Finding Your Signal – The Three Elements That Drive Success

Building a Career That Stands Out

Creating a thriving artistic career and building a body of work that truly stands out from the crowd requires more than just technical skill. It demands clarity about who you are as an artist and the courage to amplify your authentic voice in a world full of noise.

This can feel like an impossible battle to win. As we talked about in the first video, the challenge is two fold:

Challenge #1: Finding Focus We need deep focus to master our craft in a world full of distractions

Challenge #2: Standing Out in the Noise We have to compete in the noisiest attention economy in human history.

But here’s what I’ve discovered: when you flip traditional marketing concepts and view them from an artist’s perspective, everything changes. We have a secret weapon that gets overlooked – we’re unique, we have strong points of view. We’re naturally equipped to push culture forward. To stand out…

The key is getting close to that clear signal and clarifying it. This is what helps you stand out from AI sludge, generic work, and the algorithmic content that’s proliferating everywhere.

From Letting Go to Leaning In

In the last video, we talked about the three things I had to release to clarify my signal:

• Amazing detailed rendering and anatomical perfection – Beautiful work that many artists excel at, but wasn’t serving my voice
• Dynamic poses and fight scenes – Incredible explosive energy that other artists master, but just wasn’t me
• Fan art and drawing popular characters – A legitimate career path that works for many, but I needed to focus on my own ideas

But clarity isn’t just about removing impurities – you also need to know what you’re going to focus on instead.

My Three Core Elements

What I discovered was that my craft improvements weren’t what moved my career forward. The work that really landed with people were pieces I actually enjoyed creating. Looking back at my childhood influences, I found three consistent threads:

Element 1: Fantastical Worlds Growing up with Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, Franco-Belgian comics, and science fiction stories, I always wanted to visit completely alien places. Everything I create now should transport people to worlds that feel like different planets – not Spiderman swinging through New York, but places that have never existed before.

Element 2: Story and Narrative When people look at my images, there should be a dramatic question: “What’s going on? Who are these characters?” Even a single character piece should hint at a larger story.

Element 3: Full Scenes Training in French comics taught me to always include backgrounds and environments. I learned to love creating complete scenes where characters interact with their world. Even single character pieces get backgrounds that create narrative tension and context.

The Snowball Effect

Once I started consistently applying these three elements, my career transformed. People would see my work and say “Tim creates fantastical worlds, understands story and narrative” – exactly what concept art and key frame illustration required. Instead of a confused portfolio that made people ask “What do you do?”, I had clear positioning that attracted the right opportunities.

The more I focused on these elements, the more work came that I actually wanted to do. People weren’t hiring me for rendered muscles or superhero poses – they were hiring me for the things I genuinely enjoyed creating.

This Is a Trainable Skill

You might think “That’s easy for you to say” – but this is just a skill you can build. Look at recognizable artists like Picasso, Andy Warhol, HR Giger, Frank Frazetta. They figured out who they were and applied basic marketing and positioning concepts to their work, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Your signal is already in you. It’s not about finding your style – it’s about uncovering, clarifying, and strengthening what’s already there. These elements are often hiding in plain sight, connected to what you loved early on.

Try This

Think about three things that really fire you up about art – things you know are genuinely important to you. Don’t overthink it:

• What themes or subjects have you always been drawn to?
• What type of art did you love as a kid?
• What gets you more excited than doom-scrolling social media?
• What would you create if you ignored all external expectations?

Brainstorm a bunch of possibilities, then pick your top three.

---

What’s Your Number One Thing?

Share in the comments: What’s the one element you know should be in every piece you create to define your authentic artistic voice?

Next up: Watch for the next video where you’ll discover how to put these concepts into practice within a supportive artist community – I’ll show you exactly how I designed Mighty Artisan to help artists focus, develop their frameworks, and go on creative quests together.