Art is just communication. Sometimes we sit around in a circle and have surface-level, vapid, but highly entertaining and fulfilling conversations with each other about why The Avengers would’ve been at least 372% better if every character were played by Ian Mckellen. Occasionally we escape and have an all-night one-on-one conversation with someone about the deepest complexities of our ooey gooey souls and feelings — earnestly saying things like “Man… looking at all these stars really makes you think about things… and stuff.” Many people even just talk to themselves revealing their most honest and personal truths… mostly in written form granted, but I’d be lying if I said things don’t get verbal now and then when I’m painting for long stretches. The point is: communication (art in this case) doesn’t “have” to be anything at all, you choose what to say and when to say it. A teacher can hate what you have to say and grade you accordingly, however arbitrary that may seem — but at the end of the day, you have the choice to be as “deep” as you want to with the things you say.

You don’t have to pick a side. What you say and what you make doesn’t have to all be profound or all be simple and surface-level. You’re a human, and if you’re human like me… some days you’ve got labyrinthian feelings and ideas that need to be unleashed in high concept personal artwork, some days you just want to paint something because you “like it”, and some days you feel that the Dowager Countess should be in a leopard pimp coat, Ron Swanson should have a chestache, or that robots should just be girls in awkward cardboard boxes.

Art doesn’t have to explore a philosophical concept. Art doesn’t have to be much of anything at all really — but personally? A balance helps. People have many facets to themselves and creating artwork is a great way to share these facets, all of them. There is a chance that your teachers are repressing your artistic freedom and trying to force you to do what you don’t want to — but, before you climb up on the desk, rip your shirt off screaming “FUCK THE OPPRESSORS” and start burning things down in some sort of occupy art school frenzy — consider the (good) chance that they’re doing that exact thing only to see if a bit of pushing can get you to share those other sides of you in the event that you might have something else worth saying.

I made no sacrifices as melodramatic or as biblical as say… slicing open a goat on an alter and rolling in its blood… but several common aspects of life were given up, occasionally in extremes when I graduated from college, and a few I still largely keep out. While if you’re one of the special lotus blossoms who attended my NHIA lecture, you already are on top of this, when I left school, I was essentially asked what I was willing to give up to succeed as an artist. 

Not what I would DO to succeed, but what I would GIVE UP.

I answered: everything. I would give up everything.

This vague “everything” ranged from sweeping changes to my social and personal life down to substances and content consumed to entire aspects of my personality. These things removed aren’t all HORRIBLE, EVIL, things, but especially for my first year trying to improve, they were some of the most distracting constants in my life that I knew I needed to ditch or change to try to make it.

ALCOHOL: I drank and partied a ton in college, less than some, but I was regularly pushed to the limits of my own stupidity. I removed that from my life entirely for about a year, and since then I keep such things very moderate — and only unleashing college-level stupidity on very special occasions.

LADY FRIENDS: My longest stretch without a girlfriend in college was about 4 weeks, I was in love with the idea of serial monogamy, I was a total sap. I still had and have relationships since I left, but they are either very distant and not something that eats into my time working, or very surface level and thus devoid of any of the emotional displacement of energy that makes most people go insane and want to velociraptor their faces off just thinking about their significant other. Easy, breezy, brief.

NON-LADY FRIENDS: In college, though they were ever-changing, I was constantly swept up in friend circles of 20-30-40 people who did EVERYTHING together. This is a fantastic, beautiful, crazy, dramatic, and worthwhile experience, but not one that a) allows you to get much done, or b) offers stability or independence. When I left, I cut it down to a core few, and since then, like most people do far younger than I did, It clicked that the quality few always trump quantity.

CASH MONEY: For much of my life, when I made money, I spent it. I never listened to my parents about saving it little by little, so when I left school, I decided they may be on to something, and spent my first year stingy as can be. Pinching the hell out of every penny. It sucked. It felt embarrassing, especially since when working at Gizmodo that first year, I was only making 20 bucks an illustration. But it paid off, I moved to New York with every cent I’d saved, I invested back into myself and my business, it’s gone quite well, and now I just don’t ever have to think about it. If I hadn’t been so extreme in my thriftiness initially, there are MANY opportunities, huge ones, that I would have missed later on that really built my career.

WASTING MY LIFE AWAY ON THE WEB: I was glued to the Internet long before tumblr existed, I wasted away my days on forums, blogs, writing fan fiction (seriously), and frequenting gaming websites, never getting anything done or learning anything new, just consuming content that never helped me at much of anything. So that first year out of school, I spent all of that time learning how social media worked and the pathways that information flowed through Internet instead of digesting cat picture after cat picture. I’ve eased up substantially since then, but I still keep things at a minimum, and the time spent is mostly to learn or share, not endlessly scroll through nothingness — I don’t do boredom.

