On Making "Bad Art"

[rynling]

Sometimes (by which I mean often) I get frustrated because my art isn't as polished as the art of people much younger than I am, and because I don't have the sort of large network of friends from school who will help boost my art posts so that they get positive feedback on social media.

But then I think about all the extremely talented students I've worked with who stop doing anything creative almost as soon as they get out of college. A lot of these kids have been art school students with majors like Narrative Illustration and Game Design, but then they accepted a job in a different field and stayed active on social media but just completely stopped posting creative work.

So I have to keep reminding myself that, while having even a tiny spoonful of talent would be nice, the most important thing is to keep making the time to draw and paint, because "bad art" is better than "no art." It's also important to do work I enjoy. If my art posts aren't going to get positive feedback on social media anyway, I might as well enjoy making them instead of worrying about whether the work is perfect.

And I don't mean to get complacent. I always like to go to art shows and art festivals when I travel. There are amazing artists living in some out-of-the-way places, so I don't want to make generalizations, but outside of urban areas I see a lot of the same flowers, beaches, and Picasso-style bust portraits.* It's really important to me to continue experimenting and pushing myself to keep honing my style and expanding my range.


* Okay, but the best thing - and I mean the best thing - is when I go to a local arts festival in some little town in rural Maine or North Carolina and see someone's highly polished oil painting of furries on exhibit. I respect these artists immensely, I'm not even joking.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

Yes to everything about this post *chef kiss*

Also, I can't speak for every art kid who dropped it after graduating, but for me? The biggest part was the reality check whiplash of going from art classes to real life jobs using those skills. My college did not offer internships at all; if you wanted that, you had to do that on your own time outside of classes. Even my friends who went to more prestigious art schools and had those opportunities more or less handed to them, I remember them telling me they did the most mundane, menial tasks and maybe were involved in a big project towards the end. And then you get jobs where people don't really care about your vision and want you to tweak a million things because they think "it looks nice" and don't care if those changes go against everything you learned about in school. Same jobs also want you to know way more than you specialized are; us graphic designers were expected to know basic animation and illustration and web design and UX and photography, which was never in the core curriculum, unless you took one of those as your elective. And then there's the whole "you can only pick two of these: done fast, done well, or done cheap" dilemma, which makes for an extremely stressful time out of college. I had a friend who literally designed a different business card (logo design and all) every single day. He said if he could do that for a couple of months, then he'd be confident in getting a better job elsewhere. Then he did that for two years.

Yikes, let's wrap this up before I talk your ear off. When I think back on my graphic design days, I hope that the current students have better access to tools to prepare themselves in their career, because it's absolutely soul-crushing to spend 4+ years doing critiques of passion projects with peers and like-minded folk and then be the only person in a job who gets it while others are telling you you're wrong when you're not.

Shit's hard. So yeah, 1000000% do what makes you happy. Fuck everyone else. That's the good stuff right there.

[rynling]

Damn, I hear you. I most certainly do hear you.

I’m burned out on writing atm for somewhat similar reasons, so I guess this sort of thing never goes away. I guess you just have to keep making time no matter what and prioritize your own interests.

I feel like sometimes you get so burned out that it can be difficult to gauge what your own interests are, though. I’ve been there, and I have nothing but respect for artists and writers who take a good long break and only get back into practice after several years have passed.

Honestly anyone who creates anything at this point is a fucking superhero.

[lassarina]

For me, I know a lot of my creative droughts have been when the day job is just sucking up every spare scrap of energy and making it hard to have ideas. The regular "breaks" at school (even if I was working a job during them) really made it a lot easier to have energy for art, in my experience. (Relatedly, although I am still not doing the amount I want to be, it got a LOT easier to write when I didn't have 2+ hours of commute. I used to use my commute time for writing, but not having that extra mental load has freed up a lot of neurons for creativity.)