You’ve used tutorials. I’m sure you’ve used tons of tutorials. Without tutorials, you (and by you, I also mean me) would never have crossed that first big technical hump to use whatever software you started out with. They can be very effective ways of increasing your technical abilities, as long as the tutorials are actually written well and contain correct information. They’re not always good, and don’t always contain correct information (in fact, I’ve come across many completely useless tutorials, as I’m sure you have as well), but that’s not the point of this little rant.
I just want to make it clear that I don’t want to make this blog some kind of tutorial repository, just as I don’t want to make it a free resource repository, there are far better sites out there for that, and I will just do you the service of linking you to them every now and then if you don’t already know them.
Anyway, to continue on to the actual point of this post, I was reading this post on PSDTUTS (one of those far better sites I mentioned), and it made it clear to me that I had another lesson to teach you guys. Tutorials are great, but you’re an idiot if you don’t find other ways to learn.
In fact, I’d say that you’d be wrong to think that tutorials should be your primary source of learning, because they really shouldn’t be. Your primary focus should always be your creative abilities. Anything technical is just the means to the end. The end in this case being the completed work. I could come up with some metaphors about carpenters and tools and some other crap like that, but I’m not gonna assume you’re an idiot (and I hope I’m not making a mistake there.) You can’t really have a step by step tutorial on how to be more creative. Well, I’m sure there are some out there, but they don’t work and they suck.
Besides all that emotional crap about creativity (that I’m making light of right after I emphasized its importance, what the hell is wrong with me?), even from a technical standpoint tutorials can only take you so far. As displayed in that little post I linked to up there (ironically on a site about tutorials), there are many different ways to improve your skills. I find experimentation in particular to be one of the most useful ways to progress both technically and creatively, especially since that’s the way we started making digital art in the first place.
So don’t just rely on tutorials to learn whatever you have to learn, or I’ll be really mad.
2 Comments
Ah how I agree with you. I’ve used tutorials to learn specific tools within Photoshop or other programs – however I very rarely use the tutorial to do the project the tutorial is ‘teaching’. I usually use it to do my own thing.
You’ve got some good articles here Jeremy. I think I’ll be reading more of your writings in the future!
(and thanks for the comment on my site)
Always good to hear!