, which was full of everything he loved drawing. But he constantly had to fight to be able to keep drawing Conan at a much lower pay per page than his other comics, because he was simply too popular and prolific to be allowed to dedicate himself to what was considered a B-grade fantasy comic. He also mentored younger Marvel artists in the bullpen and taught classes for years. So he was basically perfect to write how to draw comics the Marvel way. The problem is, of course, that in order to sell the book, it had to be the Marvel way, and in order to be the Marvel way, it had to be written by Stan Lee. Stan Lee is known as the father of Marvel Comics, but anyone who does a little research sees that he's somewhat of a charismatic, used car salesman. Constantly accused by his so-called collaborators of leaching their creativity and taking credit for their works. Artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were writers at heart and came up with not only most of the characters of Marvel Comics, but also plotted and wrote the stories. Stories that Stan Lee, or his assistants, later rewrote the dialogue off and then put Stan Lee's name on. I'm not really trying to belittle Stan Lee's importance because without him, we wouldn't have the Marvel Comics we know today, but after Lee stopped working with legends like Kirby Ditko and Bushema, then his best-known creation is Stripperella, created together with Baywatch star and playmate Pamela Anderson, and that probably shows the level of creativity he really had. There's an upcoming biography about Stan Lee, and I think it will open many eyes up to what a fabulously interesting con man Stan Lee was. But anyhow, back to Bushema. John Bushema never wanted to write comic book stories, but he said he had to do it when Marvel often would forget to send him new plots in time. Bushema did want to write a book on drawing comics, and he did it, but again, Stan Lee had to have his name on it, so he rewrote the text of the book. The result is a hideous Frankenstein of a book with beautiful illustrations showing you step-to-step how to draw, and stupidly entertaining text written by someone who has never held a pencil in their life. Still, in this short volume, you will find the basics of how I still think of constructive drawing. Now, the rabbit hole doesn't end with John Bushema. We're talking about learning anatomy, and how to draw comics the Marvel way only has a few pages on anatomy. When studying my comic book heroes, I wasn't only interesting in learning how to draw like them, but also in what inspired them to draw. And there was a few names that kept popping up, like Will Eisner, the father of the graphic novel, and Frank Fressetta, the most iconic fantasy painter of the last century, and coincidentally also responsible for creating the look of Conan the Barbarian that we know today. Now, Fressetta and Eisner and Bushema has a lot in common in how they draw their anatomy, and this is because they all studied anatomy, directly or indirectly, under George Bridgeman. And when I was just a little kid, my father, a great artist in his own right, gave me a few of George Bridgeman's anatomy books. Which can now be acquired in the collected volume Bridgeman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life. George Bridgeman's anatomy books, much like Bushema's Marvel way book, are fascinating Frankenstein's monsters of great skill and knowledge put together in the most haphazard way. As a figure in the last century's realistic or neoclassicist like, you know, that type of art and illustration, he is a hidden giant, and his shadow is cast over comic books and fantasy and video games and movies, all due to his tenure teaching anatomy classes at the Art Students League of New York for 45 important years when illustration and comics blossomed in New York City. New York was the epicenter of the new art forms of the early 20th century. Poor immigrant kids like John Bushema and Frank Fransetta and Will Eisner and others like the great Jack Kirby were basically street rats who got good at making art in order to claw their way out of the streets. And one thing that fascinates me, coming from the socialist Norway, so-called socialist Norway, is that museums in the United States are free. Here in Norway, where the state pays for basically everything, or our taxes pay for everything, we still have to pay to get into museums. In New York, kids like Bushema, Fransetta and Eisner, all separately without knowing each other, went to museums like MoMA and the Metropolitan simply to kill time because they were broke and museums were free. There, they got introduced to history, to modern art, to the European impressionists, to classical painting and the Renaissance. But as far as proper art education, most alternatives were simply too expensive. The Art Students League of New York, not really a formal art school, had a ton of different classes that you could sign up for relatively cheap. George Bridgeman taught long and short courses, day and night classes for 45 years. He was a short and stocky man and his