Looking for more posts on creativity by Behance? We’ve moved our blog over to behance.net/blog.

Burnout, unfortunately, is everywhere. If you haven’t experienced it personally, you probably know someone who has self-diagnosed. Defined by the World Health Organization as a syndrome that results from “chronic workplace stress,” it causes exhaustion, “feelings of negativism or cynicism,” and reduced efficacy. That’s a big umbrella, and the condition has become something of a catch-all for chronic, modern-day stress.

“The internal atmosphere of burnout is always, ‘I should be doing something but I’m not,’” says Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst and the author of the book Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. “It’s the feeling you are always a step or two behind where you should be and yet you feel you’ve come to the end of your capacity to do anything.” Given the continuous demands of modern life, it’s no wonder burnout has become so commonplace. We’re simultaneously exhausted and plagued by the idea that we’re not trying hard enough, a phenomenon Anne Helen Petersen explores in her viral essay on millennial burnout. “I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months,” she writes.

“I think it’s very hard to find someone who has not felt burnt out,” says Terri Bogue, who co-authored Extinguish Burnout: A Practical Guide to Prevention and Recovery with her husband, Rob. The condition is frequently associated with work, but it can just as easily arise from issues outside the office. Terri last experienced burnout over concerns about the path one of her children was heading down. “I felt completely out of control, like I had no impact,” she says. “That lack of ability to feel effective turned into burnout quickly for me.” She was flooded with feelings of inadequacy that bled into virtually every other aspect of her life.

“At the root of it are exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy,” adds Rob. “If I feel ineffective, I am going to be exhausted because I don’t feel anything I’m doing is enough. You become cynical because you feel like you can’t change things.” It’s a vicious cycle that is easy to enter and hard to emerge from.

With that in mind, experts and creatives share strategies for how to recognize the signs and develop strategies for recovery.

1. Avoid comparison

Frustratingly, comparisons can be hard to avoid. “We live in a culture that’s inundated with everyone’s updates,” Bogue says. In real life and on social media, we’re exposed to curated versions of friends, acquaintances, and strangers’ existences. Epic vacations, prestigious jobs, elaborate wellness routines, homemade meals, and picture-perfect families flood by in a well-staged blur.

It’s a ripe environment for inadequacy to thrive. “You feel ineffective because your expectation is built on the aggregation of everyone else’s highlight reel,” says Bogue. Recognizing this is a good first step, as is dialing back the modes by which you make comparisons in your daily-life. (Yes, this likely means reducing your social media consumption.)

2. Reframe your relationship with productivity and achievement

Along with endless forms of comparison, our modern-day life is built on the concept of continual productivity. No matter how much we’ve achieved, there’s always more to be done. This, unsurprisingly, fuels burnout. Recovering from an episode or, better yet, avoiding the condition altogether often requires a reset. “It’s about developing a different internal relationship to that voice in your head that says, ‘You have to push on, you have to achieve more,’” Cohen says.

For the vast majority of people, continuous striving is unsustainable. Recovery from burnout, then, requires a more understanding, realistic, and less demanding internal motivator, one that allows for moments of rest and doesn’t view life as something to be optimized.

For those who are feeling early signs of burnout, often the first step is to pause, Rob says. A day off or a vacation is rarely a long-term solution, “but it can be self-care in the moment to give yourself the ability to pause and just sit.” Ask yourself what you’d want to do — not what you feel you should do — if you had an hour of free time. “And then give it to yourself without feeling bad about it,” Rob says.

Read the full story on the new Behance blog →

How to Recover From Burnout was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Each month we invite a creative from Behance to curate our social feed for a week. Our Guest Curator is for June is Norwich-based 3D artist and animator Alex J Jefferies.

“I’ve always been a huge animation geek — as a kid I would devour anything animated I could get my eyeballs on,” recalls 3D artist and animator AJ Jefferies. “There used to be these late night showcases of short films that I would tape which regularly featured these incredible CGI animations by studios like Pixar and PDI (Dreamworks).” These animated films ignited his young imagination and gave him the dream of one day creating his own films. Today AJ is one half of MDI Digital, a CGI production studio, whose client lists global brands and publications including Johnny Walker, Cadbury’s, and The Atlantic.

“As a kid I was constantly drawing, painting, model making or finding some way to create my own little worlds. This urge has never really left me, thankfully!” After graduating from art college, AJ started his career at a studio specializing in 3D illustration, where he got a taste of the diversity of projects that the world of commercial art had in store for him: “Something that really hooked me in was the sheer variety of the work we produced. You could be creating key art of battling robots for an AAA+ video game one day, then designing a disco dancing duck the next.”

