Some educational thoughts
Melting Inky here…
These past couple of weeks have been rather Hot and humid.
As of right now I am looking at 86 degrees in my studio, with almost 50% humidity, which is really not conducive to making art.
Nevertheless, I have been working on some educational things, been slowly getting back to work on improving some of my technical skills and working on fundamentals. This actually made me think of something that i wanted to share with you all!
There was this concept i learned fairly early on in my pursuit of art, of practicing shapes. Circles, squares, triangles, because a lot of beginning art material teaches the importance of shapes, and being able to make those 3 shapes well teaches you a few different fundamentals which you can build on later. this part isn’t important though, whats important, is that there is a trap that people can fall into with this practice.
The trap is that as you practice these shapes, you begin to think that you must do an arbitrary amount of them before you can start working on learning other things. THIS IS FALSE!
a lot of people fall into a loop of looking at their work, the doodles, scribbles, experiments, and thinking, “ I need to practice shapes more” or going, “I can’t try more complex things, because i need to work on my shapes more” and then doing a few sheets of shapes, then putting it all down because they don’t notice any improvement.
The way to break this cycle, is by accepting that your art that you have done, that you might think is awful/amateur/not worthy of praise, is actually worth looking at!
see, in order to make something, we have to practice it, which means not just doing the basics, we also need to challenge and push ourselves to try new things, experiment! if something doesn’t work, don’t throw it away or cross it out. Instead, look at it, and try to take some lessons away from it. Draw on it or write on it what you have learned from it, and put it someplace where you can revisit it at a later time if needs be.
SO this week, when you are sitting down to draw, and you feel yourself wanting to try something different…
“Dew It!”
that’s right, I am telling you to try it. Your probably gonna not have it come out the way you envision the first time, and that’s okay, but each time you will get better, and if you keep pushing yourself, and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
as long as you are still taking something away from each attempt, then you are still learning, and that will help you improve. you will soon find that you are also rewiring your brain to not view your early attempts as “failures” or “garbage”, you will instead view them as things you can learn from!
So remember, in order to get better, you have to keep challenging yourself, quit hanging out in the shallow end of the pool, and try to see if you can actually swim… You might surprise yourself!
Anyways, that’s all for now, I’m off to snuggle my air conditioner, stay cool everyone! Inky Out!
“I don’t know billy, are you sure its safe to go swimming?”