#but charcoal pencils can be SO hard to control. I didn’t want to risk messing up the drawing

[asphodeline-lutea]

Toothless's little face fell incredulously. "What do you mean, you don't know who I am?

“I’m T-t-toothless."

[katojordan]

6 Things Art Has Taught Me

I’ve begun to notice I have this NEED to create and build stuff.  If you have seen any of my social media stuff I think it apparent.  I do quite a bit of art stuff like drawing, painting and on occasion jewelry or clay or even wood working in my spare time. Some stuff I've made includes a longboard, a desk, a cello, and currently a mandolin. I've spent countless hours using drawing to relax and unwind, that got me to where I am. Sometimes the hardest part of the drawing is finding a decent picture. Over the years there are a few principles that I've used while drawing that apply to more than just drawing and painting. 

1. Being patient when it's not what I was expecting and not giving up when I don't like it This seems to happen to me regularly in art. I was drawing a rose in white chalk and had been working too long in one sitting. I looked up compared what I had against the picture I was drawing from and to me at that moment it didn't even look like a flower. I ran in the kitchen, grabbed a damp rag and began to wipe from the corner of the canvas toward the charcoal. I came within centimeters and stopped. I was starting to see the flower come through. Never ever had I been so hasty to completely destroy a picture before it had time to grow on me. I threw the rag on the floor, closed my drawing book, and worked on a different drawing. The next day I opened the drawing book and was surprised at how good the rose looked. My recent endeavor of learning oil paints has been the same experience. It's hard for me to wait 2-3 days for layers of paint to dry where as before with use of acrylics I had maybe 10-20 minutes of drying time. 

 My perspective in the moment may be disappointment or frustration because plans, circumstances, dreams aren't looking how I thought would look. I've got this far and it's nothing like what I thought it should be. It's the expectation gap. The gap between what I expect and reality. The difference is what I do about it. Give up, start over, or tweak it until I like it. Most of the time I struggle to see how I'm progressing but when I step back and give myself time to see how far I've come I always am thankful for not giving up.  

2. Practice makes me better 

 No matter what the context, practice betters your skill. Whether it's guitar, voice, studying, drawing, driving a car, biking, cooking, or snowboarding, you will get better over time. If I devoted the time I spend on drawings to other things I'm sure I could be much more successful at those things. (I many times get told I have too many irons in the fire and I should stop and just pick one. It seems like I could be diagnosed with ADD in hobbies. I love doing a little bit of everything). 

The hours I spend making the same little stroke for hair or stomping in my shading work gets the picture to what it is. It's practicing over and over and over again until that stroke becomes easy and natural. Practicing until I like what I see. It also gives me license to experiment with techniques and practice things I haven't tried before. Practice makes the drawing process faster. What used to take me literally 20 hours now can take me 2 hours. Every drawing is just practice and improving for the next one. I believe there are few ways you could practice drawing wrong other than just not doing it. But as with everything else in life there is usually a right and wrong way to do it (as I've found with teaching myself instruments). Practice purposely, intentionally, and the correct way at what you want to get better doing.

 3. Learn from mistakes and failures and move on 

 Yes, even with cool stuff you may see on my Instagram or Facebook--all of my well done art--I still screw it up horribly at times. Sometimes it just doesn’t turn out the way I intended now matter how hard I try (even after giving it time to grow on me). With drawing and painting it's generally very easy to erase or paint over a mistake. Drawing with pens, oil pastels, charcoal, colored pencils and other mediums that just don’t erase I find myself having to roll with the mistakes and work with it. There are drawings that I’ve got almost all the way done with and just stopped because it just wasn’t working. Sometimes it just doesn't work out. Many times instead of erasing, I just grab another piece of paper and start over or I'm able to work it into the picture so most people will not catch it. Its the failures and mistakes that I don’t allow people to see, and sometimes people get the perception that everything I draw is a wonderful perfect work of art from the very beginning. It's a process. Even my finished paintings and drawings I'm rarely satisfied with every part of it. There tends to be always something that I wish I would’ve done better with. This one is hard for me in life. I find it's not so simple to just move on from mistakes and failures. I tend to want to dwell on them wonder if I could’ve done something differently. They stay with me and I don’t want to repeat the same mistake and have the same failures so I want to avoid anything to do with whatever circumstances caused it. It's easy to say from an art stand point because my life story doesn't rest on one picture. But sometimes it seems as though my life rests on a few large decisions and it's terrifying to think I might be able to screw that up by doing or not doing something. 

