I swear this guy is so damn underrated, his videos are therapy

I remember in college always being told what I was creating wasn’t right, too kitsch or not fine art. It broke my heart and I left college soon after. I sit watching your videos while I paint or draw and I appreciate the honesty and encouragement.

You say there are no signposts, but your channel is the best and only true signpost I've seen. It reads: "Keep walking. Have fun." Thanks for sharing the joy of art. You'e amazing.

Steven Zapata videos have become somewhat of a daily artistic meditation for me. I pop one on with a sketchbook, listen to it, and when the video plays out to its finish, I find myself tuning into the weight of the pencil on paper and the presentness of it all. Learning to break my reluctance to love my childhood love again, day by day. My doubts are slowly quietening.

I just discovered your channel and I love it, so encouraging. I'm 23 and it's my dream to one day be an animator. I'm currently in college for it. And while we're mostly studying 3d animation what I really want to learn is 2d, so I have to personally practice that. But I love it. I have a bad tendency to overthink things a lot. Like setting up schedules that take up my whole day to make sure I get optimal practice in. But the first thing I study takes up the whole day, so sometimes I feel like I've accomplished nothing, and that creepy little voice hurts man. Your mind can really be a dangerous tool "You can't be an animator, you don't even know how to draw a full figure out of your head." Or... "Look at you you're 23, your only getting older. There are artist way younger and way more skilled than you in the field you want a career in. Just...give...up." But I can't. And your videos really help with that. Especially this one. So I just wanna saw, Thank you for being you. Have a good one.

I needed to hear this. I'm someone who's been drawing as a hobby since elementary school and been trying to actually learn the fundamentals since last year. My goal is to be a professional and work in the industry, but I find myself being afraid to even mess up sketches. I'm too hard on myself and I know that I need to work on that for me to progress. Again, thank you for the inspiring words.

Miss your Live streams Steven and miss the streamers as well a great group of people. I still watch your older videos it helps me get better at my art! TY Will

Good talk! I often stumble in this bottomless pit of overthinking before getting over a strange "tipping point" that get to me a good work flow.

This video rocks. I'm about to start teaching younger art students and I've been trying to think of what I would have wanted to know when I was their age. This is exactly it. Thank you so much!

this video definitely made me think more, like how my peers tell me not to, but my hunger and drive to be greater than myself, i will to try and go into the unknown. thankyou

Love the points you mentioned. Although I hear many instructors talk about just drawing and improving that way, I can't help but have some sort of doubts like you've mentioned so many students have. I mean, can you really just get good just at drawing not thinking about it? I often compare my artistic growth to those of games I've played, the ones where I've simply just played without heavy consideration I seem to stay stagnant at, but the ones where I question every decision, there is in turn some hard skill I can take with me to the next one. Often times the solutions to my art practice feel they can be solved if an instructor had told me and I would've saved hundreds of hours of headache or had I thought a little longer about the problem it would be solved. I'm sure I can say for many students that they don't want to remain in the same skill level for long, and I can't help but feel incredibly confused on how it's possible to improve without actively thinking so. I really trust you in this idea of being a confident artist and trusting yourself, but in the back of my mind that surely that can't be the case, can it?. You're right, I can't just sit and sketch, in the same way I can't just do math questions without thinking how to solve the answer. Is it wrong to find "solutions" to your art?

I only draw and paint when i am terriby stressed or heavily depressed, it helps me keep my mind off things and just get in the zone without thinking too much. When I'm good i just do other stuff but it's incredible how peaceful it is.

That part about "deciding for yourself" really hit home.

dude thank you so much, seriously. you have no idea how much I needed to hear this man

This advice is so valuable and the drawing you made while giving it is so cool 🖌️

This deflated breast monster is weird and inspirational for me to bring my weirdness out to the world. But sometimes my subconscious forces me to draw pretty faces everyday and post it on Instagram like everyone else and not draw the wacky things that are in my mind which clearly are not pretty.

Steven.. For years I have been drawing portraits with absolutely no room for my own stylistic input, but the beauty I see in your choices has paved the way to my artistic freedom. It will be hard to break through this box, but I will try. Thank you.

I've found a lot of artists on KZfaq but finally an artist that breaks me out of my many many years of art funk lol.

A video to watch again in the future.

Drawing, flow, philosofical talks, your videos are helpful in so many ways, really inspiring and it's like talking to someone... It kinda feels one on one, love your channel, man!!! This is the kind of content I wanna see!!! I just get a pen and a paper and start drawing and talking with you it's crazy haha you must be an amazing teacher!!

Your talk here was full of lightbulb moments. I think most artists struggle with the mental block of "is it okay for me to create this?" More artists need to watch this video 👍🏾

Your videos are like art therapy ❤ thank you so much! I am trying hard to get better. I'm 19, I'm in college right now. And I keep comparing myself to other artists I know. And it makes me feel like I'm not working hard enough when I see someone younger than me drawing/painting better than me (realistically). And yes, I know that it doesn't mean I'm not working hard enough, but it still makes me feel "artistically inferior". I don't know if you or anyone else reading this comment have ever had this feeling, but I just want to say that your videos really help me with this kind of stuff, so thank you so much !! Keep doing these amazing videos!! Ps: please leave a comment if anyone can relate to this feeling. I'll know I'm not alone. Thanks!

found you via ahmed. browsed a few of your vids. u have a hypnotically soothing voice at the same time as it feeling like im listening to a youth pastor or tedtalker. not a criticism in the slightest. truly the most teacher voice i ever heard.

