Hey everyone!

Here's something that seems like a normal asshole thing at first glance, but if you think about it it's a good chance to adress some things that have been floating around in my head for a while anyways. Good can come from bad stuff too so I'll try to get something out of this!

Take a look at this: [link]

Hello I've been a long-time fan of your artwork, it's so fantastic to watch your progress! I wanted to tell you that someone over at Imageshack is claiming that you took some art without permission, you should see yourself-

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So a guy with 0 pageviews who joined today comes and tells me he's a longtime fan, on my frontpage instead of privately, and goes on to say he/she found on imageshack, a site with no browsing or blogging system,  some images from a guy claiming I used stuff without permission. Sounds legit so far right?

And then we look at a bunch of images, and read a bit of text, and this is where my patience to write this in a witty manner ends, because what we see is the insolence of a brazen liar who besides obviously being driven by malintent can't even tell between stuff that's painted and 3D.



Which leads me to the actual subject of this journal. A while back, when I started doing art, not only were my skills really bad, but also my ability to see the world. Practice not only changes what you can put into reality, but also what you can get out of it. Everyone of you who knows something about painting will know what I'm talking about - after a while you learn to see. And that alone is worth the time you put in, you'll be rewarded twice - not only with growing skill, but also with a gift that's worth maybe even more - the ability to see beauty in everything, to take in and understand the world, and also to see through bullshit, haha. This is what people who paint over photos don't get - yes there's actually people to whom it's blatantly obvious. All it takes is to know things about painting to understand what makes a painting look like a painting, and what makes a photo look like a photo.

There's something else about this that I find really encouraging. When I started to do leartn to paint I had discussions with people I hung out with about whether it's possible to paint really realistic from your imagination, or from reference. Because back then, to our eyes lots of stuff looked so photographic! But we couldn't do it, so what was there that we didn't know?
Four years later, nothing seems like it has changed, my stuff still doesn't look like photos. Well, to my eyes. But now there's this person that, even though he/she is obviously a retard, doesn't seem to be able to tell! Now what I realize is that it's actually a matter of perception. Your stuff will always look bad to your own eyes, because you're always on your own level. Stuff you did earlier will look worse. Stuff you'll do two years from now will probably look awesome, but only to the you that exists right now! So don't get discouraged when you feel like you're not making progress - actually, you are, it's just that your ability to see mistakes is getting better too. When I look back at some images that blew me away back then it's really interesting how things have changed. Say there's two different paintings by two different artists. Both looked so real back then! Equally mindblowing. But now one looks actually horrible, and one looks even better than it did back then? That's because the first one wasn't that good, but I couldn't tell, and the other one was amazingly painted - but I couldn't tell. This is another reason why you should keep practicing - you'll be able to enjoy good art way more. Not to mention how amazing real life starts to look!

I'm not even going to go into the claims by that guy or girl above, those of you who've been around know it's bullshit, and I think we can all guess who it's coming from, there's not many mischevious liars who seem to know a bit too much about german while at the same time knowing nothing about either painting, or me, or Fair Use, or 3D (well, maybe enough about 3D to badly do something like, uh, a frog like you'd see in a TV show for idiots).
It seems like a better idea to keep reinforcing, and I write this for myself too, the point I was trying to make - keep going, keep practicing. You'll learn al ot of things only along the way and your idea of what is possible and how things work will change with time. Things that you thought were impossible will suddenly seem easy and ideas that seemed to make sense will suddenly turn out to be quite the opposite. That's why it's also important to be open to everything, because your perception changes all the time. The more you know, the more you know you don't know anything! So - go go go!





^{The 3D hypothesis also doesn't really explain this: [link]}


Cheers!
Hannes