Fetchasketch

cedreau:

juliedillon:

madlymel:

juliedillon:

I’ve been thinking lately.. While it is important to an artist’s growth to learn from others and listen to critique and try new things, not everything everyone tells you is gospel. Even if a critique is coming from a teacher or industry professional. Not everything they tell you is written in…

I, rather oddly and epically, came to this conclusion YEARS ago while on an art forum, getting critiques on a piece that was still in early stages. Someone who was regarded very highly as a professional took me to task for the way I sketched. Other pros (whose opinion I regarded much higher than the first), chimed in on either side of the issue, most of them defending me. Everything then devolved into bickering and arguing over who was right and who was wrong while I sat there thinking “But I just wanted an opinion on the composition!”

And it suddenly hit me that for at least a year, I’d been crippling myself. That I was so paralyzed with the fear that what I was doing wouldn’t meet someone else’s standards that I’d forgotten that the only standards that really mattered we’re my own, and they were already set pretty high. All the arguing did was highlight for me that there IS no one way to do anything, and that what works for one artist will never work for all.

So that’s the story of why I stopped using art forums for critiques and started trusting my own guy. And I’ll tell you, my work suddenly got a hundred times better the minute I stopped caving to other people’s opinions.

This has pretty much been my exact experience posting on art forums, and a big reason why I’ve since stopped posting. I felt really guilty about it for a while until I realized I was making good progress just by working and studying on my own and listening to opinions I valued rather than letting tons of people pull me in a dozen different directions. 

I discovered this myself when I was sitting in a critique. My professor kept telling me to go in the opposite direction that I was heading - citing that it would look better that way, that it was new and unconventional and was essentially everything I didn’t want. It was at that moment that I had a silent rebellion and realized that I was the one in charge of my education. She wasn’t the one paying for my classes. She wasn’t the end all and be all of illustration. And at that moment I learnt to say “No.” The look on her face man… I’ll never forget it. From that point on I went through the rest of my school career and there after with the mantra “I DO WHAT I WANT” ringing in my head (while of course still taking critique, just… not letting it guide me as much as it had before).

Ahahahaha my art teacher (and family) flambeed my art work so much at highschool that I pretty much just gave up and abandoned all ideas of ever thinking of art as a qualification or career.