That last point, you hit the nail on my head.

You got great shading techniques brother, it is so smooth man

I needed this. Thank you!

My school taught me to work in the movie/video game industry. It was that or fail for me... Turned out working in a world I didnt know existed in miniatures and then statues was where the void pushed me to.

Amazing work man!

Whenever I watch your videos I learn from your process as well as from what you're saying, awesome content!

This helped a lot, Thanks!

so well said. Love it Thanks for the words!

This was immensely enlightening thanks

Inspiring. Thank you Steven. 🙏

i get so happy when u release a new video🐸

Thanks for being such an inspiration, Steven! Keep up the good work, man.

Thank you, this helped me a lot

Thank you! It hits right where my doubt is as an art student and giving me courage to try more for myself

Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us Steven, your videos are inspiring!

Thank you Steven

These are great words. I’ve been trying to navigate all of what you are saying for quite some time. Never gets easy. Thanks for the encouragement.

Steven, you have some of the greatest insights about art on the internet. Thank you for what you do.

I really am enjoying your videos and what you have to say. Keep it up!

that was enlightening, for real

Steven your videos are amazing and so insightful. It really helped me free up my mind and get rid of some shackles. Also your voice is so soothing. Thank you so much.

What you are saying here is so good. Ive been so like confused my whole life about how I want to show up as an artist. Thanks for this perspective . "Think for yourself" that fricken hit me so hard. And it IS exciting! lol It is freedom to do that

Awsome ! I saw this one on instagram first 😎👏

This was perfect 🙏🏽

Beautiful 👍👍👍

Your art content is God lvl stuff

Thank you! 🙂

I just wish I had the courage to message you and talk art someday. Your videos are definitely therapy for me.

It's bizarre. But i can't stop watching. Superior drawing skills!

Thank you ! Love from India ❤️✨

Damnit, you're right! Time to delve into the endgame dudgeon of my sketchbook I've been avoiding, and grind the low leveled creatures of drawing from imagination, to help me explore.

