Articles on Creativity
How To Plan And Teach An Animation Camp For Kids
This article is a case study of how I helped develop and run a summer animation camp for a group of 16 very enthusiastic kids. Myth: We Should Wait For the State To Provide A Quality Creative Education For Our Children. One of the developmental creative myths that I...
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The Braveheart Guide To Winning Back Your Creative Freedom In 10 Steps
What Creative Freedoms Are Important To You? History is full of inspiring stories about heroes who made incredible sacrifices for a thing called freedom. William Wallace, portrayed by Mel Gibson in the award winning film Braveheart, is a stirring example of someone...
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How To Have The Most Creative Year EVER in 2016
Click Here to Get the Workbook for this article. Generally, I try to avoid clichés. That includes writing year-end posts with titles like "How to Have The Most Creative Year Ever In [ insert year here. ]". But since I'm so fond of irony, i'll go ahead and write this...
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15 Ways To Get Creatively Motivated
We've all been there. We want to be productive artists who get recognized for our work... but we just can't seem to get off our duff and actually create the art. It's kind of a chicken-and-egg situation, when you think about it... we want to have the benefits of being...
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The Messy Artist Myth
This is the third in a series of posts called "The 12 Artist Myths" that explores the most common widely held beliefs people have about artists and creative individuals of all types. It also represents beliefs that we artists have about ourselves that hold us...
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12 Ways Fear Stops Artists Dead In Their Tracks
As painful as this is… It’s time to talk about fear. Nobody except for crazy people are immune to fear. Artists are especially vulnerable to fear, because by necessity we have to be sensitive to the world around us. We get used to our fears. We're so accustomed to...
read moreArticles on Artistic Fulfillment
How To Plan And Teach An Animation Camp For Kids
This article is a case study of how I helped develop and run a summer animation camp for a group of 16 very enthusiastic kids. Myth: We Should Wait For the State To Provide A Quality Creative Education For Our Children. One of the developmental creative myths that I...
read more
How Everyone Can Benefit From A Charity Art Auction
This is, quite literally, what a stampede for art looks like. (Click the video below.) This depicts the scene at a recent art event called Canvas For A Cause, benefitting the Children's Medical Center of Dallas. The annual art auction was held at ReelFX Creative...
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The Talent Myth
There has always been a lot of excessive attention placed on raw talent. It's easy to understand why. The youthful prodigy that practically emerges from the womb playing concertos makes a much more compelling story than the quasi-talented hard worker. But the...
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11 Ways Artists Can Better Manage Their Time
As artists, we often struggle with time. Perhaps it’s because we intuitively discovered the theory of relativity centuries before Einstein was able to formally describe it. We discovered that the creative process tends to operate independently of time. This is...
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The Messy Artist Myth
This is the third in a series of posts called "The 12 Artist Myths" that explores the most common widely held beliefs people have about artists and creative individuals of all types. It also represents beliefs that we artists have about ourselves that hold us...
read more
The Secret to Overcoming Creative Block
We have all heard if, if not experienced, the mythical beast called writer's block. Yes, that's right. I said it. It's a myth. Let's go back to the definition of myth: A popularly held, but erroneous, belief. It has all the checkpoints of a myth. It's certainly a...
read moreArticles on Marketing Your Art
10 Reasons Why Creatives Have An Unfair Advantage In Business
How “Unfair” Can Work In Your Favor I learned pretty quickly how life can be unfair. I was a skinny, uncoordinated kid growing up. That meant I was usually near the last to be picked in the dog-eat-dog arena of spontaneous childhood playground sports. There I was,...
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What Back To The Future Teaches Us About Widening Our Creative Niche
I’m writing this in the waning hours of one of those impromptu cultural “holidays” that sometimes emerge from the grassroots of our culture… “Back To The Future Day." This quasi-holiday is named Back to the Future Day because in the second movie of the series, October...
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Sell The Outcome, Not The Art
It's easy to get wrapped up in the product we are creating, at the expense of recognizing its end result. What sells is not pixels, posters, or paint. What people want is the outcome. In sales circles, they frequently talk about a person selling drills. To sell a...
read more
How Everyone Can Benefit From A Charity Art Auction
This is, quite literally, what a stampede for art looks like. (Click the video below.) This depicts the scene at a recent art event called Canvas For A Cause, benefitting the Children's Medical Center of Dallas. The annual art auction was held at ReelFX Creative...
read more
How To Get More Traffic To Your Online Gallery or Portfolio Site, Part 1
We all could use some more eyeballs on our work. But like a busy city, the internet is crammed full of noise and lots of people clamoring for relevant attention. There are a lot of opinions and ideas about how to get more internet based traffic to your online gallery...
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Why verbal communication is an essential skill you need to be a successful artist
I attended a media event for a successful and growing entertainment company today. The presentation was given by a number of talented directors, and showed the company's slate of current and upcoming projects. In the audience was a gathering of highly evolved creative...
read moreArticles on Money
Rich Artist, Poor Artist
Do you have a rich mindset… or a poor one? I wasn't born a natural entrepreneur. I had to be trained. ~ Robert Kiyosaki A few years ago I read an amazing little book. You may have heard of it. The book is called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. Robert makes it...
