Paul Birman – the flying car man and a guest lecturer in the online program of ARC Academy

The students of ARC Academy had a special guest lecturer last week and that was Paul Birman – the flying car man who can create some of the best and most original 3D artworks. If you think that you won’t ever see a pink train with a horn of an unicorn, then you’re wrong because Paul has done that already and it looks awesome! We attended the lecture of Paul and we can say that it was one of the most useful presentations – it taught us how to find inspiration (even in the darkest times) but also how to promote ourselves as true artists – because after all 3D Modelling is real art that is constantly evolving in the digital world! NFT (crypto-tokenized digital art) is one of the examples and Paul gave us some advice on that also! 😉

Here’s some of the knowledge Paul Birman taught us: 

• Inspiration is everywhere around us – in the news, outside our home, in our friends, Arnold Schwarzenegger – you can inspire yourself from everything if you are paying attention enough well of the details around us. If you have a specific style of art you can always mix different elements like photobashing, painting and at the end your artwork will look really original.
•  Share your artwork and tag others – tagging different social media accounts of the software you have used during the art process can get you noticed. No matter if that’s Nvidia or Blender or Zbrush – tag them and they might repost your art on their digital channels. That surely brings a lot of recognition!
• Get into the right community groups – showing your 3D models to family and friends is nice but sharing it with communities with 3D Artists can actually boost a lot your engagement.

Tell us more about your experience in the world of 3D modeling 

After graduating with a degree in programming, I worked in Latvian television, fixing computers and such. On the side, I was earning some extra money as a DJ and event organizer. As time passed, I grew more and more tired of crazy parties and my boring day job, so in 2012, I made a life-changing decision: I was finally going to learn 3D! As before, I started to learn 3ds Max but later switched to Cinema 4D, because the user interface is super friendly, there are a lot of online tutorials, and because many motion designers are using it. I spent about eight to ten hours every day in C4D, learning so much and in 2013, I returned to TV, but this time as a motion graphic designer. I went on to work for other companies as a senior graphic designer, but the market in Latvia is rather small, so opportunities to make something in 3D were few and far between. This changed in 2019 when I started creating and posting my ‘everydays’, the daily render works I share on Instagram. Unfortunately I only made 300 ‘everydays’, but it gave me a lot of new knowledge and good new contacts.

How did you become the flying car man? 🙂

Many people like fast cars and especially flying ones. 😀 That’s why my artworks with flying cars were the most popular and that’s why I was called a flying car guy.

Why did you decide to focus on freelancing?

I always wanted to become a freelancer, but I was scared to jump into this world until the company, where I worked, went to bunkracy, so I had no choice 😀 But now I’m moving back to my independent job because I want to spend more time improving my profession and creating my own 3D artworks.

What is your lecture about and what you will teach the students in it?

Nowadays, the biggest problem is that artists copy each other and are lazy to look for original ideas. I want to share my process of generating ideas, where I’m looking for inspiration, and how to avoid “copy paste.”

 What advice would you give to aspiring 3D modellers who want to work in the creative industry?

The first is to learn, to learn and learn again, the second is to be original, not to be afraid to experiment and the third is not to be afraid to ask other artists, because we support each other in this industry and there are no competitors in this industry, which is developing very fast and more and more requested.