Great Artists Steal
Fill Your Creative Toolbox
Welcome to Tools Works, a place for you to fuel and fill your creative toolbox. I am merely a curator and creator of valuable tips, tricks, and - yes - tools to help you in your creative journey. Please comment below if you have a go-to tool, software, plug-in, or *anything*. I will gladly steal it (with credit to you, of course)!
Steal Like an Artist
One of the most life-changing reads I’ve ever had was finding and devouring all of the content that crafts about the creative process.1
Now, before you look at that headline and run off shouting, “Rob said I could steal everything and pass it off as my own!”… that’s not what that means. Human creativity is an act of collection, distillation, combination, alteration, and general mad science that makes new things out of old things and your unique talents and experiences.
To Put it Another Way - Great creatives don’t copy; they honor their inspirations with new things crafted from the old and their new, unique perspective.
You might be scratching your head now and thinking, “Didn’t Rob already write about this???” Yes, I did. Here it is.
That is one of my points: part of creating and stealing like an artist is revisiting previous work and discovering new opportunities. This post is not quite that post. That post was an attempt to share many of my inspirations for finding my art style (an ongoing and frustratingly eternal pursuit).
This post is about developing your personal, creative toolbox. What you put into it will inevitably be what comes out of it. It is of the utmost importance that we continually refresh our palate with new and diverging things. We can fuse seemingly unconnected ideas into refreshing art and creative paints for our canvas.
This is about your toolbox, and what you put into it will inevitably be what comes out of it.