# Choose Must: Learning from the Paths of Others - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/choose-must-learning-from-the-paths-of-others/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Other · Quick win · Rated 4 /10 # Choose Must: Learning from the Paths of Others Updated August 2026 Elle Luna · Artist, Designer & Author All levels · 20 min A 20-minute exercise in cutting out portraits and hanging them by your shower, more ritual than method. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fchoose-must-learning-from-the-paths-of-others%2F1905506823) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Choose Must: Learning from the Paths of Others is a 20-minute exercise class built around a single craft project: assembling a physical collage of creative influences, called a Mentor Tree, and using it as an imagined sounding board when work gets stuck. It is the second installment in Elle Luna's series drawn from her book The Crossroads of Should and Must, and it functions less as instruction than as a guided ritual. ## What the course actually asks you to do The structure is a three-step build. First, a 10-minute timed brainstorm of an unfiltered list of dream mentors, dead or alive, reachable or not. Second, a categorization pass where those names get grouped by discipline, illustrated with Luna's own example of cutting self-portraits out of a book called 500 Self-Portraits with an X-Acto knife. Third, a physical assembly step: picking a location in your home, in Luna's case her shower wall, and pinning or taping the images up so they are encountered daily. The most useful idea in the course arrives late, in the sixth lesson, when Luna walks through a real use case. Stuck on how to price her drawings, she describes standing in front of the collage and letting a specific memory of Picasso's advice to a photographer surface, followed by thoughts on Modigliani's scarcity of exhibitions and Keith Haring's commitment to free public work. The value isn't the collage itself but the act of interrogating a single question through several imagined, historically grounded perspectives in sequence, which is a genuine (if informal) creative-thinking technique distinct from just looking at inspiring pictures on a wall. ## Where it falls short The course has almost no method beyond that one demonstration. Steps one and two are just "make a list" and "cut out pictures," which most people intuit without paying for a class, and the actual critique mechanism, the interplay between imagined voices, is described anecdotally rather than taught as a repeatable process. There's no guidance on how to select which historical figure would plausibly speak to a given problem, no framework for what to do when the mentors' imagined advice conflicts, and no acknowledgment that this is essentially personal projection dressed up as counsel. Viewers hoping for research-backed mentorship practices, a structured feedback loop, or something that works outside a visually oriented practice will find nothing here to use. The runtime is honest about its own scope. At 20 minutes across seven short lessons, several of which are single scenes (the bathroom walkthrough is largely a tour, not instruction), it never overstays its welcome, and the project itself costs nothing but a stack of paper and some tape. For a visual artist who already feels isolated in a home studio, the ritual of external voices to argue with has real psychological value, and Luna is a warm, specific narrator who clearly uses the practice herself rather than just pitching it. But as a standalone class, it teaches one technique wrapped in a lot of shower-wall show-and-tell, and the substance could be summarized in a paragraph. The standout The technique of meditating on one specific unresolved question in front of the display and letting imagined responses from different mentors surface conflicting angles on it, as Luna does when she works through how to price her drawings by recalling Picasso, Modigliani, and Keith Haring in turn. ## What you will learn - · How to brainstorm an unfiltered list of dream mentors, living or dead, in a timed 10-minute burst - · How to categorize influences by discipline or medium to build a focused reference group - · How to physically construct a mentor tree using cut-out images, books, or printouts - · How to choose a location to display it so it becomes part of a daily routine - · How to use the display as a prompt for imagined critique when stuck on specific creative problems - · How to edit and rotate the group of mentors over time as your questions change Best for: Solo-practicing visual artists or makers who lack a local peer group and want a low-cost ritual for self-generated critique and motivation. Skip it if: Anyone seeking research on how real mentorship works, a structured feedback method, or techniques usable outside a visual, image-based practice. Engaging Teacher Helpful Examples Actionable Steps Audio & Video Quality [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fchoose-must-learning-from-the-paths-of-others%2F1905506823)