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How To Sell Your Art Without Feeling Bad About It
Why do we think of sales as a dirty process to be avoided? Are our negative experiences with invasive telemarketers and over-inquisitive department store staff causing us to see all sales in a negative way? I can certainly relate with that feeling. I value my privacy...
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11 Steps to Better Finances for Artists and Creatives
It almost seems like they don't belong in the same sentence: "finance" and "art". In fact, many who create for a living prefer to just make pretty stuff and let others do the "dirty work" of number crunching. But to completely abstain from all personal financial...
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6 Steps To Selling Your Creative Work
Selling Doesn't Have To Be Scary Words like "selling" can be terrifying to an artist. I certainly avoided the word like the plague nearly all of my life, ever since I was pressed into selling magazines for my school fundraiser. It was here, in sixth grade, that I...
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How Artists Should Think About Money (The Parable of the Stream)
How do you think about money? Do you see it as a finite, limited resource, always remaining just out of reach? Do you feel frustrated when you think about it, knowing in your heart that you will "never" attain the wealth you would like to have? Not to be filthy rich...
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The Starving Artist Myth
This is the first in a series of posts called "The 12 Artist Myths" that explores the most common widely held beliefs people have about artists and creative individuals of all types. It also represents beliefs that we artists have about ourselves that hold us...
read moreArticles on Your Creative Business
10 Reasons Why Creatives Have An Unfair Advantage In Business
How “Unfair” Can Work In Your Favor I learned pretty quickly how life can be unfair. I was a skinny, uncoordinated kid growing up. That meant I was usually near the last to be picked in the dog-eat-dog arena of spontaneous childhood playground sports. There I was,...
read more
The Braveheart Guide To Winning Back Your Creative Freedom In 10 Steps
What Creative Freedoms Are Important To You? History is full of inspiring stories about heroes who made incredible sacrifices for a thing called freedom. William Wallace, portrayed by Mel Gibson in the award winning film Braveheart, is a stirring example of someone...
read more
How To Have The Most Creative Year EVER in 2016
Click Here to Get the Workbook for this article. Generally, I try to avoid clichés. That includes writing year-end posts with titles like "How to Have The Most Creative Year Ever In [ insert year here. ]". But since I'm so fond of irony, i'll go ahead and write this...
read more
What Back To The Future Teaches Us About Widening Our Creative Niche
I’m writing this in the waning hours of one of those impromptu cultural “holidays” that sometimes emerge from the grassroots of our culture… “Back To The Future Day." This quasi-holiday is named Back to the Future Day because in the second movie of the series, October...
read more
Sell The Outcome, Not The Art
It's easy to get wrapped up in the product we are creating, at the expense of recognizing its end result. What sells is not pixels, posters, or paint. What people want is the outcome. In sales circles, they frequently talk about a person selling drills. To sell a...
read more
How To Get More Traffic To Your Online Gallery or Portfolio Site, Part 1
We all could use some more eyeballs on our work. But like a busy city, the internet is crammed full of noise and lots of people clamoring for relevant attention. There are a lot of opinions and ideas about how to get more internet based traffic to your online gallery...
read moreArticles on Having The Proper Artist Mindset
What Is A Hypercreative?… And How To Know If You Are One
Have you even wondered what it really means when someone uses the word "creative?" Maybe not... it's a pretty broad term. The word can refer to so many different things, can't it? "That child is really creative." "Can you put that ad creative on my desk?" "Leaders in...
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How To Plan And Teach An Animation Camp For Kids
This article is a case study of how I helped develop and run a summer animation camp for a group of 16 very enthusiastic kids. Myth: We Should Wait For the State To Provide A Quality Creative Education For Our Children. One of the developmental creative myths that I...
read more
The Beauty Myth: Why Art Doesn’t Have To Be Pretty (And A Case For Art That’s Downright Ugly)
The Beauty Myth says that the highest and best purpose of art is to be visually beautiful. It also implies that creative work should look to the standard of beauty first when it wants to attract attention, communicate a message, or sell a product. I assert that while...
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The Braveheart Guide To Winning Back Your Creative Freedom In 10 Steps
What Creative Freedoms Are Important To You? History is full of inspiring stories about heroes who made incredible sacrifices for a thing called freedom. William Wallace, portrayed by Mel Gibson in the award winning film Braveheart, is a stirring example of someone...
read more
How To Have The Most Creative Year EVER in 2016
Click Here to Get the Workbook for this article. Generally, I try to avoid clichés. That includes writing year-end posts with titles like "How to Have The Most Creative Year Ever In [ insert year here. ]". But since I'm so fond of irony, i'll go ahead and write this...
read more
The Consumer Myth
The Consumer Myth is the idea that artists and creatives can consume media without being affected by it. My generation spent much of our childhoods convincing our parents that this wasn't true, especially when it came to video games. We certainly weren't alone - we...
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