Hey Reader,

Alan here, I help manage CG Boost.

Today I want to share a second, more personal newsletter with you.

Last week, I wrote about making art for the sake of art, and about not automatically following the more deconstructive trends in 3D. If you missed that one, you can read it by clicking here.

This time, I want to talk about something many of my 3D artist friends (myself included) ran into when a creative hobby slowly started turning into something more serious.

My career started as a young freelance 3D artist struggling to pay the bills, and trying to understand how the CG industry even worked, I eventually cold-called a successful millionaire business owner just because I thought it was worth a try.

Somehow, that turned into a nice lunch with him and his wife.

He ran a company with a team of 3D artists doing large-volume product renders for corporations. I didn’t have much going for me at the time, except that I was asking a lot of bold questions and genuinely looking for answers on how to make a good living in the 3D industry. That seemed to catch his attention.

During lunch, while talking about work, money, and life, he casually said something that stuck with me. It went something like this:

That insight helped me put words to something I had been feeling without really understanding it.

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So Many Creative Paths

3D artists can be an amazingly creative and deeply emotional group, but we can make big decisions like studying something for years, or taking on massive personal projects, mostly because it felt meaningful at the moment. And we make an emotional decision, hoping things would work out.

One of the beautiful things about being young (and working with younger creatives) is that feeling that everything is possible. You jump in fully, you believe everything is possible, which honestly it kind of is!

But as you get older, and after plenty of mistakes, different questions start to appear:

• Why should I do this?
• How long will this take?
• How much will it cost?
• What’s the trade-off?
• Why does my back hurt?
• Why is RAM so expensive?!
• And why am I so tired after only eating pizza? (It’s the cheese and carbs 😜).

My point is, momentum can carry you very far in a direction you didn’t consciously choose.

This is relevant because there are now more tools, more courses, more tutorials, more platforms, more promises of progress than any of us can realistically process.

I see people react to this pressure in different ways:

Some jump in to something quickly, just to escape the discomfort of uncertainty. Others get stuck, filling the time with things that feel productive, like watching 3D tutorials, learning new Blender features, tweaking endlessly, but without really making progress.

And no judgment, both reactions are understandable, I find myself often ping ponging between the two.

And it can feel like your creative and logical minds are out of sync.

When this happens, everything feels off. You try to relax and feel guilty. You learn a new “useful” 3D skill and feel bored. You start a 3D project and worry whether it’s worth anything.

Personally, I’ve learned that my logical side isn’t there to suppress creativity, it helps to protect it. To keep life stable enough that creativity has room to breathe and have some fun.

Interestingly, some of my most creative insights came while making very logical decisions. And some of my most practical progress came from following creative curiosity instead of pressure.

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Two Practical Helpers

First, I want to talk about big dreams with smaller goals, and second about how our CG Boost community is designed to help:

In a noisy world, I’ve learned that good decisions rarely happen in the middle of all that noise. More often, they happen once things quiet down enough for your own thoughts to catch up. And it can feel painful to slow down.

For me, that usually means turning things off for an evening. No screens. Letting my mind slow down, grabbing a notebook, and writing, focusing on simple problem-solving and answering simple questions.

• What has gone well in the last days or weeks?
• What could be better?
• What creative problem am I really facing right now?
  • What am I excited about?
  • What am I most afraid of?
• What can I realistically do about it?
  • And who, or what, could help me take that next step?

Seeing these on paper helps the problem feel more logical and actionable. The next step feels smaller and with clear purpose. And sometimes I realize that the answer isn’t to work harder, but to learn one specific thing, or to ask someone for help.

Over time, this led me to a simple way of thinking that I keep coming back to.

The dream gives me direction. It can help you stay oriented when trends shift or the noise gets loud again. It’s good to pause and ask, why am I doing this again?

One example is the NFT’s craze, all of a sudden, clients and friends could smell easy money on me as a 3D artist, promises or riches started pouring in. So I paused, reflected on my own dreams and goals, and just simply said no. And I’m so happy I did.

It simply was not a direction I was interested in, and where my skills were useful. It helped me stay on track and not waste time when there was real temptation to join the craze.

Goals, on the other hand, can be small enough and doable. You can use them to build confidence and skill. They’re proof that you’re actually moving forward in the right direction. Bit by bit, they turn your dream into something grounded.

That balance, between an impossible dream and very practical next steps, is something I’ve seen again and again in successful CG artists.

To me, it comes down to following a beautiful dream for the rest of my life, while my smaller goals keep me moving and motivated.

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​The CG Boost Community​

When we brought back the CG Boost challenges and introduced our monthly Sprints, it wasn’t because we thought people needed more things to do, or to add to the noise. If anything, it was the opposite, we want to make things simple, and help you narrow your efforts down.

The challenges help with a shared theme, it removes the pressure of infinite choice. You’re not asking what should I make? anymore, you’re just making something, alongside others who are doing the same and practicing your skills, while learning to grow.

The CG Boost Sprints help if you already know what you want to work on, and set your own goals, giving them shape, and a time limit. Nothing dramatic, but enough commitment to see something through.

I’ve come to appreciate this more as the internet has changed. Social media is about fast consumption. Huge platforms can reward strong negative reactions to drive engagement. They’re loud, they promise thousands of followers, but they aren’t designed to help you improve. They’re designed to keep you scrolling or watching.

I’ve come to believe the future looks different. Smaller, healthier groups moving at a slower pace. The feedback is slower, and isn’t instant or addictive, but it’s often more thoughtful. And for many artists, that could be more than enough.

Maybe five or ten people who follow your work closely, who notice your progress, who care about where you’re headed, that can carry you surprisingly far. Maybe that is enough for now.

And in that way, it connects back to the same idea as before: keeping the dream large, while making the steps simple and achievable.

These two last emails I haven’t touched much on some practical 3D tools and examples, but there are times I feel it’s worth going to the bigger picture and openly discussing how and why we should create with amazing open-source tools like Blender.

If you enjoyed these last couple of emails, I'd love to hear your thoughts about your own dreams and goals, please hit reply and let me know what you are up to.

Thank you for reading until here, and I hope this helps you on your journey, also starting next Friday we will be back to our regular resource emails.

All the best,

~Alan