In 2008, AJ joined forces with his former classmate Matthew Dartford to found their own studio. “Even though it’s just the two of us, we do a LOT of varied work for the advertising, music and gaming industries, from CGI illustrations to photographic retouching, digital sculpting, animation, motion graphics, photography and more. We both love learning new techniques and once you start adding strings to your bow, it’s difficult to stop!”

Read the full story on the new Behance blog →

Meet This Month’s Guest Curator: AJ Jefferies was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The ocean covers 71% of our planet’s surface. A healthy ocean means a healthy planet, and protecting the health and biodiversity of our waters is a vital part of addressing the climate crisis. This year, World Ocean Day is rallying support for 30x30, a pledge to protect at least 30% of our planet’s land, waters, and ocean by the year 2030. As of today, only 17% of land and 8% of the ocean is protected.

The ocean has also long been a source of inspiration for creativity. “For as long as I can remember, the ocean has always fascinated me,” shares photographer Matthieu Walch. Growing up on Reunion Island, the ocean was a big part of his childhood, and he spent his days surfing, diving, and later free diving.

“What got me into underwater photography at the beginning was that I wanted to take back visual memories from my dives,” shares Matt. His time in the water has given him a deeper understanding and awareness of the delicate nature of the ocean: “When you get so obsessed with the underwater world, you can’t help but feel how fragile these ecosystems are, and you naturally want to protect them.”

Read the full story on the new Behance blog →

Celebrating and Protecting Our Oceans For World Ocean Day was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Each month we invite a creative from Behance to curate our social feed for a week. Our May Guest Curator is Brooklyn-based art director and animator behind Untitled Army, Lucas Camargo.

“UntitledArmy was a way I named myself when doing side art projects through the years. It was a way to push some of the frustration I had from agency life,” explains Lucas Carmago. The Brazilian artist, who now calls New York City his home, started his creative career in advertising, eventually climbing the ranks to become an art director and creative director. “The agency world was a hub early on that helped to capitalize my creativity into a viable career path, but unfortunately not a fulfilling experience.”

In 2017, Lucas decided to take a leap of faith and leave the advertising. He had been learning animation on his own time over the years, and decided to “start from scratch on the production side of things.” He joined an animation studio and is now the director of 3D animation at Roof Studio.

Although his life in the agency world was ultimately unsatisfying, Lucas does credit those years for helping him build on a vital skill set for being a successful creative. “I learned a lot on how to articulate a project, and it allowed me to touch on different areas from digital, print and film, and it taught me how important it is to curate your ideas.”

His experience working with agencies and clients gives him an upper hand today in his role as an animation director: “It definitely helps to understand some anxieties projects can bring into the creative teams.”

If going through a complete shift in his career was not overwhelming enough, Lucas also went through a divorce at the same time: “It was a painful moment in my life, basically I questioned everything I had done, seemed I had failed in my career and in my marriage, but art came to the rescue.”

Read the full interview on the new Behance blog →

Meet This Month’s Guest Curator: Lucas Camargo of Untitled Army was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Make Monthly Income with Your Behance Content Through Subscriptions

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Showcase Your NFTs on Behance

Read the latest stories on the Behance blog and follow us on Twitter to stay in the loop!

A New Home for the Behance Blog was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Looking for more posts on creativity by Behance? We’ve moved our blog over to behance.net/blog.

We are continually inspired by the incredible, boundary-pushing work that the Behance community creates. Thousands have been discovered for their talent through our platform and we are committed to building more features to help creatives further their careers.

Last year, we introduced subscriptions, a new way for the creative community to support and learn from one another. Subscribers can support their favorite artists financially and get access to premium content, and by offering subscriptions on Behance, you can monetize your work and connect with a global community of supporters.

As a creator, you can choose any amount between $1-$100 to charge your subscribers every month, and if you have an active paid Creative Cloud membership, Behance collects no platform fees. That means 100% of your subscription revenue goes directly to you (aside from payment processing fees from Stripe).

Subscriptions are seamlessly integrated with your existing Behance projects and livestreams, so you can mark any existing content to be for subscribers only, or create new content as you go.

“It’s a great way for artists and creators to supplement their income and it can be a big help,” says Maddy Bellwoar. Maddy is offering Photoshop brushes and demo videos to her subscribers.

