On Teaching Yourself Art

Jolie, 2008, University of New Mexico

Art School Vs. Self-Taught

Creative work is fantastic - no-one cares about your certifications or degrees as long as you create phenomenal work.  Put thus, why would you go to art school?

"By their own estimation, the cost of a four year education at RISD is $245,816. As way of comparison, the cost of a diploma from Harvard Law School is a mere $236,100." 

-Noah Bradley

Required Reading - IMHO, Don't Go to Art School by Noah Bradley

Or maybe it can help.  Or do go to art school - just use it effectively, something I worked at with perhaps 50% success.

"As a student who wants to train in avant-garde cinema, video art, and photography, let’s consider what I’d like to have to shoot one short film: 

Sennheiser MKH416 Shotgun Microphone: $1,000 

Sound Devices 702T Audio Recorder: $1,975 

Associated grip equipment: About $5,000 

Sony F3 Digital Cinema Camera + Lensing: $20,000 

Production Assistants, DP, Grips: I don’t even want to think about it." 

- Mark Kammel

The rebuttal - IMHO Go to Art School, by Mark Kammel

Teaching Yourself - Resources

If, like me, you are currently choosing NOT to attend art school, realize now that you can teach yourself anything you want to know - we literally live in the Matrix.  Remember how psyched you were when you saw Neo being jacked in and learning kung fu?  Well, we're basically there.

There are so many resources out there, and bloggers like Karen Chang are even nice enough to organize them for us.

Do you want to become a graphic designer?  Listen to Karen, who taught herself design, left her job at Microsoft and started making a living doing something she loved instead of something she tolerated.

Karen Chang - How to become a designer without going to design school

Want to learn to draw?  Refer to Noah Bradley's post above, and in addition, check out this post on the fantastic blog "Lines and Colors" by Charley Parker

Charley Parker - Learning to Draw

Teaching Yourself - Beginning at the Beginning

Now that we have the resources, every expert in every field agrees:  Do whatever it is every day.  No matter what.  Which must take a lot of discipline - certainly it seems impossible to me.

Or not.

"People think I have a lot of discipline because I danced every day for 365 days in a row. But the truth is, I have no discipline. I never did anything else for 365 days before. Dance was different because I loved it the most." 

- Karen Chang

Karen Chang on Discipline

The hardest part about making a living doing what you love the most is discovering what that is. What do we love so much that we can practice every day?  If you are one of those lucky people who already knows, I think you might be a rarity.

When we see a performer, or look at a painting, all we see are the results of the work, not the work itself.  We don't see those "10,000 hours," that Malcom Gladwell talked about in Outliers (Still the best book on genius and success I've ever read).

"If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it." 

- Ignacy Paderewski, Polish pianist and politician.

Where To Go From Here

Okay.  You've figured it out!  Congratulations, you've just begun a terrifying journey.  There are a number of pitfalls you'll encounter - usually entirely of your own devising.

This quote has been floating around for a while now:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass

I hope this helps a little bit, I know I'll keep writing here about motivation, about process - all the better to stay focused on the goal - to create really awesome sh*t.

Some of my other posts on the subject

On Resistance

Ryan Ottley on Breaking into Comics

Her Golden Whip EP Cover

Photo by Mateus Alves

Her Golden Whip is a Ska/Klezmer band out of Berlin that asked me to create a cover for their new EP “The Way They’re Dancing.” They emailed me a couple of photos, and admitted they didn’t have a very concrete idea of what it ought to look like, so they needed help to nail down a concept. We made an appointment to chat via Skype and discussed a number of different options for covers. I’ve been really psyched on the Urban Sketching style of watercolors, and it seemed like a style that could convey the kind of energy they were looking for, so we settled on a watercolor sketch based on a photo from one of their performances in Paris.

I brought my sketchpad to a couple of house shows in my neighborhood, trying to gather some poses and lighting options that would feel suitably dynamic.

Next I roughed in a very simple color scheme and design into a small watercolor pad that I sent to my contact in the band for assessment. Since they do a lot of busking and on-the-street performances, interactivity and personality are critical parts of their image, and something I wanted to be sure to capture, so I developed several head-shots for each of the members.

When they got back to me, they admitted that as long as I could get that level of detail, they wanted to show all the band members on the front cover, a potentially tricky composition. Working in photoshop, I selected images that I thought would harmonize, and composed them into a couple of simple designs for reference

I also decided that for the final image, I wanted to move away from the purple and yellow color scheme to a subtler gamut of dark blues and cool neutrals, balanced against illuminated oranges.
 The far left of the image (the back of the digipak case) needed to fade away, keeping so any lettering would be as clear as possible.

The first attempt was still too purple, and clumsy in execution, stiff and lacking energy. (Shown here compared with the 2nd version on top)

The final image in progress

The final cd case, with lettering mockup.