DIAL DOWN THE DOUCHE JUST A NOTCH: I had always been told that I was very stubborn and set in my ways, thinking I have the answers and that the answers were set in stone. Stubborn makes it sound endearing so I long agreed with it. It’s a word many like to use, but if I’m being honest, being stubborn mostly just feels like being narrow-mindedness and egotistical. Though perhaps the least tangible, the biggest thing I’ve (attempted) to give up and continue to attempt to, is an ego. I was really riding high when I left college. Despite all of the distractions mentioned, compared to highschool me, I had turned my life around and thought I was on top of the world, ready to tackle its obstacles.

I think ego is very perceptual. Depending on who you ask, it varies in size, ex:  A super nice girl at my last lecture made it sound like it’s non-existent, but I’ve encountered many who view it as a giant triceratops of one, and I think either is valid, though that girl definitely gets my favoritism for obvious reasons. I wouldn’t post my artwork and my thoughts if I didn’t at least have some confidence in them, (the crippling fear and self-loathing is less seen by people), but what changed a couple years ago was simply checking myself (before the wrecking of said self). What I mean by that is, I believe in being true to who you are — if you’re confident, be confident — don’t fake your way through being humble just because you’ll get less shit for it. It’s easy to be something that’s never disagreeable. But at the same time, your confidence must always come with rules, fine print, and a very unflattering mirror. Know who you are, what you’re good at, and what you’ve done, but never make it more than it is. Never put yourself above anything or outside the crossfire of criticism. For me, I needed very badly to just let go and understand that my knowledge is rewritten and expanded on a daily basis, my work has a million miles to grow, my viewpoints on the world will only extend as far as I’ve dared to look, and that a balance does exist out there where I can care passionately about what I do, feel empowered by sharing it, and not do so while being a ginormous twat waffle in the process. It’s not the search for false humility, but rather just understanding my place, my REAL place, knowing that it’s not that high, and communicating at least a vague awareness of it while I try to grow. Even writing this out makes me feel like a breakfast food/insult combo — this is very much so a work in progress for me.

IN CONCLUSION:

Sacrificing/giving up the things in life that are often viewed as just common place things or everyday indulgences, can actually give you a little momentum — it can bring clarity to what you’re doing. You don’t need to become a saint, it’s not some religiously-induced choice, it’s a personal one solely made to eliminate distractions when you have a goal in mind that demands your full attention. Since I was asked this question by a professor when I graduated, it’s now the same question I throw back at everyone who ever asks me what they need to do to succeed as an artist. The things you need to do to succeed are obvious: time, effort, passion, practice, knowledge. End of list. 

But what are you willing to give up?

Normally, I feel that whenever I answer questions here, whatever perspective I have to offer will suffice, but this one left me with a laundry list of opinions, most of which conflicted with one another. While it would probably be most expected for me to think that art can change the world, and it’s other professions that serve a more tangible purpose that would look down on art as a career choice – if I’m being honest, my gut feeling was that me deciding to become an artist and continuing to be one IS incredibly selfish and narcissistic. Even when I engage with people considering following a similar career path, my words of encouragement boil down to “I love what I do, it fulfills me immensely”. From artist to artist, that’s exactly what you’d expect, but suddenly I considered the possibility that all of my artistic “advice” was just perpetuating a cycle of selfishness – encouraging people to pursue things only to make themselves happy. Having an impact on the world was never even a consideration, I just… like making things.

Is what I do, is what all artists do, just for themselves? Are we really just choosing a path that puts a smile on our faces when we should be picking careers that tangibly assist people? I was at a loss. I knew that I lacked the proper perspective to answer this question in full on my own.

Thankfully, two of my brothers happen to be in fairly interesting careers that contrast my own as an illustrator: a Doctor and a Rabbi. While we sat around a coffee table in Manhattan eating Thai food — my niece running around in circles holding a Superman action figure, and my 6 month old nephew smiling in a dapper baby outfit while he happily filled his diaper – I broached the question to see what two people who respectively save lives and save souls, would have to say about this. However, unlike myself, they almost immediately dismissed it as absurd.

The narcissism and selfishness was one of the first things they tried to dismantle — saying every profession, no matter how seemingly noble by label, attracts people who do it entirely for themselves, a doctor being no exception. I argued back saying that in these instances though, regardless of the reasons FOR pursuing these practical professions, a doctor still saves lives.

Next on the chopping block, they dissected the notion that artists have no real impact on the world. There were a slew of very expected and easily rebuked statements thrown around. When I told my Rabbi brother that the impact he has on his congregation and community is deep, profound, instantaneously noticeable, and that I don’t have a damn clue whether anything I’ve ever made has affected anyone, he was just his usual humble self and in denial of that fact. But my other brother said something that if there were ever a statement that gave any sort of real answer to a question layered with so many existential onion rings, I felt this was it. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Sam, just look at history, Doctors, Engineers, and Scientists are the people who have an impact in the world and matter the most? If anything you could make a strong argument that these are the professions that are extraneous. Art pre-dates medicine, science, and engineering by very wide margins. Art has grown and expanded exponentially throughout history, it has transformed language and sold belief systems to entire nations. I gain more from looking at a beautiful painting or listening to good music than I ever do from how something is engineered. I mean even on a really basic level of what I do, without artists, what the hell would us doctors learn from? You have no idea how much the field of medicine relies on illustration.”

