From School to Studio with Becca Hallstedt
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From School to Studio
If you’re trying to find a job in the highly competitive fields of Media & Entertainment, there are many things you can do to set yourself up for success. In this course, Instructor Becca Hallstedt shares valuable learnings and applications from experience that can help you land your first studio job.
About the Instructor
Becca Hallstedt has experience working as a concept artist, illustrator, texture artist, and 2D generalist in games. Before graduating, they were able to land an internship in the industry thanks to advice and guidance from mentors.
“I wouldn’t have gotten that headstart without the wisdom those folks shared with me. I’m excited to pass it on to you!”
In this interview, Becca shares their learning experiences, more about what you’ll learn in their course and more.
Most memorable learning experience:
I’d been working on a small illustration that was out of my comfort zone for a few days and it had gotten to a point where I was over-rendering and struggling with the composition and just getting frustrated. My lead opened it up on his computer for a paintover, and I watched in horror as he flattened my 150+ delicately organized layers, seemingly ruining my progress.
Over the next 15 minutes on that single layer, he re-cropped the image, lasso tooled and shifted the structures around, threw big paint strokes over muddy details, and bam. All the nervous, tentative little mistakes I had made were fixed. It taught me to focus on the bigger picture instead of getting caught up in the details.
Behind the course:
The most important lesson that I figured out early on was to research. I spent a lot of time while I was in high school and college reading forums, watching artists’ Youtube channels, asking questions in Facebook groups and just trying to lay out a path for myself moving forward.
Along the way, I met a lot of really generous, kind professionals that responded to my questions with short novels of advice on how to avoid common job application mistakes, write a good cover letter, take yourself seriously and present yourself at events. All of this accumulated into a small wealth of knowledge that I share with students whenever I’m able to and this course covers the most important lessons that I learned along the way.
Overcoming obstacles:
Everything that I’ve achieved was something that I once believed was impossible. I thought that I was never going to be good enough to be a professional artist or get into the games industry. I wrestled with self-doubt for years. While it is still something I struggle with, I found it absolutely necessary to address it head-on. When it was especially hard to deal with, I kept my nose to the grindstone and focused entirely on improving my own work rather than getting caught up in jealousy and anxiety.
Nothing helped my impostor syndrome more than just doing what I loved to do, which naturally resulted in improvement and got me closer to achieving those seemingly impossible milestones!
1 sentence of advice:
Nothing fuels career growth, creativity, network expansion, curiosity, persistence, improvement, and passion more than the pursuit of fun.
ArtStation Learning courses are included in all ArtStation premium subscriptions. For a limited time offer until September 30, lock in ArtStation Pro at just $6.99/mo before the price increase on October 1.
See more of Becca’s work here.
