Hello, Hivians
I haven't posted in a while and I thought maybe I could take a little time to write about something that most beginner artists struggle with. I know for certain I struggle with this as a new artist trying to make something of this.
Why aren't I as good as X?
or
Why aren't I as good as I want to be?
Before I proceed, I'd like to just preface this with the fact that this is all my opinion and it could be a practice in the general artist community and I might stumble on to it independently by chance only.
It's often a question that comes to me, more when I fail at the objectives of a project or study. For some other people, it could be that they're just not in any place, economic or social or personal or mental, that would make learning and improving possible. For some it could be they just don't take instruction well.
I've given this a great deal of thought over the past two weeks as I weathered the severe lows of my manic depression. I think there is a lack of visibility of failure in the art community, with the final piece of an artist often being the ultimate public subject.
It's often heard that practice makes perfect over time or makes for something that looks legible to the human eye. But I think there is this other side of practice that is often not visible. Failure as a paradoxical practice and tool of evolution of artists. In fact, I think I'd dare say that the only way to become better as an artist is through this procedural failure. A reflective failure.
This occurred to me when I was watching the Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn sketchbook series . This one had Scott Eaton as the guest artist. He said something that I had never really thought about. As he got his sketchbook ready, he seemed reluctant to share his materials publically, saying that "an artists sketchbook is a place to fail."... or something along those lines.
Maybe it's just my lack of formal training but I'd never heard this before and it turned my whole understanding and perspective of progress but it did something for me that is far more important too.
If showed me that failure is okay as long as you can learn from it. And as a person with a manic disorder, it lifted this huge cloud over me. And I think it is this that is missing at the current time, especially for all of us outside the formal artistic spaces, the so-called self-taught newbies.
With that out of the way, I'd like to offer up and share my failures, studies, and experiments with you, not because I am publically successful as an artist but because I think that my failures should be shared. And I think artists on this platform shouldn't just show only the processes to the successful pieces but also the stuff that never sees the light of day because of how they never panned-out right. I believe that if new artists see that side of things it will be a practical and psychological boon.
I hope I'm making sense since this is the first time I'm concretely wording this out and haven't done any preceding foregrounding. It's straight up stream of consciousness.
Tools:
- Samsung Tab SM-T805 (Ipad Pro Mini or a Wacom one in my wishlist)
- Ibis PainterX Android
- Autodesk Sketchbook Android
- Infinite Painter Android
- Photoshop Express Android
- Charcoal: Vine, compressed, wordless pencil (hard)
- Graphite: Stadtler HB & 2B, Faber Castell H2 & 6B, Pentel Techniclick 0.5