thank u for this, really

thank you

Thanks again for your videos, I really haven’t found other art talks I could connect as much as with yours, this one send me on a bit of a self-reflection for a few hours and I thought I might as well write it down, I understand that you probably won’t have the time to read all that, but I hope if that’s the case someone might read it and get some use out of it. These common art student issues are what I've been going through for a long time and still haven't really resolved them to any tangible extent, but it's interesting to see them from a broader perspective, because I didn't really interact much with other art students, and a lot of these issues I experience in a somewhat different way to how you describe them. In the same order you talk about them, starting with motivation, not being motivated is not the problem as in your examples, but I feel like I have stuck with the wrong motivation, which goes something like this: "I HAVE to draw, because I don't have any other skill that could get me a job, and I HAVE to get a job so I better get good at drawing ASAP", and It is kind of an unhealthy and unhelpful external motivation based on "logical" reasoning about future survival rather than an internal one which would be something like "I want to draw (insert a subject/style/etc here, anything from "like art in blizzard games" to "comic books" will do)", the reason I feel like this is because it meshes very poorly with not yet having the skills necessary to get a job in art and it only ends up creating stress that only stands in the way of drawing anything, and without having anything that I want to draw just because I want to I can't really fall back onto "drawing X because I enjoy that" and organically learn in the process, so the only way forward seems to be to force myself to try and draw whatever or spend time learning more technical skills, but that still feels like trying to make a car move while it’s out of gas. Now I ended up with a habit to sit down and draw every day and at least a bare minimum of an understanding of art fundamentals, and that’s good, but I still struggle to come up with anything that I would actually want to draw, and most of the time I just sketch mindlessly until I can see something in the doodles like people tend to see animals in the clouds, and then I'll try to make something more than a pose mannequin out of it, but I rarely get any of it to any sort of "completion". Sometimes I draw fanarts which is easier because there's like zero designing and creating to be done and I can just try and draw this thing I like in a cool way, but then I usually get stuck in making it look pretty/"good enough", and because I still don't really understand rendering it's just a long and confused crawl forward until I just give up on the piece. Listening to you, all this might actually be a result of confusion and uncertainty, but then again, thanks be the internet - there is a lot of information about art out there, and in my experience all my troubles with motivation are more of a clashing of the reality of what I can/can't do with what I see in other artists work, and the general stories of other artist’s journeys to which I can hardly relate and because of that I regularly come back to doubting if I even have any chance to have drawing as a career not be a hopeless pursuit. Then again, I seem to be too obsessive about drawing being a career and I do realize that it’s not helpful, but I just can’t get this out of my head. Well that seems now to have been a lot of blabbering on my part again, but of all your points I feel like I struggle with motivation related stuff the most, so talking about that more than the other points seems okay. The next thing about not trusting yourself, from how you talk about it I feel like my struggles with lack of ideas/goals/internal motivation are in a way a result of me not allowing myself to pick my own path, but I’m really not sure. At least with trusting myself to draw there was some success, I definitely spent my first couple of years at an art college like that, but at this point I got over not drawing because “that’ll be a waste of time”, I do draw, but the feeling of wasting time/not getting anywhere is still there, now I’m just drawing in spite of that, but that’s probably just me being impatient. With the whole permission-seeking thing, I’m really not sure where it comes from, but I might even do just that right now by writing all this, at least with technical things I never really understood why people fixate on if this method is correct or that tool is right, because to me it’s more important how good the result is rather than if I used the “right” way to get there, but it probably comes from getting a lot of advice in a form of hard and fast rules like “never use black paint” or “don’t draw anime” when the intention is good, but the reasoning behind the “rule” is not given to a student, I was actually lucky enough to have had at least a couple of art teachers who explained the reasoning behind the instructions and advice they gave to me and other students, but there also were some teachers with whom I’ve butted heads about why things have to be done the way they were telling us and was left frustrated without getting their reasoning. Anyway, I seem to be getting off-track. I’m not sure if there is a thing I’m waiting to see someone else do with art to allow myself to start doing it too, but I feel like trying to find what that is might help me get over the whole motivation thing, so I’ll definitely think about what it might be. I also have some thoughts on students with a one track mind on what they want to achieve, from my perspective of not really being settled on any specific art job, thinking in that way should be really helpful because it provides a goal that at least appears to be clear at the time, so the person thinking in that way would probably focus all their attention and effort on getting there, and if/when they find that wasn’t exactly what they wanted, they’ll probably find a new goal to chase. And the vagueness of getting to do art as a job is definitely a thing I struggle to cope with, I looked into how to get into drawing for games, because locally I don’t know about any alternatives where the actual drawing is needed and not a graphic/packaging design, but the only clear thing I got out of that is something like “Be real good at drawing, fit the style the company is looking for, and be super enthusiastic about it all and maybe you’ll get lucky” and that’s pretty demoralizing because I really don’t see myself fitting into all of that, so I probably should focus more on finding something I truly enjoy doing with art. Also blending art practice with the rest of my life experience is something I’m not really sure how to do, because the vast majority of any of my life experience was obsessively consuming other people’s art that caught my interest - books, movies, games, animation, any other form of art, with some I connect more than with the others, but it always feels like I can’t get enough of other people’s artistic expression, but at the same time I can’t really make anything similar myself and having the only internal drive for drawing be “make picture look cool” is bothering me. And now my brain is melting from thinking to much, ouch.

ur videos so soothing and ur insane

Thanks so much for saying this... now I’m even more scared but I guess that’s the point!

amazing channel greetings from austria ;D

very Masahiro Ito esque drawing there

heck yea! especially the permission sillyness

Heya! Again, you've mentioned things that were crawling in me as well as many others, things that are more under the surface level and get to some kind of core of the art journey. I appreciate your perspective and approach so much! Yet I need to ask you - Yes, it's important to not lose sight of your path and keep constructing it on the go but you also had an amazing environment and influence on you that can't be dismissed when defining the journey. As someone who knows those resources just won't be around for myself, while trying to figure out a lot of things by myself, I find some things not so simple. What are your thoughts on that?

I've let my career be too open-ended personally, always thought that was a strenght, I was wrong, there's a balance to everything, this included.

i feel free

Sorry if this has been already answered. Any change you could link that video you mentioned, about concept art studio trying to explain the process of getting that job?

What kind of fine tip pen is that you are using? Great vid by the way

I gotta ask, what do you use to smudge the graphite?

do you read lots of books ? your vocabulary seems to be very good.

🥰

ok i want 2 Iearn figure drawing but an artist better than me is sayin that i shouId draw morte 2 IeveI up but i hate it. isn't that bad advice?

I think artist should ask why artist use certain process, it might be for speed or how its gonna look in the end for example and observer of process is really free to cut it in pieces and use this and that then discard other bits which they don't need at moment, I have question for you: why do you use stump instead building it up with hatches or side of pencil?

Do you share your YT with your students so they can get these thoughts or talk to them about this?

Hm. 😯

My only wish is that I could like this video more than once🤦🏻‍♂️

hi

Also, where can I sign up to be a student of yours? 😅

So say we doing what we like in drawings.. but we don't get the fundamentals right somehow.. clearly it's not lack of motivation but just not something which is getting right.. and we not sure if it's a right track or not.. and everytime that one friend who is fellow artist or not says you're doing it wrong . Lazy ... Or too less efforts put in even if you enjoyed the process n are proud of it..but now no more

I just came here to hear the word hackles.

Can't know how I bumped onto this. Anyway GREAT content ❤️. I also have been watching those rather similar from MStarTutorials and kinda wonder how you guys create these stuff. MStar Tutorials also had amazing information about similiar things on his vids.

Tip number 1: LOL GET GOOOOOOD NOOB