Have you ever thought about boredom? Specifically, I mean being still. Have you tried it lately?

Not distracting your brain with your phone or reading a book or anything, but just … existing.

The act of sitting quietly with my own thoughts is actually harder than I thought it would be at first. For years I trained my brain to want that dopamine hit of the phone and social media and games. Of distractions.

My brain became used to never being idle. Always on, always interacting … Recent reading on the topics of focus and productivity have lead me to try something new.

Just sitting and being bored.

More clinically, intentional mind wandering. Allowing your brain to wander aimlessly and unpack and process what’s happening in your life at that moment. This sounds silly, I know, but you really have to give it a try. You’ll be amazed at how many insights you’ll have as you wait for something to finish processing on your computer, or you wait in line somewhere, or ride an elevator, or attend a boring meeting.

Giving your mind space to wander and do what it does best … take thought fragments and put them together in unique ways … pays off huge when you’re trying to solve creative issues.

The lucky thing is that we as artists have a lot of opportunity for this sort of intentional navel grazing. We have progress bars! We’re always waiting for a file to save or a normal map to process or an effect to render or a level to load … use that time to do some intentional boredom.

Cross your arms, sit back, and just let the mind be free. Even for 30 seconds. You’ll being noticing improvements in creativity and focus pretty soon.

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Hi! I’m Warren Marshall!

I’m a freelance, hard surface 3D artist living in North Carolina. I specialize in hard surface work but I can do pretty much anything from environments to props.

I worked at Epic Games for over 15 years and started freelancing after that. Since then I’ve done prop and environment work for some fun projects, including We Happy Few from Compulsion Games and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. I’ve also done a bunch of asset packs for the various marketplaces.

I have experience with Unreal Engine 4 and Unity and know how to put assets together quickly that look good in those engines.

Here’s a link to my Art Station page where you can see a bunch of my latest work:
https://www.artstation.com/artist/warrenm

Visit my main web site here :
http://www.warrenmarshall.biz

You can email me directly if you’d like :
warren@warrenmarshall.biz

Questions, business inquiries, support – or just to say hi!

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