Maddy’s advice is to offer resources that may be valuable to other creatives: “I Try to focus on giving subscribers things that are like tools rather than just like my artwork — something that they can use in their own artwork, like Photoshop brushes or reference pictures so they can paint from.”

“I love creating digital products and like Photoshop brushes,” says Jessica Johnson of Creators Couture. “It’s so much more fun than I could ever imagine.” Even though she enjoys creating resources for other creatives, she admits that it’s a competitive market that can get oversaturated.

Her solution was to add a deeper personal touch and offer something beyond just a sale. “I started to pivot into tutorials and teaching and fostering a community,” she explains. “You can give everybody all the coolest tools in the world, but if you don’t teach them what to do with them, then they’re not so valuable.”

Over the years, Jessica has successfully cultivated a community of supporters, and when she started offering subscriptions on Behance, they followed her to the new platform. She’s taken advantage of our livestreaming feature to host these tutorials, and in turn, increased her subscriber count. Jessica’s goal is to migrate her remaining supporters from other platforms to Behance.

See what other types of premium content creatives are offering through subscriptions:

Interested in setting up your own subscriptions? Qualified Creative Cloud members can get started via the ‘Subscription’ tab on their Behance profile.

Don’t see this option but want to try it? Get in touch with us. Find more information about subscriptions in our FAQ.

Read our latest updates and features on the new Behance blog.

Make Monthly Income with Your Behance Content Through Subscriptions was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Each month we invite a creative from Behance to curate our social feed for a week. In honor of Earth Day this month, infrared photographer Paolo Pettigiani will share with us his approach to photographing the world and the thought process behind his curated moodboard.

“The beauty of photography is that it’s an extension of the human eye, allowing you to see what’s beyond your sight, even the invisible. This is especially true of infrared photography, which captures wavelengths of light invisible to the naked eye and shows you an otherwise inaccessible world,” explains Paolo Pettigiani.

The Torino-based photographer has captivated the world with his fantastical infrared photographs: he’s worked with global clients like Pantone and LG, and if you’re a photographer editing with Lightroom, you may recognize Paolo’s work from the splash screen of Lightroom Classic.

Paolo recalls his first memory with image making: “I started taking some pictures for fun during a trip with my family in Argentina. I was 10 years old and I used an old analog camera.” It wasn’t until much later, during his studies in design and visual communication at Polytechnic University of Turin, that photography became a real passion and eventually a profession.

“During my Bachelor’s Degree, I started to explore the topic of seeing the unseen, driven by a desire to explore familiar places, expanding the limits of perception through a graphic and visual exploration of the territory,” Paolo shares. He found his trademark style using infrared photography, something he describes as “a fusion of science and creativity.”

“The human eye can see wavelengths between 400 nm and 720 nm (the classic rainbow). Infrared photography typically involves light in the 590 nm to 1200 nm range,” Paolo explains. By using external infrared filters and modified cameras, Paolo was able to make the invisible visible.

Paolo created his first artistic infrared project titled INFRARED NYC during his stay in New York City, and it catapulted him into the world of photography. “Since I published this infrared project on Behance, it became viral and completely changed my life. I was featured on The Washington Post, Wired, Highsnobiety, Vogue and many others. This has given a lot of worldwide visibility to my project and the week after, I signed my first contract with LUMAS Gallery to sell fine art prints in their beautiful galleries.”

“Infrared photography is a very niche technique and, when I started in 2015, few people knew it. A limited amount of information was available online and this stimulated me to do a lot of research and studies to create my personal artistic philosophy.” He attributes this period of exploration for his unique style.

To help like-minded photographers and to cultivate a sense of community around the burgeoning niche, Paolo founded Infraland World and created a Domestika course on infrared photography.

After nearly 7 years of shooting in infrared wavelengths, Paolo has learned to see the world in a new light: “When I shoot, it is as if I have developed the ability to see the invisible colors and to imagine the real world as a new land full of colors.”

Paolo first started using Behance over ten years ago when he was studying design, and he still uses it as one of his main sources for finding inspiration and discovering new trends and interesting projects. When curating his Behance moodboard, he kept an eye out for projects that gave him the opportunity to “look at the world through creativity and colors.”

One of the projects that stood out to Paolo was fellow photographer Matthias Heiderich’s collection of minimalist architectural photographs: “Matthias has an incredible eye for creating beauty from simplicity, and he follows his natural instinct for composition.”

Given his appreciation for the power of photography and its power to give us new perspectives on the world, it’s no surprise that Paolo found himself drawn to Tom Hegen’s aerial images: “[Tom] provides us with an overview of our earth’s surface that has been transformed by the impact of human presence.”