I didn’t have an argument for that. It was historically sound.

While I’m not sure that I have a definitive answer to your question, after filling my perspective and knowledge gaps from my brothers, I will say this: It’s a slippery slope to say that artists don’t impact the world. Art’s effects may not be as tangible as the aforementioned career alternatives, but it’s still around, broader and more widespread than ever, permeating ever facet of our human-made world. Its effects may not be as quantifiable as how many years a Doctor has kept a person alive, but as most doctors will tell you, quantity of life is not nearly as valuable as the quality of it, yet their job demands that they deliver the number over the experience.

Art demands nothing, we just make it. We express, we depict, and we rage on whether or not our impact can be put into numbers.

The feeling that we’ll never be “good enough” isn’t something to remove, my dear grey-faced pudding-pop, it’s the cold, hard, and universal truth that pushes us forward whether we’re amateurs or masters of our crafts. 

If I feel I’m good enough at any point in my life, I’ll be both a massive disappointment to the tiny angel-winged/shoulder-mounted version of me, and have effectively cheated myself of exploring my own human capacity. Like many problems that people face, how you use the struggle will determine its effect on you. It’s shockingly easy to let the abstract fear of never amounting to anything cripple you into a sobbing, fetal-position-assuming, ball of angst and pouting, but (though more difficult) turning that fear on its head and using it as the glorious fire under your ass to keep moving… well it keeps you alive and willing to attempt to make that life worthwhile. 

I get embarrassingly giddy when I see artists 40-50 years older than myself and their work has evolved exponentially over the course of their lives, continues to do so, and that even near the end, they feel their work still won’t be good enough after their dying breath. You can see that as a morbid and depressing thought, sure, OR you can see it as a delightful and life-affirming reminder that most people are never happy with who they are and what they’re capable of — but we get to spend our lifetime improving our skills and subsequently — ourselves. 

That largely depends on how well you understand the program you plan on drawing with. The technique, fundamentals, and general rules of drawing and painting can be tweaked then applied to any medium — digital isn’t an exception — the biggest shift is simply in learning how to use the toolset and do so efficiently.

When I mostly painted in oils, I knew the confines and necessities of the toolset — I knew going into a painting that I needed my paints nearby and I would group them together with similar colored tubes in their own bags. I would mix key color scales ahead of time on a glass palette so that I wouldn’t need to constantly be making new ones mid-painting. I would buy generally either a linen canvas and head to the wood shop to build stretchers to put it on or just use a wooden panel as my surface. I’d need it on easel which would need to be angled to the right so that my painting arm wasn’t obscuring the model, photo, or still-life I was looking at. I’d need turpenoid/turpentine, linseed oil, and walnut oil for mixing and changing the consistency of the paint, have my brushes arranged with different bristle types and sizes for different paints as well as certain brushes for lighter colors and certain for darker. I learned how much pressure to apply to get a smooth or scumbled/dry look, how to glaze color, how to hold a brush for the most control without smudging wet paint, how long to wait in between layers, how to use both dry and wet layers for different purposes and textures, and a million other tiny factors that make up everything that is “oil painting”.

When I started to move to Photoshop, some of those things were simplified and synthesized like color mixing, paint drying, and brush cleaning, some were just slightly tweaked like the transition of thinners and thickeners to opacity and blending modes, and others were completely unfamiliar like an infinite range of sliders and depth maps replacing my familiar sable and bristle brushes (though over time you can learn how to use brush settings to bring that organic and at times unpredictable nature of real brushes back into a synthetic environment) — but what helped me transition most was simply learning the tools and nuances that make digital painting its own thing. Hotkeys, selections, layers, workspaces, and so on are best grasped as soon as possible so that you can simply practice painting — not constantly be forced to learn a new way to do something as you go along. Not learning the confines of your medium puts up obstacles, moments of pause, hesitation, frustration, and reasons to get distracted. I find this especially key of the digital medium for me, because the thing I like most about it over other means of painting is that I can just sit down and start making shit.

I don’t have to prepare ahead of time, making sure I have the necessary supplies, that my brushes are clean, my paints are sorted, my colors are mixed, my canvas is stretched… these are all things that delay getting that first brushstroke down — and though many people like digital for many reasons, I just get excited about making things and this lets me START doing so quicker. Even when I spend over a hundred hours on a digital illustration, being able to jump right into the first second of it gives me momentum and the motivation to start and subsequently finish a good deal of things. Drawing and painting traditionally combined with learning the fundamentals of Photoshop early on (even before I knew it could be used for drawing) made picking up a Wacom pen click incredibly fast. Though in the 6 years I’ve been digitally painting I still learn new things all of the time, especially ways I can manipulate the tools of the software to cater to aspects of oil painting I miss, it’s those fundamental first steps of learning the confines of the toolbox that digital artists of every level still use.

