You're only as good as your reference

I've hosted internships. I've done hundreds of portfolio reviews. I screen freelancers constantly. I'm familiar with the craft as equally as I'm familiar with the ceiling that most artists don't see; the one that holds them back from doing their best work.

I know too many artists who take too many classes. They spend thousands on courses that teach how to use a tool. And they often come out with a small increase in their ability to design or animate better than when they started. The content isn't the problem.

The relationship to reference is.

The Class That Cracked It Open

I figured this out while I was a student at SCAD.

When I left Trinidad to study there, I thought SCAD would make me into the best designer I could be. My parents took a chance to send me, despite the immense financial burden, to pursue a career considered trivial in the Caribbean. The idea that I was getting taught by the #1 design school reassured me that being successful would be easy.

I was wrong.

My first foundational class was a drawing class by Professor Meg Aubrey. And I was not a drawer. I was one of those kids that could not draw a circle to save his life. At this stage, I could make a mean, obscure oval only a mother would love. To make things worse, every single student around me had been drawing their entire life.

I told my professor this. She could sense my shame.

The assignment was simple; and if you're an art student, you know it very well. A charcoal still life. She threw together a random series of objects and asked me to draw it. Terrifying, if you don't know how to draw.

Then she told me something that catapulted my ability to figure out how to make anything I see with my eyes.

Most students who struggle see six objects together. She sees a hundred simple objects and shapes that just happen to be next to each other. A shoe is difficult to draw. A single shoelace is easier. The plastic tip of a shoelace is easier still.

Focus only on the tip. Don't think about anything else. How wide is it compared to its height? Is the height one-eighth the width, or one-sixth? Think only about that part, and when you think what you draw looks true, move on to the next little thing.

This is Gestalt. To perceive an organized whole as the sum of its parts.

And once you can perceive the parts, you can build anything.

Why This Matters for Your Work

I don't know nearly 60% of the features inside any tool I use. What I do know is how to look at high-craft work that has hundreds of layers and thousands of hours behind it, and perceive the smallest components that, when added together, create the whole.

If you ask me what it takes to uplevel your work ten years from now, you'll hear me say the same thing I tell every intern, student, and apprentice who has ever worked with me. If you're one of them reading this now, you know what I'm about to say.

Ash Thorp knows this. Picasso understood this. Da Vinci understood this. These are all people who did not innately know how to make the things they made before making them for the first time. They could perceive, by reference, what makes a thing a thing.

So when you're sitting down to build a style frame, a video, a brand, or whatever it is you do, a lot of artists fall into the trap of not grounding their thinking alongside references. They assume the right spontaneous thought or feeling will somehow motivate the right design decision. It won't. Your ability to source, analyze, and reinterpret references is the key. This, by the way, is how you get out of a creative block.

The Lie Young Artists Tell Themselves

One of the silliest things young artists need to get over is “I don't want to make anything that looks like something else.”

Do you really think you can build a career working for paying companies, attempting to make something they or you have never seen before every single time you work with them for years on end?

Stop it.

Good artists copy. Great artists steal. Picasso [allegedly] said it. Every director, designer, and animator I respect has lived it. This isn't about blatantly copying something and calling it yours. It's about perceiving what makes a thing high in craft and then dissecting the required techniques to make something compelling and ownable to you.

The Exercise That Breaks the Block

To get my interns comfortable with this, and to break the mentality of "I must be purely original in everything I do," I make them do an exercise I learned from Ash Thorp.

Pick something you think is the most impossible, compelling piece of work you've seen in the last month. Your task is to recreate it. One to one. Literally. 100% copy it.

Not "inspired by." Not "almost finished." 1:1, fully completed.

And if it isn't obvious, do not share this as your work or imply that you made it on your own. The goal of this exercise is purely to document your learnings.

This is the fastest method to uplevel your work, hands down. No course will exceed the potency of this method. This is in the backdrop of why I’m not incredibly bullish on telling young artists they “need” to go to college. This method [plus a mentor] is all you need. It’s entirely practical, and not theoretical.

You'll be forced to confront every decision the original artist made. The timing. The texture. The spacing. The restraint. Tutorials hand you techniques in isolation. Recreating a real piece forces you to see how those techniques combine.

That's gestalt in motion. Perceive the parts. Build the whole. Then take what you've learned and apply it the next time a blank canvas is staring back at you.

Quick detour. Some jobs I found to share with you:

Where Most CDs Burn Out

Here's the part for the Creative Directors reading this.

Your reference practice is your gasoline. If the only thing you're looking at every day is LinkedIn posts, Instagram explore, and your own past projects, you are slowly burning your engine out. You'll start every project from the same shallow well. Your output will reflect it.

The CDs whose work I respect most have a deliberate practice of looking outside their own discipline. They study branding when they're directing motion. They study industrial design when they're building brands. They study architecture, photography, fine art, fashion, product design; not to copy, but to store enough in their well.

If your work feels stuck, don't start with a new tool. Start with a new reference exercise.

Next week I'm sharing something I've been quietly building for the past year; a tool made specifically for the type of people who read this newsletter. It's the thing I wish existed when I first became a creative professional. More on Tuesday 😉

Until then, try the exercise. Pick something impossible and recreate it. Reply and tell me what you picked. I want to see what you're aiming at.