 Welcome to episode two today. We're gonna talk about the myth of innate skill to be a great artist What I wanted to talk about is that all award-winning or Competition or display level pick your pick your favorite topic all the best miniature painters have an innate talent Right that there's something innate about skill you have to have to be a great miniature painter. I would say That's a myth Why do I think that because if every award-winning miniature painter would be a natural talent? Then that will be an awful lot of talent out there I've got to say Travarion hit me with a really solid point here right away Like all you have to do is come to something like golden demon calm or demon winners or anything and just scroll through this page Take a look at all of the different names behind all of these incredible pieces and yeah Sometimes you see repeating there are certainly some people who've won multiple awards over the years But what you'll actually see as you scroll through is just that there is a tremendous amount of talent out there and this is just one of Hundreds of miniature painting competitions the list for salute or Monte Sansevino or Crystal brush or the capital palette or whatever would all be different people and the idea that every single one of these people Was born with some kind of innate talent? It just seems statistically unlikely now all admit that's a gut feeling you might say well Yeah, it's still a relatively small part of the population. Maybe it's possible and maybe you're right But to me I just am willing to bet if I went out and asked every one of these people Hey, do you feel you had innate artistic talent or did you train pretty hard to get there? I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of them would not tell me that this was something they painted with very little training Practice and time. I think all these people probably put in a heck of a lot of hours to get to this point There's so many talented artists out there and yet people still say this all the time I could never achieve this. So the question then is why Why do they say this? Well, I think we've got some ideas I don't want to you know be rude and and say everyone It's lazy, but it's A bit of a shield that it can put up and say, okay, I cannot go any further than what I can do Because I'm just not that talented and other people will always have a I will always be ahead of me Because I'm not talented enough But I think and I'm pretty sure because I feel like I also had that approach People always forget that the people that they see On instagram like you mentioned they all have a very long History of painting miniatures and they had they put in a lot of work And sure some are going to have a natural knack for something you know, however Paint behaves or how paint interacts or color harmonies and all of that But I'm pretty sure with a lot of people. There's a lot of work And a lot of trial and error and a lot of investment That we don't see I just believe innate talent has almost nothing to do with it Uh, certainly in professional athletes, that's the case If you think of maybe the greatest athlete one of the try the greatest basketball player Maybe one of the greatest athletes of all time somebody like Michael Jordan He was an incredibly innately talented guy Right upcoming up through high school and everything else and then he went to college and he got cut Because he wasn't putting in any any actual work and he had to go and he trained hard and for the rest of his Life he would train very very very hard. You know, he didn't become The greatest of all time accidentally Uh, it was it was through hours and hours and hours of hard work Yes, he had a good leg up over some competition But by the time he got to people when he met then on the field people who had put in the hours His natural talent was found wanting So the question is Does that also apply to miniature painting in some form? Yeah, I think there's probably some levels of like Dexterity or just kind of the way people it might even not be genetic It could be just training in other ways Like some people are naturally good at recognizing things like color and understanding color balance and still like you mentioned earlier I don't know how like I don't know the brain well enough to know how much of that's, you know Truly like quote unquote genetic and how much of it's just sort of nature versus nurture, right? But some people do have those kinds of elements and I think that can make the learning curve More or less shallow right this this art has quite a shallow learning curve If you really are just starting from zero There's a lot of nuance to it. There's a lot of things to to learn and understand And so I think you could start, you know farther ahead on that curve But in the end the answer is those people who you see Painting that stuff they put in the hours Also a factor is that when people come over from other Art professions, but there is multiple people like that So when they come in with a certain training and a trained eye Into not a field of art then that can look like Magic and the important part there is they didn't show up with innate skill still, right? It was still just training in a different artistic field. They had they were interested in art Maybe they had been you know, they had been drawing and stuff since they were young But they still went and trained they spent hours in university or something like that doing The work learning the stuff, right? So they just they happened to shortcut their miniature painting training time by spending that training time doing something else another example for someone who really put in the work and within A short amount of time accomplished. I'll say a sword win is Vincent Haddon