classes were absolutely packed with people. So in order for him to be able to draw examples for the class, he taped his huge papers to a board suspended in an angle from the ceiling so everyone could see and drew with a big graphite or coal pencil attached to the end of a long stick. So picture this round little bald man in front of an absolutely crammed classroom drawing with a stick on an angled board high above him. Now Bridgeman didn't have time to write any books on drawing. He had too many classes to teach. So instead, he and his students collected leftover ceiling drawings from his classes and edited them together with lectures transcribed by students. And that is what Bridgeman's books are. Ceiling drawings and more or less random explanations. Bridgeman approved the books and he might even have drawn or written some original parts for them, but they are more or less just ceiling drawings drawn with a long stick and they are beautiful. Hidden in this wonderfully loose line work and sometimes rather esoteric text is one of the best systems for constructing anatomical drawings ready for you to decipher it. So there you have two good anatomical books to start with, but the art of drawing from images in a book can itself be hard. And all these artists I admired didn't just draw from classes and books, they took life drawing. They preached the importance of life drawing. And life drawing, well, you have to fool your brain into not drawing what it think it sees but what it actually sees. One of the best books to learn doing just that is Betty Edward, but Betty bought a bit of, but a bit of, sorry, Betty Edwards book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain published in 1979. Now it's not a Frankenstein's monster of a book, it is rather a step-by-step guide to fooling your brain into being able to draw what it actually sees or to even see what it actually sees. And interestingly, it is one of the main culprits in spreading the commonly held myth that the right hemisphere of the brain is the creative part, while the left hemisphere is the logical part. Betty Edwards was not a brain scientist. She was an art teacher. Her theory on how the brain works was based on her understanding of the science and that was flawed from the start. And later research has confirmed that no, creativity is not exclusive to the right side of the brain. Still, the impact of the book was such that a lot of people still think it's true. And there's a good reason for that because even if the science behind it is wrong, the book is shockingly effective at teaching you how to draw what you see, to draw realistically based on a model or photograph in front of you. And it can teach it to you really quickly. And those techniques are equally useful when it comes to learning how to copy drawings from a book. So if you start with how to draw comics the Marvel way, Bridgeman's complete guide to life drawing and drawing on the right side of the brain, you have a truly great start at how to learn how to draw realistically with a pencil. Does this mean it's my official recommendation? No. It's just one of a thousand different approaches. You could go to a YouTube channel like Proko, P-R-O-K-O by Stan Proko Penko. Stan Proko Penko. It's not that difficult, Proko Penko. And get a lot of great tutorials there and demonstrations and discussions and interviews on all manner of art. And when you get into that world of concept artists for film and games, you will very quickly find Andrew Loomis and his great books on drawing. Loomis, himself a student of Bridgeman, was a clear and innovative art teacher. But it's not the greatness of his books that made him highly influential, even though they are great books. It was simply that the books were out of print in the early 2000s and in the 90s when someone rescued them by putting them up online for free under the name The Loomis Project. And every broke kid dreaming of becoming a comic book artist or fantasy painter or a concept artist for games and films suddenly had a fantastic free resource. Or you could go on and find a bunch of anatomy books written and drawn by artists who are doctors for a more medical approach. You could study medical anatomy or you could ask your local coroner to let them draw corpses, let you draw corpses, I mean. Or you could get one of the thousands of great books or online courses that are new to me and I don't have a personal relation with. