Can ‘reading the best to be the best’ be great advice, all the time? Or, can inspiration sometimes be… uninspiring?
Category: Starting
Learning through mimicry
It’s surprising what your fingers will do, automatically, when you’ve spent some time copying the writers you admire, word-for-word.
Credentials aren’t that important for most things
An uncertified surgeon is illegal but it’s probably true that no one has ever died by looking at artwork produced by an uncredentialed artist.
The problem with pure
Are acrylics or digital any less ‘pure’ than oils? Those in the art world favour tradition over new technology, but everything was new technology once.
Lucky breaks are everywhere
Our intuition tells us that good luck is harder to find than bad luck, but what if luck was just about the way you looked at something?
How much should I spend on a pencil, paper, and eraser?
Maybe “Buy the best art materials you can afford” isn’t the best advice after all.
Ideas are easy, progress is hard
Ideas are everywhere, but artists are not. Is it really just fear of failure that prevents people from converting their ideas into art?
What’s in a name?
Would we use the internet differently if a browser was called a do-er? Would we make different work if we called ourselves an artist instead of a hobbyist?
You could instead of you should
Assuming that what works for us will work for others doesn’t make sense. Perhaps instead of advice, what we need is perspective.
No one taught us what do with boredom
The problem with being bored isn’t about being unable to think about what to do, it’s about deciding which, of all things, we should do, right now.