 4. Take a risk

 I love a good challenge. As I've taught myself to draw I've progressed through various subject matters that interest me. From animals to people to scenery to action sports and a little bit of still life even though that still bores me. I'm always looking for the next thing to draw that will be a challenge and in that I take a great risk of it not turning out how I want. I take a risk on a challenging picture just to see if I'm able to draw it.   I control every brush or pencil stroke and even yet it might not look like what I expected. I take a risk every time I do a portrait (many times without permission, a stolen profile picture from a friend's Facebook😬) that if I show it to them will they like it or maybe just lie to my face. I take a risk, a small risk, every time I post to social media. Will I get praise or criticism? How will I handle either when it comes? I'm building a mandolin right now. Its risk is what if I mess up an angle and it doesn't play right? Well what if. I have a hard time trying not to live in the what ifs. I like to have thought of everything, every possible way it could turn out but sometimes you have to step into the unknown and confront a friend, or share something personal, or talk to that stranger. You sometimes have to do stuff you've never done before.  Its in that risk where you learn and grow.  Take a risk.

 5. Don't let criticism steal your passion

 It's hard to hear someone's criticism of something you put effort into doing. And not something that I've done haphazardly with little thought. I took time, I cared, and people don't like it or think it looks bad. Its easy to take the criticism of and few and make it personal, "these few don’t like this picture or what I'm doing, therefore I'm bad at it." It's harder to hear criticism from those I love because they're opinion holds more weight. It stings a little more to have someone close to me point out something about a drawing that's not right, other times it just frustrates me because it seems like Ive done all I can do to fix it already and nothing is working.  Many times I can already see the problem spot and people just want to point it out for the sake of pointing it out. It's disheartening to get a lot of criticism on a project but it's a drive to make it better. I admit it's easier to ignore what people are saying altogether and leave a drawing alone or I can pick out the truth about what's said and fix it. In the end they may be seeing something about it that I am unable to see. 

 Don't let people's criticism steal the fun out of something you love doing. 

  I want to be a person who can take criticism well. Allowing that trusted friend Tell me how it really is, point out the areas that I need to work on, show me my blind spots and not get offended or make excuses. This is hard! 

 6. Embrace the process 

 This part in art and music is fun, the same part for me in life is not. In art stuff it's fun to search for a picture and think of every possible way I could do it. Decide on paper size and medium. Lightly sketch it in. Take time to fix perspective mistakes. Start shading. Smooth shading, sign name. That's the process in the most basic form. Every piece is a little different based on difficulty and subject matter. Painting involves many more steps and techniques sometimes I'm not sure how to go about the process. Every aspect of music is a process. From learning an instrument, writing music, recording music, playing music live, producing music. It's something I rather enjoy doing. Using the process to create and be creative. The end result of a song is rewarding but all the middle is where you really live and find inspiration. The middle of the process reminds you why you do what you do.

 In life I don't like the process. All the beginning and middle stuff is the worst. Most of the time I just want to see the end result without wanting to spend time on getting there. And most of the time I don't even know what the process is going to look like in life. I mean with drawing I always have a fairly good idea of what I want it to look like by the end but in life the season may end up completely different. I never thought I'd be doing this, be here, have these people as friends, not be friends with so-and-so any more, all because I had no idea what the end result would be during the process I was in. Even though I so very badly want to know what the final destination would look like. I really need to learn to live in the middle of the journey better and be content with progress during the process not just a destination. #WeGetThereWhenWeGetThere