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to study. When studying art, reading and taking classes is not what you will do the most of. What you will do the most is drawing. You want to learn how to draw hands, draw your hands. They're right there in front of you. Draw them again and again. See how they're built. Watch them, move them, touch them, draw them. Want to figure out how your favorite artist draws? Then copy them. Perhaps start by copying them freehand, then go on placing tracing paper over their art and trace it. Then go on figuring out how they construct their drawings. Look at sketches. Find the simple shapes underneath the art. Then try to draw their art in another style or find out who their artistic heroes were and trace their evolution as an artist. The point is that just by deciding to learn a little bit about anatomy, we have learned about shysters in the superhero industry, about street life in the 20th century New York, about, you know, we have myth busted a common misconception about the brain and we could have made so many more detours into the influence of Japanese prints on absent drunken French impressionists about grave robbing renaissance thugs and their mafia connections. We could have learned the medical names of every muscle in the body. The more you learn, the more you see that there's even more. It's a cliche, but the more you learn, the more there is to learn. And if you find drawing bodies fun, then all this research will be fun or at least less skull-crushingly boring than if you were forced to sit through all of it in school. If you like something, learning about it becomes easier. So therefore, using what you like doing should be the basis of most of your learning. But what about learning from what you hate doing? I did mention that, didn't I? Back in the good old days of this podcast. Well, I don't like drawing cars. I probably never will like drawing cars. Cars are simply not for me. But in studying how to draw cars, they get slightly less terrifying to draw. And there's a lot to learn. Drawing perspective, drawing mechanical objects, mechanical drawing is a field in itself. The design and the shapes of cars, automotive history and so on. Not only have I drawn cars from life and photographs for endless hours, but I have watched tons of documentaries and videos on car history. And I have a handful of books just on cars. And if you ask me a car question, I don't know. My brain will probably never retain the information in the same way it does information regarding anatomy. I can't name you a single groundbreaking car designer whose curvy lines shaped how we see transportation. I can barely identify a Ford Model T. And I'll never become a great car artist. But learning about cars has made me confident enough that if I get a project that will involve drawing cars, or shudder if I'm pitched a sci-fi project full of all types of mechanical gadgets from hell, I'm no longer afraid of it. I can simply, rationally judge whether or not the hassle is worth it. To go back to my 80-year-old son's football adventure, not long ago he had his first football practice and he absolutely hated it. He was confused, angry, didn't know what to do, wanted to quit. So we taught him the fundamentals of football, corners, throw-ins, free kicks and so on, and taught him not to always run after the ball, but rather break free so his teammates could kick the ball to him. And the next practice, he absolutely loved it and loves it still. Studying something makes it easier. Studying something hard makes it suck less. And that brings us finally to the last part of our loop, practice. By practice, I don't just mean practicing a skill to get better at it, but I mean putting the skill to practice and your whole art practice, putting it out in the real world. Now when playing with art or when studying art, you are under no obligation to make a finished piece and you're certainly not under any obligation to show it to anyone. Well, if you do a class or a course, you do show it to your teacher or your classmates, but it's still confined within the safety of being just a study. Or if we go back to my kid's football career, we're not talking about practice as in the football practices, we're talking about the practice of playing actual matches. They might be friendly matches, league matches, cups or finals or just matches with friends in the streets, but there has to be something at stake. Take for instance, the drawing I'm drawing right now for this episode. The scene is called The Rape of Persephone. It's from Greek mythology. It's also known as The Rape or Abduction of Proserpina in Roman mythology. It's a well-established scene in art history. Bernini made his famous sculpture around 1621. Rubens painted it in 1637. Rembrandt may have painted it around the same time. Now, the word rape here. It's also called Abduction, but I choose to use the former word. Although the words are used interchangeably to mean kidnapping in a lot of old tales, I feel that the word rape more sinisterly captures what's happening in this actual story. The story is of the kidnapping of Persephone. She is the goddess of spring. She is daughter of Demeter, who is the goddess of harvest and of Zeus, who is the king of the gods. The story starts with Hades, brother of Zeus and lord of the underworld, which coincidentally is also called Hades. So Hades is the ruler of Hades and it's all sort of confusing. But anyhow, Hades falls in love with Persephone and asks his brother for permission to marry her. Now, Zeus knows that Demeter will not allow her daughter to move to the underworld and marry Hades, but he is sympathetic to his brother's plight. So together they concoct a plan. One day, while