One of the most daunting aspects of pursing a creative or artistic career for many aspiring artists is not knowing how to learn the craft. So, we asked some very talented artists and creatives to talk to us about how they learned their crafts and we hope their stories will help you in your journey.

Anthony Segovia

I’ve learned a lot of techniques and experimented with a lot of materials. I learned to create a space where my art can live as a designer. But when I first began to think of my art as a career, it made me feel constrained. I had a huge art block, overthinking every choice so that I could be “favored” by the outside world, but that only created inauthenticity. Understanding your voice, learning more, and experiencing more whichever way that may look is how we as designers connect to others, it is the most crucial part of learning the craft, and the plant only grows from there. Read more>>

Ikechi THA PRFSSR

I’ve been singing since I was 3 years old. Growing up, I performed in every way you could think – church choir, school band (trumpet), musical theater, . I always had a great musical ear, and my passion for music carried on into college where I studied classical voice and started writing, producing and performing original music as well as playing for other local Chicago artists. When I moved to LA for business school, all my musical work hit a pause, due to managing course load and settling into a new spot. To get back to my creative flow, I turned to DJing. I had hung around the nightlife scene often, specifically the Afro scene, and developed a friendship with a promoter Emeka who introduced me to DJ Major League, founder of Wahala Crew. Major took me under his wing and taught me how to DJ. With my deep music background, I picked up quickly, and after about a month in the lab, I started taking gigs – club nights, day parties, baby showers, graduations, etc. Read more>>

Chris Flacksenburg

I’ve always been interested in photography but never took the time to learn its finer details—I used to just point and shoot without much thought. As I started planning for retirement, I decided to take it up as a hobby, with the possibility of earning a little extra money on the side. I enrolled in an online class taught by National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore, and it really helped me a lot. Since then, I’ve felt myself gradually improving. While working full-time over the past couple of years left me with little free time to practice, a recent job change has given me more flexibility to focus on my photography. Read more>>

Anthony Robinson

I grew up as non-social kid, I kept my distance from all the other kids and spent hours upon hours just learning instruments. My dad bought a guitar in the early 2000s and eventually as he lost interest in learning how to play, it became my guitar. It was not a great guitar, however it ignited a passion for music in me that would change my life. A lot of people seem to believe that you need hours a day to learn a skill, but that old saying “work smarter, not harder” is really the key phrase here. People, especially in music, tend to practice what they’re comfortable with over and over again, and expect progress on things that they’re not comfortable with. While practicing what you know is important, in order to take steps toward improvement, you have to do things you’re not comfortable with, you’ll improve more practicing 15 minutes of a skill you’re not comfortable with, than 3 hours of a skill you’re good at. Apply this to any skill, and you’ll have a much easier time. Read more>>

Andres Garcia

Being a filmmaker is a process that slowly tears you apart so that you can later reconstruct yourself, piece by piece, discovering chunks of knowledge you were missing before—like an old vase repaired with gold. When it comes to writing, directing, being a First AD, or anything film-related, the most essential skill—the gold that glues your pieces back together—is perseverance. It’s about having the strength not to give up, no matter how difficult it may seem. Read more>>

A.V. Hamilton

Well thank you for asking, it’s a pleasure to receive and share information if it can help those interested. I learned how to DJ by first studying music and the effect it had on my family at our reunions. I learned how to songwrite a few years later after learning to produce and design sound. Knowing what I know now, when I was younger I would have asked for turntables and beat machines for presents instead of skateboards lol, but everything happens the way it should. The skills that I think were most essential were those of understanding how to tell a story and get a response out of an audience when it comes to my music, whether I’m commanding a party or writing my own music. The obstacles that stood in the way when I first started my journey was equipment, so for a while I had to invest a lot of time and resources to buying equipment and tools that I needed to properly learn my craft, as the demand for DJing became higher over time. Whether it was a paycheck from the 9-5 job, DoorDash driving, money I’d get sent from a parent, it all went towards music. Read more>>

Peter Favilla

Performing on stage in any capacity requires a gorgeous paradox of complete freedom tethered to incredible discipline. To be absolutely free to creatively roam around your medium in real time requires a focused amount of time learning- through mistakes, sacrifices, and uncertainty. If you aren’t pointed in the right direction early, if you aren’t checking off your boxes and growing accordingly, just know you will need to make up all of that effort someday somehow in order to get where you’d like to be. Read more>>

Rylan Wright

For the most part, I’m a self taught photographer! I taught myself how to use my first camera in 2015 which was a little Canon Rebel T5, so luckily it was fairly easy to use. Back then, I wasn’t doing photography professionally so to me, it didn’t matter if I knew all the settings. By the time I started pursuing professional photography, I upgraded my camera to a Canon 5D Mark IV without really knowing much about it. I just told myself I would figure it out and it would be easy. Boy was I wrong. For the first few months of using that camera, I did multiple shoots with my settings in Automatic… Read more>>

Nohemi Arvizu

The drawing part started at a young age like most artists, I just started doing it and didn’t stop. I went through various eras in terms of subject matter in my drawings but it all adds up in terms of practice. Designing and mixing both came later after college when I got a job at a print shop. That was my school I guess because everything I learned there I use now in my freelance career, not only in the technical side but also in customer service, how to look for manufacturers, and things that don’t have anything to do with the creative aspect. Read more>>