Another photographer whose work captivates Paolo is Reuben Wu. “I think Reuben is one of the most talented artists and contemporary photographers,” says Paolo of the Chicago-based photographer. Paolo included Reuben’s series of long exposure landscapes in his moodboard: “He uses creativity and technologies to explore new places and night landscapes.”

Follow us on Instagram this week as we share more projects from Paolo’s moodboard and to learn about his infrared photography process. You can see more projects by Paolo on Behance.

See our latest updates and features on the new Behance blog.

Meet This Month’s Guest Curator: Paolo Pettigiani was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Each month we invite a creative from Behance to curate our social feed for a week. This month’s Guest Curator is self-taught digital illustrator and animator Alina Bohoru.

Bucharest-based illustrator Alina Bohoru describes herself as a “compulsive drawer.” She recalls getting her first graphics tablet at age 17: “The discovery of Photoshop, digital art and online portfolios completely blew my teenage mind at that time. Gradually, my artworks started to transition from traditional to mixed media, and eventually to digital exclusively.”

Alina went on to pursue a degree in English and German translation studies in university but she found herself leaning into her creative tendencies: “I was spending a lot of time (and occasionally skipping German grammar courses!) building up my portfolio.” Her work was getting noticed and steadily, a freelance career was starting to take shape. “By the time of graduation, I had been offered a job at an illustration studio in Bucharest, and that introduced me to new things like working in a team or dealing with clients and deadlines.”

After two years, Alina decided to branch out on her own, transitioning back to being a full time freelance illustrator. These days, she works on a wide range of projects from editorial illustrations to packaging designs and collaborative animations.

“There’s definitely all kinds of struggles: not knowing if you’re going to make it or not, the rise from the ‘underdog’ jobs to a real career, and finding your true voice,” Alina admits. “But on the other side, there’s also an immense sense of purposefulness, being able to do what you’re meant to be doing, and luckily, making a living out of it. Having a magical way to express yourself, with the freedom of working on your own terms.”

Alina’s colorful illustrations vibrate with energy and have caught the eyes of international clients including Samsung, Xbox, BBC Radio 1, and more. She summarizes her color process as “purely intuitive.” “I often go with the flow and choose colors based on my mood in that moment. My emotional landscape often sets the tone of what the palettes or compositions will look like before making any conscious decision about them.”

With commercial projects, she often has to take the client’s guidelines into consideration, but this too is a challenge she welcomes: “Every palette that pulls me out of my comfort zone is always a wonderful exercise for me.”

One of Alina’s most memorable projects is a two-part solo show that was held throughout Bucharest and Timisoara in the summer of 2020. For this ambitious exhibition, Alina combined illustration, AR/VR, 3D modeling, inflatable installations, animation, and video mapping, to bring her art to life.

“In Bucharest, we used solely outdoor spaces, windows and building facades, dividing the setups into different concepts and mediums. Two months later, we shipped everything to the second location in Timisoara, a former tram depot turned museum,” Alina explains. “This project was hardcore but truly exciting introduction into the much more experimental environment of new media arts, applied to my illustrations.”

“Behance turned out to be a pivotal tool in my creative process so far,” says Alina. She first started sharing her work to Behance over a decade ago, while she was in high school. “It started more as a way to keep track of my work and share some of it online. Fast-forward a few years later, many of my coolest and most important jobs come through this platform. And it’s a source of inspiration for some of the best and newest art and design work that’s out there.”

While curating her moodboard, Alina leaned into her gut instinct: “My focus was finding that warm, tingly stomach sensation that you get when you discover a piece of really amazing work.”

One of the projects Alina included in her moodboard is a piece by the illustrator and graffiti artist Smithe, which she pinpoints as one of her favorite Behance projects of all time: “I’ve always been a big fan of Smithe. His amazing artworks, intricate lines and perspectives, his detailed combinations of anatomy with technology have always had a big influence on me. This one’s a beautiful piece that definitely leaves me with a hopeful feeling.”

“I love these sculptures for their incredible level of craft and detail: the faces, the armor, the postures, the way they embody the idea of balance,” says Alina of Wang Ruilin’s sculptures of the Monkey King. “The contrast between the strong poses and fluidity of their flowing sleeves and clouds, as if you can almost feel the air movement around them.”

Follow us on Instagram this week as we share more projects from Alina’s moodboard and give you an inside look at her creative process. You can see more projects by Alina on Behance.