Persephone is out walking, picking flowers with their friends, the daughters of Oceanos, the daughters of the ocean, she spots a beautiful Narcissus flower, but its roots are buried deep and it's hard to pluck. As she tugs and tears at the flower, the ground itself opens up. Hades rides out on his chariot, drawn by hellish horses, and he carries Persephone away to the underworld. To make a long story short, hijinks ensue. Demeter gets furious, all plants stop growing on earth, and after more plotting and scheming, Hades accepts to give her back, but only if she has not eaten anything while in the underworld. Of course, Persephone has just eaten some pomegranate seeds, perhaps being tricked by Hades to do so, and finally, it is agreed that she will spend some of the year in the underworld with her husband and some of the year above ground with her mother. And every time she is with Hades, her mother Demeter mourns, and that's why we have winter. It is a powerful, dramatic, and even funny myth of winter's harsh assault on harvest that has to come before every spring. It holds within it echoes of the earlier Mesopotamian myth of Ishtar's descent into the underworld, also dividing the year into fertile and infertile periods. It is a tale of beginnings. The reason I choose it as the artwork for this episode does not have to do with theme, but with time. It was simply practical. There is a great podcast called the Dark Art Society podcast, hosted by the fantastic artist Chet Tsar, and I support that podcast on Patreon. One of the perks of supporting it on Patreon is that you get to join a group called the Dark Art Society Co-operative. It's a closed group where a bunch of the world's greatest dark artists post stuff in relatively private settings to a group of like-minded artists and collectors and peers. Now, every month they host an informal contest based around a theme and the members vote on the winner. There's no prize, not even exposure, but it's a fantastic place to practice in front of some of the best of the best of my peers. I'm constantly out of my league, but that's half the fun. Now, this month's theme was Greek mythology and not only have I been in love with the image of Hades' chariot coming up from the earth itself, ever since I saw it rendered by Sam Keith in the funny philosophers' comic Epicurus the Sage when I was like a teenager, but the story of Persephone has been popping up in many places in my life recently, so I knew I had to tackle it. But as I was writing this podcast, the deadlines for the contest loomed closer and closer, and I had to realize that I simply didn't have time to do it, unless I made it into the episode art for this very episode. You don't practice when it suits you, you put practice into every opportunity you get. Now, if you're watching this in video format, you can actually see how the art has been progressing, but if you're listening to the audio format, you will just have to trust me. Now, in making The Rape of Persephone, I'm actually going through everything I've talked about in this podcast. I'm going through all the stages. I start with playing, scribbling some lines on paper, then going into sketch a few thumbnails, then back to modifying the original sketch, and I'm playing around with pencil, thinking out loud on the paper, trying to figure out the anatomy of the figures. Now, in my daily practice, I do too much art directly with ink, so I'm really feeling rusty with the pencils and the anatomy, but I keep playing around with the shapes. I quickly choose to draw the figure's nude because it's both appropriate for the Greek theme and for my love of drawing bodies, but I don't have the time or the budget to photograph models to figure out the correct anatomy, so I have to put on my best George Bridgeman and construct the anatomy. Then I have to take a break to do research, and I come back with a bunch of photos of Greek chariots. Now, chariots, they are like the cars of the ancient world, and I'm only slightly more fond of them than of modern cars. They are hard for me, and I did mine completely wrong from memory, so I end up redrawing actually everything I did before the research. The research doesn't only pertain to that damn chariot, pun intended, but also to the horses, which are always tricky, and to the Narcissus flower, which I honestly couldn't have picked out in a lineup. Now, the Narcissus has a beautiful yellow and white coloration, giving a color theme to the whole drawing in black, white, and yellow. It echoes the fight between life and death, winter and spring, and I marry the two opposites in ink. And then, because I played around with the composition in the beginning, and I did my research on the chariot, when I finally start inking the art, then the practice becomes play, and that's how it is. If you practice what you love, practice itself becomes play. And at the end of your practice, you get to taste the fruit of your labor. That's the reward. It might be sweet or foul, but hopefully it will give you enough nourishment to start the cycle anew. You spit out the seeds, say