It’s also important to mention that like traditional mediums, digital can be as little as one step of a mixed-media process –- learn the tools that apply to its purpose for you. I know artists who only use it to bring out highlights of an otherwise all-oil piece for print, others who only use it to overlay color, others still who do their linework in pencil and then paint value and color digitally, obviously many who use digital from scratch, and some who even use digital initially, print, and draw/paint on top of their lines. Digital art does not replace or make older mediums obsolete, it’s simply a newer one with strengths and drawbacks like the rest of them. As new-fangled as it may seem to purists, I can assure you that painting with pixels is shockingly similar to doing so with pigment.

Well I’d argue heavily that there’s nothing even remotely wrong with drawing porn or sex if that’s what you want to draw — but she is a mother after all so let’s mainly focus on selling her on nudity’s detachment from sex and its artistic utility for now.

While the most progressive out there would simply deem nudity as having no attachment to sex and that The Man is oppressing everyone… generally speaking, people seem to ditch clothes while they have it. Even with blind, progressive, idealism, the connection is pretty easy to make. The problem is that for whatever reason, that one simple nudity/sex link has taken over and spread to the nudity/clothes-changing, nudity/breast-feeding, nudity/bathroom-going, and nudity/hygiene links as well. Literally everyone (maybe sans Tobias Fünke) gets naked or naked enough to be societally-deemed “offensive” from day one of their lives, and while I personally don’t think being naked’s association with sex should matter in the first place, I also just don’t feel that the ties from sex to nudity should have changed its socially-normal definition so expansively when nakedness exists in such frequency for such unsexy reasons. While undressing can certainly be stage 1 for sex, on a daily basis for me (and most people) 90% of the time it just means things like hopping around and tripping trying to get jeans off and looking like you’re Jim Carrey trying to escape from the robotic Rhino in Ace Ventura 2 while you wrestle out of a shirt if you were nervous at all that day. I don’t even need to explain why breast-feeding or going to the bathroom is in almost all instances non-sexual, and while a bath/shower is just one of a bajillion places one can have sex, yet is the de facto standard of where you clean yourself in much of the world — it’s pretty baffling that the same place I go to to sanitize myself after a New York subway ride gets such a sexy spotlight in society.

Now, I mention all of these very normal, largely non-sexual, things in reference to drawing nude people, because, well… drawing ‘em is right there with the others. As mentioned, there are exceptions to all of the above. Have I and most mildly competent artists somehow managed to woo a gal or two by painting them like French girls? Sure. But that wasn’t because nakedness was involved, some people are just attracted to artistic ability in the same way some people are attracted to non-naked things like “nice hair”, “a good vocabulary”, or “a deep understanding of the Harry Potter universe.” 

Most people don’t try to feed a baby THROUGH a shirt, change clothes while keeping all of their original clothes on, or take a leak while their jeans are still zipped up and buttoned tight… they/we get down to basics and expose ourselves because “nude” is our natural state — it just makes more sense. Drawing clothed people works fine, but when LEARNING HOW to draw people, it is most helpful and practical to do so while they’re in their natural state. In life drawing classes, the models are there as tools for learning. Bodies reduced to their simplest of forms — nipples, penises, vaginas, and butts galore included — are there for you to study and practice. And what’s crazy about learning to draw people naked, is that after staring at all that skin for so long, you a) Get over any weirdness you feel about nudity and b) actually learn how to draw people fully clothed better without even realizing it. By understanding how everything underneath sits, it suddenly becomes much easier to not just see a shirt, but to see how it interacts, falls, and folds across skin, muscle, and bone. You learn about movement, how joints interact, how skin stretches and crinkles, and the relationship on a macro level from limb to limb down to slightly more micro-level things like where nipples fall on a chest, the many positions of the chest depending on how the body is contorted and how arms are raised, or the creases from pelvis to thigh as legs and waist pivot about… Drawing nude models isn’t just something I personally use as someone who draws many portraits, it’s honestly MOST valuable to people like animators and (when they’re not twisting their super heroines into anatomically impossible positions) comic book artists. I know people at Pixar and in the game industry who take nude life-drawing lessons all the time because it keeps them sharp and because those same fundamentals that some deem “pornographic” are applied beautifully to something as child-friendly as animating a beloved Disney film.

There are MANY value systems that demonize sex and sexualize anything within a few degrees of Kevin Bacon from it — something as simple as drawing people nude is just one of many casualties from that line of thought. But naked is just what we are. It’s our natural state. In a perfect world, you’d be able to draw naked people, sex involved or not, without needing an explanation or defense for your parents, but this is something much more basic. Your mother thinking you can take an art class and fully learn to draw people without learning how to draw them nude, is like her expecting you to get squeaky clean while showering with your clothes on. You can do it I guess… but it really just does not make much sense. 