or Haddon, I don't know how to pronounce his name. I think it's Vincent Haddon Who painted magma tracks if you remember that one? Yep That was a really great miniature and I think it was in 2007 And he started from zero artistic experience and from obviously a zero experience in miniature painting and he painted a seya sword winner And he also mentioned that he put in about 18 months of time into getting that one figure right and Whenever you put in that amount of time And you're willing to learn so you always say deliberate practice um Yeah, then you can achieve a lot of success and a lot of progress Do you think there's any parts of this that are specifically tuned to where innate Where we're sort of innate talent or innate skill things Maybe they're born with it right where that actually has real Weight and impact like is there any element of this where that does shine out to me? They're this this thing we do seems to split largely into two Conceptual categories and I'm I'll admit I'm making a bit of a logical fallacy here But let's just walk down this road for a moment the It seems to split into the technical and the sort of purely artistic now obviously there's no actual bright line between those those are highly overlapping circles But what I mean is like there's a technical craft Understanding your brush control how paint is going to react what you know when you add water to it What does dilution do how to properly? What are colors going to what what when you put two colors together? How are they going to interact right is it going to be a positive thing or a negative thing? Understanding how you can glaze one color over another and if you keep them separate versus mixing them There's lots of little technical picadillos how to get paint to flow smoothly off your brush and yada yada yada, right? And that's all very technical stuff. It doesn't feel to me like innate Has almost any impact there like that's just stuff you've got to learn and in the end Most of those elements are what great miniature painters have have sort of internalized through hours and hours and hours and hours of practice and experience And then I think there is something of like the artistic side of it is the other half where you just kind of have an eye Understanding what colors are going to look cool together being willing to experiment With using different colors or interesting compositions or things like that you can learn all of that There's nothing that's un-learnable About that But I do think if there's anything where maybe it has a slightly higher percentage It's that just because some people we often hear it said like oh Just in casual conversation somebody who always dresses nice You'll say you have a you have such a nice eye for for color or something like that, right? You pick out outfits that look really nice or or things like that So I think that that could be one where they have a slight Leg up, but it's still largely you're gonna have to stack a ton of training on top of that So I want to take another moment to talk about the technical In the artistic I mentioned that I think these are two distinct Components of miniature painting and when we look at something like the technical It really consists of those elements that we learn brush control Paint dilution, you know how to glaze and stuff like that The techniques and the application of the paint these are all learned skills And other than perhaps a slight edge of manual dexterity It's hard to imagine how anybody could have an innate talent at stuff like this If you put this into any other realm if you're training to be an HVAC repair person No one expects you to have innate skill at Fixing an air conditioner or a broken coil or something like that Those are learned skills where you have to understand the parts the components and how everything works The artistic side of it though when we think about things like the ability to understand good composition Or color balance or even channel emotion into your pieces I think that's a part where sometimes people just happen to have a brain or a way of thinking That is more attuned to these sorts of things where they can Because of either their imagination or their upbringing or maybe it's just something in a gene who knows But they have a better eye for that sort of thing However, just because you might not count yourself as one of those Doesn't mean that there's no hope for you or that you can't learn it as we're just about to find out when I'm sitting down and I'm Planning my next project I always have to look somewhere else. I I rarely Have that picture in mind sometimes I do but It's like one out of 10 times and then I just have to look somewhere else Maybe a movie maybe an artwork by someone else um, maybe someone who already did the topic in miniature form and then I'm just Trying to find an angle that I like and then I try to do my own version of it I think that's um, yeah, that's something What you call the artistic side of it Is I is what I feel less comfortable with so with the technical prowess I had 15 years to practice that um, I have not always thought about composition and all of that during that time. So it might be that I just have a Have less time invested into studying it But I I feel like That I always have to look somewhere else But I think you can Or we must not say that's a bad thing we kind of have to Be aware of the weaknesses that we have and also the strengths and maybe focus on your strengths And and have them play into what we do um, which also again Plays into style or developing a style and whenever we have weaknesses We we have to again deliberately See what we are lacking And how we can compensate for that for me It is looking at artworks for example to get inspired and get the