# The artist inside of you

## Cooking (yes, it's art, and I will fight you on the parking lot for it)

If you enjoy good food, cooking it yourself makes it taste even better.

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And if you’ve never touched a cooking pot in your life, type “cooking for noobs” on your favorite search engine and you’ll have plenty of easy recipes with cooks showing every little detail.
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I’m biased. I used to hate the idea of touching a pan, and I felt oddly weird when trying to cook even with nobody watching, which I can handily blame on bad memories of childhood that took part in the kitchen. For the longest time I was certain I hated cooking. On the other hand, I was getting bored with the limited possibilities of restaurants and take-away in the small place I lived in, for the sake of change I tried to cook at least one dish properly. And… it’s pretty fucking lit if I dare say so myself. I like to cook, I’m still a bad cook by all accounts, but on the occasional success I’m the proudest man in the world.

*Relevant short-term goals*:

* Try out a new recipe every week and redo it a few times until you get it just right. For bad cooks like me, just right equals to tasting good. Getting that restaurant quality where the food just melts on the tongue is in the long-term category.
* Try adapting foreign dishes with local products. Incidentally, lots of recipes on the internet do just that, so you won’t have to guess what works or not (unless it’s your thing of course).
* Learn dishes you can make in batches, to have big quantities of in the freezer for the days you don’t have time to cook.
* Learn how to present the dishes so it doesn’t just taste good in the mouth but also looks great on the platter.

*Relevant long-term goals*:

* Build up a list of twenty dishes you can confidently say you’re good at cooking.
* Same, with vegetarian dishes to reduce meat intake if you have an Eco-friendly tendency.
* Have one recipe or two you can cook as good as your favorite joint would. Told you it would be in the long-term list.

*Synergized goals*:

* ‘Synergized goals’ really sounds like your incompetent marketing boss throwing out buzzwords, doesn’t it?
* Cooking your own food goes hand-in-hand with doing sports to lose weight, that way you have a better handle on caloric intake.
* Listen to audio-books while channeling your inner Gordon Ramsay (channel him only as far as cooking goes, the swearwords aren’t necessary).\\

## Writing

If the task of putting out a scenario, polishing phrases and characters until they fit perfectly into a novel seems daunting, it’s because it is. You don’t have to start with writing a sequel to the bible though, plenty of websites offer what’s called writing prompts. They are sentences or ideas from which you must spin a short story. Horror, romance, thriller, whatever your genre is. Don’t get too hung up on spacing, on how to write a character or how to bring out a good sentence, write shorts and get a feel for the process.

Prompts are great to work on your imagination and to introduce you to creative writing without immediately committing to a full novel, and who knows, maybe it’ll give you the itch to commit to bigger stories.

*Relevant short-term goals*:

* Write out a short story daily based on a writing prompt.
* If working on a longer story, write 1000 words a day.

*Relevant long-term goals*:

* Write a novella or a novel.

*Very long-term*:

* The same, but get published. Good luck.\\

### Painting <a href="#painting" id="painting"></a>

Feeling like putting the landscapes of your mind on a canvas? Finally decided to honor the kid you were who played with modelling clay by taking it to the next level? Time to invoke your inner Picasso.

Painting’s a lot cheaper than what you might think. Easel, canvas and colors are easy to come by but storing them can be a bit of a bother if place is limited at home. Taking courses may be expensive, but as it goes with the digital age, internet has you covered.

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Every episode of Bob Ross’ “the joy of painting” is available for free, which is a nice way to get you used to the medium.
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My paintings didn’t look exactly like what Bob Ross did, but some came out okay. There are plenty of teachers on video for different art styles to try your hand at, and the pandemic saw a rise of easy-to-do, cheap, and good-looking painting guides to do at home.

Other forms of drawn expression exist, like academic drawing. That’s the one where a person looks intensely at a nude model and gets increasingly desperate because they can’t draw the elbow properly.

*Relevant short-term goals*:

* Check different tutorials and find a style you enjoy to get started.
* Set aside an hour or more each day to work on your paintings. Further down the line, you can consider improving specific aspects of the craft: color mixing, perspectives, etc.

*Relevant long-term goals*:

* Redecorate your place with your own stuff.\\

## Design your own video game

Popular views may have you believe you need to be of a technical mind with a love of math and lines of code to work on your own interactive pet project. This may have been the case twenty years ago.

In the meantime, some very, very smart boys and girls realized that a lot of digitally impaired miscreants like me would love to try their hand at making a video game, if only someone would give them the tools to do so. Enter development software, designed for people whose knowledge of computers starts and stops at checking their e-mails and blaming the cat when the internet dies.

I started with a software called *GameMaker*. It took me less than two weeks to have fun with it. I wasn’t working on a specific game; just wanted to check if it’s really that easy. I learned how to change the rules of a proto-game and was surprised at how I started to tweak the system to add my own ideas.

You will have to do coding at some point, but the engines have plenty of tutorials to teach you the necessary basics without having to power through ten dictionary's worth of mind-numbing numbers to get a clue.

Which software you will use matters. The one I mentioned is good for 2 dimensional games. Others will offer the choice between 3D and 2D or will focus on a specific type of game-play like role-playing games.

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Unity has a truckload of tutorials and does both 2D and 3D games.
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Learning how to use these tools isn’t complicated. The actual hard part of making a good video game is to have the right idea and translate it into a game.

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The website Itch.io has a plethora of games made by small teams using these tools and are free to download if you want an idea of what can be done on your own.
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*Relevant short-term goals*:

* Pick a software, follow the tutorial to understand the basics.
* Pick a simple game and make a copycat out of it. It’s training and will make you hit snags to improve your skill.
* Experiment on that copycat with any idea that crosses your mind.
* Pitch your idea of a game. You’re on your own. The better your initial planning is, the less time you’ll spend working on aspects you don’t intend to put in the final product. Not that the plan will be perfect, you will always get ideas midway through and wonder *what if*… It’s part of the fun.

*Relevant long-term goals*:

* Finish that game. Best of luck.