An education, regardless of field, should serve the purpose of building your skill set. While this runs through many strains of higher education, art school in particular heightens this skill-driven education rather than a degree-driven one. A degree from an art school, regardless of its prestige, isn’t terribly relevant (outside of a select few majors). It’s what you learn there — or rather what you CAN learn there — that are some of the most priceless and wholly tangible skills that a school can give you. It’s stripped of much of the monotony and hoop-jumping of traditional schools in that what you learn is evident through the quality of what you make rather than a series of memorized facts and test-taking. Those still exist, but in microscopic numbers and only in select classes.

Your friend is like many kids who go to art school because they think it’s the easier, “more fun” route. I complained about tough professors (like any student in the history of ever) who took away my “fun”. The difference is that the harder the teacher I had, the more it pushed me, and though I received letter grades to mark my progress as well, you also get your drawings, paintings, sculptures, designs, animations, etc. as tangible products of what you’re ACTUALLY learning from the people teaching you. No professor can be like: “Remember how you picked C when the correct answer was D on question 17-E of test 3? Here is what you can learn from that” But at art school, your growing portfolio becomes a timeline of progress and reference for teachers to meticulously critique to help you improve.

I don’t think that there’s much validity in those claims that teachers are too harsh/mean, but I won’t assume that they didn’t work hard enough. Laziness and excuses are certainly the easy things to point at (and could be all there is to it), but as crazy as it sounds, the emotions of it all are hard to swallow — and some people might be hard workers who just feel too much or take it too personally to cope. For me, I think that people believe that teachers at art schools are so much harder than they actually are because they’re dissecting something you’ve created instead of marking you down on a series of missed multiple choice questions. That vulnerability makes it more personal and it “hurts” more when you falter, but man… when you succeed… it can be like getting a fist-bump from the ghost of Leonardo da Vinci while he gives you vague but heartfelt words of encouragement from Star Fox 64.

“Never give up. Trust your instincts.”

At 17 I had virtually zero artistic experience beyond highschool doodling, no desire to be an artist, not a clue how to paint, didn’t know what a still-life was, spent most days in the back of class hidden under a mop of hair hoping that no one would see me, and though that was 7 years ago, the Internet was a very different place. My social media presence was a long-ago-deleted myspace filled with angsty punk rock lyrics and musings about whether or not I would ever get a girlfriend.

To say that you have a head start and talent out your ass is a gross understatement. It’s also a recipe for disaster if you keep ‘hating art at school’.

When I showed up to class on my first day at art school, I knew the least of anyone in my class. There were a few kids who got accepted and given full rides for their highschool portfolios. I was in awe of them, they were my gods and goddesses. These guys and girls could decently replicate fucking Michelangelo drawings while I excruciated over the most basic sketch of an egg. These were the prodigies, the geniuses, the talented and the destined — 6 years later and my once idols aren’t doing anything art-related and as much as I’d like to say that shitty hands were dealt, their stories are more predictable. I remember having a conversation with one of them my freshman year that at the time simply impressed me because of how damn good this kid could draw, but in retrospect was quite blatantly the beginning of the end — the stagnation of brilliance. They said: “Have you seen the professor’s drawings? If this is all I have teaching me, it’s pretty clear I have nothing left to learn from this school.” 

Don’t let yourself turn into that kid. Push yourself while you’re young by letting others push you. Paint things you don’t want to paint and you’ll understand them. Understand them and you might like them, and if you still don’t? Well shit, you’ve made an educated push forward towards defining who you are as a person and an artist instead of arbitrarily branding yourself a certain way because that’s “how you feel”. Art, well, ehh… fuck art — “making things” is hard. It takes time, work, passion… these are things you know, but much like knowledge about any other facet of life, it advances through challenge. Challenge isn’t a linear scale of difficulty, it’s something filled with variables and even seemingly simple things can feel impossible when unfamiliar or even presented in an unfamiliar manner. That unfamiliar, that unknown — it pushes us. We often “hate” it. I have “hated” certain classes, certain teachers, certain assignments, certain jobs, certain clients… but I have built the skills I’ve obtained thus far and will continue to build them for my entire life, through late-stage obsession, a relentless desire to understand this world that still feels vast and new to me, and battling, beating, and developing new ways to tackle the obstacles of the job — not finding a way out of or around them.

You’re an artist and you feel boxed in?

Good.

You can do a lot with a box, don’t throw it away just yet.

I think this one is best said bluntly, so I’ll be brief:

If you aren’t prepared to be actively creating artwork and/or promoting it 8+ hours a day, then let it be a hobby for you. Don’t expect a career and a solid income from something that isn’t even getting the equivalent time of an average 9-5 job.