See our latest updates and features on the new Behance blog.

Meet This Month’s Guest Curator: Alina Bohoru was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last year at Adobe Max we introduced a new way to showcase NFT art minted on Ethereum on Behance. Now, you can also showcase art you’ve minted on Solana and Polygon.

Polygon and Solana are both environmentally efficient blockchains — Polygon uses a mere fraction of the energy consumed by Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains and each Solana transaction takes less energy than two Google searches.

It has been inspiring to see artists from around the world be discovered for their work and build new communities through NFT marketplaces. Many artists are finding not just an additional stream of revenue, but newfound creative freedom.

“NFTs have motivated me to switch from being a designer and occasional artist, to being a full-time artist, so that I can use my vision and skills to tell my stories, instead of those of clients and brands,” explains digital artist Laura Shepherd. “Client work can be inspiring and challenging, leading me down new and different tracks, but it diverts me from the creative path I need to follow.”

Illustrator Faqih Nurzaman has also embraced the creative freedom of NFTs: “I was a freelance illustrator who worked on projects from clients and worked at NFT to express my other side in my work. Unexpectedly, my works were quite appreciated, and I feel the freedom of art here.”

“As artists, we pour our hearts into our artwork,” says designer Christina Young. “As we venture further into NFTs, it’s important that we stay true to ourselves, find communities that uplift, and create that empowering experience for ourselves and others. Solana is more environmentally conscious and focused on fostering an encouraging, positive, and wholesome community of creators and collectors.”

Protecting Creators and Collectors

We are committed to providing artists both the platform to showcase their NFTs and the technology to ensure they are credited for their work. Through the Content Authenticity Initiative, we developed an open-source standard that allows artists to attach their artwork provenance to their creations,and we’re collaborating with NFT marketplaces including OpenSea, SuperRare, KnownOrigin, and Rarible, to make this provenance visible. That same artwork provenance is also displayed on Behance to help protect creators and collectors alike.

Learn more about how CAI protects creators and collectors by authenticating provenance.

Showcase your NFTs on Behance

Head to the NFT tab in your Behance profile and you’ll be able to connect your wallet via MetaMask or Phantom. Once the accounts are synced, you’ll be able to see all the NFTs you minted on Behance and be able to include them in any projects.

We look forward to expanding our partnerships and creating more opportunities for artists to share their NFTs and be discovered for their work on Behance.

Browse our curated moodboard of NFTs on Behance.

See our latest updates and features on the new Behance blog.

Showcase Your NFTs on Behance was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This month, we celebrated Black History Month and the launch of Wiki Unseen in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation and AfroCROWD. Wiki Unseen is a joint, ongoing effort to expand the visual representation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in history.

The Wikimedia Foundation selected three artists from Behance to commission portraits of Black historical figures whose Wikipedia articles remain unillustrated. “Wiki Unseen champions representation in both the knowledge and creative spaces. For us, it was important to collaborate with people who champion artistic expression and provide platforms for all creatives to be recognized for their work,” says Tas Elias, Brand Collaborations Lead at the Wikimedia Foundation.

One of our founding pillars is to provide more opportunities for creatives, and we are thrilled that these newly commissioned portraits will become an important part of our collective history.

Ballpoint pen artist Enam Bosokah of Ghana was selected to illustrate Senegalese computer scientist, Rose Dieng-Kuntz and Ghanaian biochemist, Marian Ewurama Addy.

“I developed a passion for the arts at an early age but was not sure where it was going to take me,” shares Enam. “However, my decision to study fine arts in high school was an issue of following my heart rather than knowing what I want and going for it.”

Multidisciplinary artist Bukhtawar Malik created portraits of poet and playwright May Miller and documentary filmmaker William Greaves.

Trinidadian artist Esther Griffith illustrated portraits of Asquith Xavier, who fought race discrimination laws in England to become the first Black train guard at Euston railway station, and Mercedes Richards, a Jamaican astronomy and astrophysics professor.

“Esther’s use of color is joyful and irresistible, creating moments that remind us all that Black history is something to be celebrated, not just mourned.” says Tas.

These commissioned portraits have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a free-use media repository. By releasing them under a Creative Commons Attribute Sharealike license, they will be freely usable on Wikipedia and anywhere else in the world. Learn more about Wikipedia’s commitment to closing the visual knowledge gap through Wiki Unseen.

See our latest updates and features on the new Behance blog.

Drawing History with Wiki Unseen was originally published in Behance Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.