Liken mixing paint to curating your pool of interests. You can successfully mix up a swatch of paint by combining various concentrated colors in varying proportions, just as you can refine your creative voice through the practice of various crafts.
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I was painting the other day and found the process surprisingly insightful. It seems simple, but mixing paint is no easy feat-- it's a tightrope walk of constantly making adjustments to keep your balance and reach the finish line.
To achieve your desired color of paint, you must first accurately discern the quantity of separate base colors that you must combine. If you combine too few colors, you will not achieve the level of nuance within the color that you want. But if you combine too many, the color becomes dull, muddied, and ugly.
The next balance to strike is proportion. You must identify how much of each color will create your desired result and finely control the execution. Throwing each color into the mix in equal, haphazard proportion is almost never the right answer.
The final piece of the puzzle is the consistency of your paint. If you add too little water to the pigment, the paint will be stuck on your brush, inflexible and inapplicable. But if you add too much, the paint will be watery, streaky, faint and ineffective.
The same rules at play apply to personal interests.
If your end goal is to make a lasting, effective creative impact through the pursuit of one or multiple interests (3d modeling, hand-drawn illustration, animation, programming, graphic design, etc.), that is akin to having a shade of paint in mind. You will likely have to discover, learn, and pursue multiple interests in order to create a new, novel, interesting craft that is unique to you. Pursuing only one, or too few, may not give you the flexibility you need to achieve your vision. However, pursuing too many interests will lead you to confusion, lack of focus, or cause you to burn out and produce nothing at all.
You must experiment with and identify the proportion that each different interest will be of your process. There is likely no right answer here, and these proportions will change as your goals change as well. And even after you've identified them, executing them is a whole different challenge: can you take the care needed to finely, proportionally divide your time between your interests?
In addition, you must balance everything else in life with your creative or craft-related goals. Relationships, money, exercise, housekeeping-- If water is all of life that is different from your craft, you must include it in your life deliberately and intentionally. Too little will coagulate and clump your channel of creation, preventing you from applying yourself with consistency. Too much will dilute and distract your actions from your vision, resulting in a weak result.
But it is senseless and impossible to keep all of this in mind from the very beginning. No artist purchases their first paints with their perfect shade in mind. Crafting the perfect shade is a process where the final shade is continuously evolving, and even if you have done everything seemingly right, results are heavily influenced by their volatile environment. Just as the perfect shade may shift depending on the texture of the paper or the humidity in the room, your perfect craft may change depending on new technology or a radical change in your physiological state.
The best you can do at any given point in time is to use the colors, tools, water, and knowledge you have at your disposal to craft the perfect shade. Or, if you have sufficient resources and knowledge to figure out which color you're missing, you may go out and purchase another color to use in your pursuit of the perfect shade.
Don't beat yourself up if you mix the wrong color. Merely wipe your palette off and start again.
Interests, like paints, are options, not requirements. Just because I spent the last 5 years becoming intimately familiar with color crimson does not mean my next masterpiece has to have even a tint of red to it.
Hone your craft. Hone your eye. Hone the ability to identify what paints, what colors, what tools you need to achieve the vision you hold. Mix with intention. Apply with love.
That is the best that any artist, and any person, can do at once.
