BFLAT ETUDE: If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough.

"An étude is an instrumental musical composition, usually short and of considerable difficulty, usually designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill."

Hey everyone, I've been meaning to make a series of posts covering some topics that I felt needed discussing for quite some time now, but before any of that I'd like to start with why I started BFLAT ETUDE and why I feel it's important.

Before you start reading though, I feel it's important you watch this video as it quite nicely explains my mindset going into this. It's only 15 minutes, and well worth the watch.

For the longest time I had avoided any serious commitment to proper studies and practice, preferring instead to just draw various anime characters. There are a lot of reasons I could give for this, but I feel at the end of the day it came down to one thing. I was being lazy, unmotivated and wishful, it is so much easier just to draw what you like, what you're comfortable with, and feel that given enough time you will improve from that alone.

BFLAT ETUDE has many purposes, but the largest one is to get, and keep me practicing on a regular schedule, practicing things that I'm not good at, but want to get better at. Having a regular practice schedule is important because it forces me to prepare in advance, and diminishes the excuse of not having time.

"I just don't have enough time to practice" and "I'm too busy to draw" are things I've heard many times before, and while I don't think everyone who says this is a liar, I want people to also understand that time is not given, it is taken. Not having enough time to draw feels like a weak excuse. The busiest people I know are also the most hard working, they "don't have time", they make time.

If I had just one thing I could tell to other artists, or aspiring artists, it would be this; the best way to tell if you truly want something badly enough is when you run out of excuses to stop getting it.

ETUDE is many things, but what it is not designed to be is a tutorial series, and this is very intentional. My goal here is not to teach others how to draw, I myself am still learning how to do that. Rather, my goal is to show how the learning process is a series of making mistakes and learning from them, and through doing so hopefully encourage others to participate and join in, because the fear of failure and ridicule is something I feel holds back more would-be artists than you might imagine.

Every session is recorded to help me keep track of what I have covered, and my mindset while doing so. It allows me to look back and actually see what I was thinking, as well as make all my efforts and mistakes open for anyone to see.

I want to show that getting good is not the same as being good, and making mistakes is not the same as being bad.

Improvement begins with the first mistake. The value of this sentence is incredibly overlooked, because all you see is the finished result. It's important to keep in mind the simple fact that everyone started out bad, and the true masters simply made more mistakes than anyone else without giving up.

So, what are you waiting for? Go out there and make some mistakes!