However, If you’re ready to make the sacrifice of treating art as your life instead of “the fun and easy thing to do” — then start gathering up your cheesy text-over-image motivational quotes, because you can fucking do it and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Personally, I believe that artist’s block is caused by 2 main things: 

1. A relentless fear of being unable to create something truly original and successful.
2. Laziness.

The first is fairly straight-forward. While I’m sure there are people out there who don’t analyze and think about their every action, most content-creators don’t fall into that category. As a result, it’s very easy to have a brief, electric, idea in your mind, and if you don’t start executing it quickly enough, you can become creatively impotent thinking that it’s been done, can’t be done properly, or won’t be noticed/shared/respected. One moment like this can cause a chain of thoughts that keeps you from even putting pen to paper/screen/canvas. As I mentioned in my 10 Things I Learned In The 2 Years Since I Graduated From Art School, your best fix is to just do it, “it” being something, anything.

The latter of the two causes, Laziness — I actually believe is the more common issue, just the less admitted one. The first reason gives people an excuse, but no one likes laziness to be their excuse. “Art” in its most traditional sense (despite its current definition of: “anything…literally…anything”), is really not a genetically (or god)-given skill. It’s a technical ability and understanding that is honed and matured through practice and time (Yes, there are always brilliant exceptions to this rule, but they’re the vast minority). That’s not just how well you can shade, sing, or sculpt, but how you understand light/shadow, rhythm, or movement. Technical ability extends to the conceptual: the idea-having, abstract, and less concrete parts of creative-trades. Coming up with an idea for a painting, a book, or a song… it’s rarely this “eureka” moment, but rather the culmination and synthesizing of your ideas, existing ideas, and things you’ve seen and heard, all coming together over time to create something “new”, even if it’s not actually new at all. Where laziness comes into all of this, is that people use their lack of inspiration — this necessity for eureka moments — as excuses for everything when finding inspiration is as easy as finding a Bruno Mars song that I hate. It requires such little effort to be inspired these days thanks to the Internet, you just have to not use it like you’ve just done a line of coke in the middle of a squirrel-filled plastic-ball pit while a bubble-machine fills the air with rainbow soapy balls of wonder underneath a disco-ball.

As I’ve said before, having the Internet is a big deal. We have pretty much any visual we could ever imagine at our fingertips and that over-saturation of imagery can be daunting… if you don’t SLOOWWWW DOOOWWWNNN. Seeing something on facebook or tumblr and instantly clicking “like or reblog” does NOT mean you have absorbed content. It means that in the midst of endless scrolling, you have paused for .2 seconds to express to the world “I LIKE THIS THING, OH SHINY THING, *CLICK* OK GTG BYE… OH I LIKE THIS THING, *CLICK* OK GOTTA—- OH MY GOD THAT THING!…” and so on. Just chill. Look at the artwork, listen to the music, watch the full youtube video…. it’s like the Internet version of stopping to smell the roses, except instead of essentially useless flowers, it’s the entire Web filled with the creations of millions of different people in every medium and format imaginable.

So, advice on artist’s block in easily digestible format (tl;dr as some of you call it):

-Make something. Light bulbs don’t actually pop up above your head causing you to vomit up creativity and unicorns. Start something before you get too afraid to make anything.

-Don’t use “lack of inspiration” as an excuse. Slow the hell down and appreciate the endless chocolate-fountain of artistic brilliance and horror that is The Internet. 

Read here/click the picture if you want to read an article where I go all philosophical and artsy, or start scrolling like crazy if your dash is no place for “words” let alone multiple “paragraphs” (though there are pictures and spots of mild humor… so… ya know… you’re missing out)

An Introduction
Let’s get formalities out of the way because I want to talk about things bigger than me when given a Scott Kelby Soapbox.  My name is Sam Spratt and I am a 23 year-old illustrator who focuses on realism. I’ve had the pleasure of making paintings for a mess of major publications, websites, celebrities, corporations, and oddly enough, even a few photographers (the profession which brought about the decline of illustration) such as David Hobby, Joe McNally, Lara Jade, and my good friend, that guy who did the Twilight poster. To watch some examples of how I sketch, render, and paint things, you can follow this link. Obligatory preamble complete. Now let’s move on.

The New Old
I am a knowing hypocrite. I roll my eyes at the Instagram-ification of photography – slapping vintage filters on digital photographs to make them appear old and organic. I loathe the skeuomorphic interfaces in Apple’s user-experience design – digital leather-trimmed calendar apps, paper textured digital notepads, and synthetic camera click sounds trying to make something “classical” which should be as clean and minimal as the aluminum hardware it rests in. Yet… I’m a painter of the digital variety, who has built a career off of translating techniques and concepts learned through Baroque-era oil painting courses into a modern medium. Pixels have replaced pigment for me, but they’re pushed around just the same.

Maybe it’s not as simple as swiping through some preset effects and slapping filters on filters over my every meal with a button press, but the core idea is the same: art and technology are converging into a Kurzweil-esque singularity and we look over our shoulders to build something on top of what came before it.

New mediums don’t always replace the old ones. Anyone who has ever used Photoshop knows that the tools aren’t the manifestations of mere synthetic coding robots, they’re explicitly modeled for usability after old-medium artistic techniques and workflows.

