Lessons learned from making art
Posted onMy resolution for 2025 was to make more art, and I had fun keeping it. I took acrylic painting lessons, got into watercolours, printed stickers, and made hundreds of drawings. I went to sketching sessions and organised art hangouts. I carry my art kit everywhere I go. Mission accomplished!
Along the way, I have learned a few lessons that apply to other areas of my life.
Make mistakes
I became a better artist when I allowed myself to make mistakes.
Until recently, I used the pages of my notebooks parsimoniously. I feared disgracing them with subpar work. Someone might yank my notebook from my hands, flip through it, and expose me as a fraud! This was not a position I reasoned myself into, just behaviour I never questioned.
But then I learned about studies. The greatest artists make a series of sketches to figure how to render their subjects. It stands to reason that they practised the smallest aspects of their craft, just like athletes.
My first painting lesson was two hours of making lines and splotches, first with different paintbrushes, then with our fingers. The goal was not to make art, but to understand how acrylic paint feels. I learned more by wasting paint for two hours than by rationing it for decades.
This got me to experiment more. A lot more. I embraced failure as an essential part of the creative process. It was a subtle but powerful change in my approach.
When I lost the fear of making bad art, I started tackling bolder subjects and experimenting with new techniques. I deliberately failed so that I could learn from each attempt.
The fearlessness has spread to other areas of my life. I learned to slip up, cock up, blunder and bumble, because I want to be good on ice skates, to meet interesting strangers and to make better art. I might fall on my ass, have awkward conversations and waste a lot of paper, but I will risk failure if it guarantees progress.
“Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.”
— Jake the dog
You are your own harshest critic
When I got into watercolours, I made a portrait of a friend that now hangs on his wall. He even framed it.
Then I made stickers out of one of my doodles. They were a test for a larger batch of All About Berlin stickers, but they started showed up on my friends’ water bottles. I thought they were just obliging me, but when their friends asked for stickers, I had to accept that some people genuinely like my work.
When I’m in the thick of it, I compare myself with the very best in my field, blind to the fact that I have already made stuff people deem worthy of putting on walls.
Hyperopia
I tend to get stuck on getting tiny details perfectly right while losing sight of the big picture. This often results in a highly detailed turd, where each part is elaborately drawn, but none of them work together. I quite literally miss the forest for the trees. It’s a form of hyperopia, in which problems can be seen clearly at a distance, but are blurry up close.
Our painting teacher stopped us mid-painting, and asked us to take a few steps back. With a bit of distance, I could see the glaring flaws in my work.
I have learned to get the broad strokes right before sweating the small stuff. If a drawing feels off, I allow space and time to highlight mistakes that I’m too close to the canvas to see.
Do the thing
Above all, do the thing. If you fancy yourself an artist, make art. A painter is a person who paints. Collecting paintbrushes is not painting. Going to art museums is not painting. Following creators is not painting.
Making more art meant carrying a sketchbook with me at all times. It meant creating a space for it in my apartment. It meant meeting friends in a café to paint watercolours.
I used to draw on lined paper with a mechanical pencil. It was good enough for all of my childhood. It’s something I try to remember when I fuss about pigment and paper quality for my watercolours. Of course a tree needs the right conditions to grow, but most of all it needs time. Waiting has extracted a greater toll on my craft than cheap pencils.
Art is about the choices we make
Making things myself has changed the way I appreciate other people’s work. I used to understand the word “appreciate” as establishing the value of something. I thought that appreciating a Van Gogh painting meant seeing why Starry Night is so damn popular, because if you don’t, something is just wrong with you.
Only since recently do I understand appreciation in the sense of love and gratitude. Failing to paint one landscape after another make me appreciate just how difficult it is to convey emotion in just a few brush strokes.
Painting is not about faithfully reproducing what the eyes see. The invention of photography has greatly devalued this aptitude. Making art is all about making choices. You can’t draw every single leaf of a tree, so you have to take shortcuts. The shortcuts that you choose to take is the message your are making.
This applies to other areas of your life. Life is unfathomably complex and your time on Earth is a blip. You are the shortcuts you take and the parts you choose to highlight.