you retreat underground into death, into winter, before they come back in spring, bearing new fruit to harvest. It is the marriage of Hades and Persephone. It is the practice. Maybe we're stretching the analogies a bit here. Anyhow, entering the art into the informal competition over at the Dark Art Society is not the point of making the art. Putting myself out there and getting practice is the point. And with the advent of social media, there are more chances to get your practice in front of an audience, an audience so big you could never dream of it in earlier ages. Next month is October, which a lot of artists know as Inktober. The illustrator Jake Parker made the Inktober challenge just for himself back in 2009 to practice his inking skills in a public way and to commit to a schedule. And it grew to millions and millions of posts using the hashtag each October. These are artists challenging themselves and trying to get attention by attaching themselves to the popular trend. I don't remember quite when I first joined Inktober, but it was probably around 2011. And for the first few years, I absolutely failed. Drawing and ink drawing every day for a month shouldn't be all that hard, but it appears that it is. Then in 2014, I tried putting a price point on each piece of art and selling them. I found that they sold like hotcakes. And ever since, I have completed every Inktober. And October is an important month for me economically. But in order to pull it off, I, yeah, I had to up the stakes. Then last Inktober, I was feeling burnt out and depressed, but I also felt that the practice of drawing something public every day was a good practice, both for my art skills and for my mental health. And I had been doing a lot more acrylic and oil painting and less traditional inking. So I wanted to create something every day of the year, but with lower stakes. So I created my daily Ink monsters. First, it was in secret at the now defunct Instagram account. And then they found their life on TikTok with millions of views. I didn't plan on making daily Ink monsters a big thing. I only knew that I needed the practice, but sometimes practice takes a life of its own. And it's kind of directly attributed to those Ink monsters that I now start a podcast. And there's so many art challenges out there. Inktober, Gnomember, Mermaid, Monster May, a hundred days of comics, a hundred portrait challenges, and so on and so on. And so many places where you can find communities to share your practice with. So there's really no excuse anymore. Play, study, and put it to practice. And whenever I get a new job offer, this is how I judge it. Will it be fun to play with? Will it lead to interesting study? Will it help my overall practice? If the answer is no to those, then it will take a lot more money to make it worth it. And of course, you don't win every time. I am still struggling to make ends meet, but I'm getting there. It took a few tries to get my Inktober practice up and running. Daily Ink monsters were not the first time I had set a daily challenge for myself. And during the first six months, it got absolutely no attention on any social media platform. I knew it was a good idea, but no one cared. There are concerts that I'm so happy that I got to draw and there are some I'd rather forget. I've made some cool cover art for great bands and I've made some cover art that is generic and sloppy at best. Failure is one of the best things to learn from because you have to figure out what went wrong in order to avoid doing it again. And even to just to write this podcast, I had to play around a bit. I had to study a bit. I had to put it to practice. And who knows, maybe I'll have a new beginner's guide to art in a year or two or five. But for now, to anyone starting out, my advice can be summed up like this. Play around as much as you can and figure out what you like doing. Then identify the part you really like and the ones you struggle with and study those. And finally, find places to put it out in practice. Find something that will present a challenge to you but make sure that challenge has room to play around in a fun way and has something interesting for you to learn and study and that the end result, whether it succeeds or fails, will further your practice. Now, to end it all, my eight-year-old played his first football match. He was really scared of it but he managed to convince himself to give it a go. They lost seven to 11 and he had a lot of fun. Success. Okay, so you have listened this far so I hope that means you enjoyed the podcast. If you have any questions or anything to add or counterpoints or ideas, then by all means please message me. Do subscribe to my channels all around the net. I'm den unge-hadholm on YouTube, den unge-hadholm on Instagram, den unge-hadholm on TikTok, den unge-hadholm on Facebook. And if you like my podcast or my art, you can support me at www.patreon.com slash kimholm. Last but not least, I'm an artist making art for free use. The best way to support me is to use my art or share it with someone who might need it. Thank you.