With every new iteration, software simultaneously distances itself from where it came from with new capabilities, as well as shifts the entry-point to older techniques, making them even more accessible. There will be a point in the not too distant future, when cameras pick up anything we can see and anything we don’t — ISO, megapixel, aperture, and shutterspeed will be irrelevant buzzwords. The boom of point-and-shoot, iPhone photography has already made them feel like dusty terminology.  Eventually, painting, as outlandish as it may sound, will be dictated by what we think and imagine rather than what we can physically execute. We’re moving more and more towards a world where the ground floor to creating great artwork is being lowered through technology, and every facet of life is manipulated and designed.  Even chest hair.

It’s amazing how frightened artists can be of their “fields” converging with technology. People lambasted the latest Final Cut Pro video editing software for “dumbing down pro features,” but more so – it was threatening. It enabled mere rookies to access very intuitive and easy-to-use controls and to execute things which would have been incredibly complicated mere years ago. We have hipsters who call themselves “purists” for everything. I am a painter who uses a Wacom stylus. A person who digitally paints with only a mouse looks down on the stylus because it’s “easier.” People who do any digital painting are looked down on by digital photographers who are looked down on by manual photographers who are looked down on by traditional painters who are looked down on by writers, who are looked down on by writers with typewriters who are looked down on by writers with pens who are looked down on by writers with feathers and ink, all of whom are looked down on by street artists because everything sucks if it doesn’t have an obvious political message and is plastered over a public wall.  All of whom, of course, are looked down on by commercial artists.

It’s not that technology gets rid of previous mediums, it builds upon them, and I think it’s incredibly important that this continues because “art” has just about the loosest definition of any word. We literally live in a world where our own blood and excrement can belong in a museum if it’s wrapped in a sound bite explaining its purported depth and profundity.  Without new tools and techniques driving creativity in new generations, we will continue to just point to anything and declare it as high art.

When I paint digitally, I am granted an enormous amount of control. CTRL+Z can wipe away my mistakes, thousands of settings, sliders, rulers, guides, layers, and paths can assist in my ability to manipulate the medium. However, despite the thousands of tools available, I limit myself to only a few, simply because those are the ones that express my techniques and education in traditional painting. The only times I hit “undo” is when I smack my entire face into my keyboard from looking at YouTube comments, everything else I consider to be mistakes worth working over. It builds character (as every dad ever would say). I’m not trying to make my life harder by limiting myself.  After all, the difficulty of your medium doesn’t elevate it.  But I believe that as art and technology get all up inside one another, it’s important to be wary of the visual gimmick babies which rise up along the way.

3D, HDR, Tilt-shift, multiple-exposure, lens flare… these are some buzzwords which mostly pertain to the worlds of photography and video, but they run in parallel with illustration. Many artists look for visual hooks, something that brings individuation or “edge” to their work. It’s marketable, I’ll give it that, but it’s also transient when your style is no more than a fashion trend. In college, I had a teacher who told me something along the lines of: “Sam, design trends, fads, and gimmicks come and go, realism/classicism and the genres bent off of it won’t always be popular, they won’t always sell well, but they have always and likely will always be here to stay.” This stuck with me – not just on the illustrative plane, but looking at the photographers I’ve been able to work with, they ride down a similar path, working within the framework of reality. Bending the rules, but not breaking them just to find a “different” gimmick.

I was skeptical about continuing down this road. After all, most painters are taught realism initially and then they push into other styles. “Why would someone hire me to paint their portrait when they could get someone to take a picture that is quicker, more accurate, and possibly less expensive?” I thought. But in the two years I’ve been working, I’ve realized that speed, accuracy, and cost are shockingly relative terms.

Speed
A commissioned portrait typically takes at least 20 hours for me. Far more than it takes for someone to take a photo and edit it. However, I don’t require advanced lighting setups, assistants, hair and make-up, a specific location, expensive equipment, and taking thousands of photos to eventually select just one. A recent client, Donald Glover, had a packed schedule, as most celebrities do — I sidestepped this and met him out on the town.  I simply pulled him aside for 5 minutes, and snapped a few reference pictures from different angles in the dim light of the club with an entry-level DSLR.  And that was the extent of time I required of him or anyone else — the rest was Whisky. It still took many hours to paint, but the time and resources didn’t come from the client.

Accuracy
I work hard to try to capture a decent likeness. It’s no photograph, but with my limitations in technical ability at this stage in my life, I try to make up for in treatment and character. There’s no tutorial for these things, just practice. Where capturing individual pores and exact anatomy fall short, painting allows flexibility in accuracy. When I get reference, the lighting is irrelevant as the reference is to understand the form. I shoot around the figure rather than from one angle, so that I can learn their anatomy and how light hits it. Learning each person as a three dimensional entity enables client direction like “I’d like my eyes less happy.” Vague? Not really. When we smile, every muscle in our face adjusts slightly. Making eyes less happy involves being able to re-paint eye-lids, eye-brows, adjusting forehead crinkles, lowering cheeks, uncurling lips, and dozens of other tiny nuances. If my reference is of someone with their mouth open, and they want it closed, it takes some thinking.  But it can be done. The detachment from direct realism, that wiggle-room freed up by color treatment, loose brushstrokes, and texture, lets things like this flow naturally in a painting environment, while in photo manipulation/re-touching, such a thing can easily be botched and unrealistic.