creative chooses rolling Yeah, I think that's I think you're dead on there There's sort of that element of the artistic side that is inspiration, right the muse The how readily to these are you someone who ideas are just kind of popping into your head constantly and you're always thinking Oh, I want to do a fake that looks like this and all this piece could look like this or this or this We live in a world that's full of inspiration constantly You know, we live in a world with centuries and centuries of art at our fingertips You mentioned looking at at art like you can you can look at every piece of art done by every old master for the past Five centuries online in seconds browsing thousands and thousands of galleries You can look at You know hundreds of thousands of other people's miniatures at tons of incredible like real world vistas and stuff like that So I think we it's it's a nice time to have that challenge So a reasonable question you might ask is all right. I want to be inspired I don't find myself readily having that muse available What do I do when people come to me to ask for advice that comes up a lot So how do I get inspired and I always ask well, did you did you work? Did you look at any Particular artwork or any any other art form or anything like that that could inspire you and Most of the time to say no, so that's not really a concept that is in the public A mind or the the hive mind for whatever reason And yeah, maybe we can inspire a lot more people to to do that and go out there and look at that stuff like that I I think one of the the final nails in in sort of this the coffin of this myth Is the idea of just how many hours people actually put in So most of the artists that I've interviewed or talked to or you know people who I Just look at their their work and I'm blown away by it people such as yourself it's Amazing how many hours not just years I don't like to think about years because years you could paint like one million a year and that's a year Right. I like to think about actual hours of painting So so let's do this real quick. How many hours a week would you say right now? You paint on average or you're engaged in some, you know form of the hobby I would like to go back maybe to when I had more time and when Painting was a hobby I definitely painted Sessions that were 10 to 12 hours long Where everything I did was painting And then I just got up for food and went to bed and then just did it again So there was definitely a time in my life where Mostly painted and did nothing else. Yeah, I think that's right. It's like I think people I mentioned it earlier But people don't see the hours. I mean you've been painting for you know, pretty Uh, you know pretty regularly and at a high level now for 15 years. Is that right? That's your said earlier on and off. Yeah and To me that's when you think about the number of hours you would have spent in that time period learning and then again Doing it a deliberate way because you were also competing in a lot of that space You were getting feedback in a lot of that space, right and that stuff that accelerates learning So I what what always bothers me is the and you kind of mentioned this earlier Is I think it's an easy defense to say I could never paint like that Because I don't have quality x and I think that that is somewhat of a defense You don't have to feel like you need to paint like that. You don't need to paint like that paint however you like that makes you happy That's fine Okay, there's nothing wrong with painting just at like tabletop standard constantly and you make armies and you're happy with them great That's fantastic. You're you're living vicariously in your hobby and that's wonderful But at the same time if you do want to improve you can't it's just the hours in the deliver practice That's all it is. That's every artist. I've talked to Who's put in 5,000 10,000 15,000 20,000 plus hours That's what it is It's just they put in that time And so even if you don't have a lot of time every day if you set aside one hour and you focus on some deliberate thing You're working on I think you see that's when the benefits happen. That's when the breakthroughs happen Right, that's when you start learning So what's the summary in the end? I think when you look at what we discussed you see how you Only witness what these painters do on their most recent piece And it's easy to look at that destination which seems so far away Over the horizon on your own personal hobby journey and go I could never get there But it's no different than looking at the real physical horizon And seeing how far away it is and thinking I could never get there But if you take enough steps or get in your car and drive or get in an airplane You'd be amazed how far you end up and it's the same here Those hours of deliberate practice that focus that training Is what will end up advancing you if you're willing to put in the time And yes, some people might have some amount of skill and might be able to start slightly ahead of you on the curve They might be a little better at understanding colors or understanding composition But in the end, there's no reason that if you want to you can achieve the same thing So there you go. I do hope you enjoyed this everybody. Give it a like Don't forget these alternate back and forth between my channel and travarian's channel You can look down below and find the playlist that actually has the videos on both channels So you can watch those in order Travarian's information is all down below as well Please do go over and subscribe to him and give all the videos in this series a like But I do hope you appreciated this. I hope you enjoy our myth busting And as always, we thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time