How To Be A Good Artist
How to be a good artist
I get this stupid question about every other day. "How can I be a good artist like you?" Instead of just laughing it off or giving a silly reply, I will actually explain how you can make yourself be a good artist. NOT precisely how you can draw better/paint better/write better/ whatever your craft may be. Art itself is an expression of the images inside of your head. The product of 'art' is how well the information translates from your brain to your hands on whatever canvas you may use. Art is an undefined subject that people have been studying for centuries; alongside syntax, language, human emotion, and the human brain itself. While art, or rather, inspiration is not produced by chemical discharges sent by the brain, but by the very core and soul of human beings. Art is purely cultural and emotional.
The first step to being a good artist is classifying your self as an artist. You may never believe you are an artist if you don't think that you are one from the beginning. You need to unconditionally believe in this. Lie to yourself if you have to, you'll end up believing it someday. In another sense, we are all born as good artists, we just don’t see it. The categorization of art is so vague and vast: it could be as simple as how you go about doing your job, writing a paper, being a soapbox preacher, how well you mesmerize a crowd, how easy it is to steal a purse right out of someone else's hands. You are born an artist, but may lose this general idea due to human insecurities or flawed philosophy that might be engraved into the back of your skulls at an early age. This is wrong. Lie to yourself, you are an artist now.
The next thing you need to do is find out what kind of artwork you like. Whether it be traditional artwork like expressionism, realistic, abstract, Claude Monet to Pablo Picasso, Tex Avery to Dave McKean, whatever you fancy. Find what inspires you, what images your mind develops when you're looking at what other people have done. Inspiration is like a rush of mental adrenaline; you get excited, an uncontrollable urge to run back to your safe spot and plot down the image you see right there in your mind before it goes away. Sometimes it may take days to finally plot down the image but sometimes the image fades away when you don't tend to it after a period of time. If you're always looking at the same kind of artwork all the time, get daring and look at different kinds of art. Listen to different kinds of music. Read a different genre. New pictures, new inspiration, may always lurk inside of what we have never been exposed to. While it is easy to find what kind of artwork you like best and pursue along that road, you need to look at the whole picture as well.
Know your materials. What was this art made out of. What kind of paints did they use? What type of metal? What pen? Research it. Figure it out and go find your tools. You may not know of every one right away, but comes in over time, a need for extra tools for your own personal use. What colors make the best portraits. I love to paint, but it took me a long while to realize that those silly plastic-like acrylic and tempura paints were not the only paints invented by man. Oil paints became a new door opening right in front of me to explore in my sophomore year of highschool. I knew they existed somewhere in the back of my head, but the option of ever using them was nonexistent until its time. Digital painting is another big one. You can literally do anything you want with them: paint whites over darks, do the foreground before the background, make your canvas bigger in mid painting, etc. Know that there are plenty of options and materials that are out there for you, you just have to find them.
Research special artistic techniques. What makes the process easier? Anything that comes before the final product; sketching the 'ghost' the understructure of figures, drawing the sculptures or pot, plan the painting (if there is something definite you want to do), prewriting, premeditate, study anatomy, cartoon anatomy. Most understructures are drawn. Teach yourself the artistic process and follow it every time. Once you have a process, copy some artwork (for practice purposes only). Don’t take credit for the final idea, but learn from it. Discover the feel, style, the shape of every color, and the dynamics of every perspective. Do it again and again and again until you feel like you understand what you want to do. You don’t need to fully, but just be aware of how you can go about planning and creating your own pieces of art. You need to practice, again and again and again some more with your own art.
Acknowledge that you suck. Your art sucks, you need to know that. It sucks and will always suck for the remainder of time. When it doesn’t 'suck' anymore, you don't grow after that. Look back at art you have done from each year and criticize it harshly. Make fun of it, ridicule it. THAT is how you see your very own progression. From this, you can give yourself a small ego; know that you can actually like your own artwork from time to time or know you have some 'skill'. Don't inflate this ego though or you will never be open to criticism or growth in any way. It is crucial to have the opinions of others, you need to know what people want to see. This is how you become known. THIS is how you leave a mark on the world; conform to the ideas of society and the planet to fit your own new tangent of visual emotion on top of its surface. Share your Art with others, share your techniques, discoveries, inspirations with other people, they will happily return the favor. Find out what inspires other people, find out how they do it/what they do and why. Learn from your community and become a part of it.
Lastly, and most importantly; Stay at it. Just keep going. If you hate your art that much, give yourself small break. Come back to it tomorrow. In a Year. Ten years. Just keep the idea alive. Believe that you are still an artist and have the ability to create pieces that can influence a new generation. Artists are what shape the world as we know it, human beings that have divine passion and urge to create, destroy, and recreate. We shape society, creating imaginary pictures of what we 'should' look like and we do actually start to believe in them. We do have the power to change anything we please, just so long as the main ideas are not lost in the translation from brain to hands. We share our souls with the world, and the world in return, craves to see more.