Cost
Much like the relative displacement of time, cost works similarly. I charge more for a single image than most traditional commercial photographers (at my level of exposure) would, but people pay for the imagery and the rights, nothing else. There is no division or expenditures for location, production, sets, equipment, assistants, retouchers, etc. If someone wants the Sahara desert, some velociraptors, and spaceships in the background, painters get to just make those things up. It requires only one person’s time and energy, rather than the coordination of entire teams and sets.  As you can imagine, the economics of one person over many can be vastly different.

Connection
All of the pros and cons of the aforementioned mediums and technologies meet at the same place with the same question: How do you share them with the world? Well, since you’re reading this, you are probably familiar with The Internet. The Internet is the single most powerful tool available to the public. It wasn’t always that way, but right now, I can get on my computer, in any area of the world with a connection, and I can share my work, my thoughts, news, ideas, and process with anyone who cares to listen. I can put a single image online and track it as it virally trickles and booms across various websites – finding its way into millions of eyeballs.

I don’t believe that anyone with an Internet connection can find success, but I do believe that the barriers which separate someone who wants it and who can have it are largely diminished by the web. Anyone who is willing to treat their craft like they’re a doctor or a lawyer, putting in exhaustive hours like their creative job matters just as much as any other, I believe they can find success.  I firmly believe that we live in a time where actual effort met with a basic understanding of social media can sustain us. There are always excuses. Timing, connections, and luck are words people love to throw around for reasons why they haven’t found a footing. With the Web at your finger-tips, those factors are greatly reduced. It’s you, your work, your commitment to improving it, and the power to share it. It’s not an instantaneous process nor one that fits into quick-fix culture, but it’s one where your name can be found and explode through “likes” and “retweets” instead of yearly contests/awards and knowing just the right people.

Closure
We live in a digital renaissance that many disregard because of gossip blogs and cat .gifs. However, technology has allowed generations, new and old, to find ways to create fresh and exciting things from both revolutionary and evolutionary methodologies, and share them in unprecedented ways. Within a single piece of software, I have infinite canvases, brushes, colors, and layers. Nothing has to dry. Nothing has to be coated or prepped. When I pick up my stylus, I waste no time on the monotony of tertiary painting elements — they have been synthesized and streamlined into nearly instantaneous aspects of my work flow allowing me to jump in and create.

There are simple advantages of digital mediums which aren’t up for debate, but within every fiber of the toolset, the tablet, and the software, lies a foundation built by traditional painters, and for that reason, it’s important to not look back at what came before as obsolete. Technology and art are converging — what we can make, and how we make it are expanding at a rapid pace — but old mediums aren’t simply dying.

Why? Because not everything old is broken. I can’t achieve the smell, texture, and true organic nature of oil paint. No amount of slapped-on filters can make a digital photo look like a true tintype. No preset font looks quite like hand-written pen and ink calligraphy. That’s not permanent. Eventually, consumer printers will be able to print the three dimensional depth and texture maps along with a painting. Fully simulated chemicals and physics will enable digital ink to bleed and flow naturally while photos become instantaneously exposed and treated as if in a real dark room. These things aren’t unrealistic, they’re ideas built on readily-available technologies.

Do new mediums carry a stigma? Of course. Very rarely does the digital world find its way into the realms of “high art”, but it is trickling in as digital artists develop new ways to assign pseudo-symbolism to what we do.

Perhaps there’s no grand symbolism to my work to elevate it to the elusive “high art” status, I can’t say there are any deep emotions or bursting geysers of self-expression, and my concepts are typically one-note and surface-level… but to say why I make things in this way with this medium for one simple reason:

I’m obsessed with the future and will likely spend my life hurdling towards it, always looking over my shoulder.

(via samspratt)

The Difference Between A Wacom Pen Tablet and A Mouse

For people unfamiliar with digital art, the concept behind how it’s even done makes little sense but the really key thing that enables it, are wacom tablets. To illustrate this, here are just two examples of what using a pen over a mouse means using continuous brushstrokes. I think of it as: if a mouse is a pistol and a click is a bullet, a wacom pen is Iron Man and using it is like having a salvo of laser-guided fly-by-wire rockets… that play Black Sabbath. 

A mouse, you click once or click and hold, it has one degree of pressure. A wacom pen is like, well, a real pen or a brush, just much more versatile. The relation between the tablet surface and the pen is one that allows it to pick up how hard you’re pressing, the angle the pen is being held at, and the way it’s being rotated in your hands. This allows single brush strokes to control opacity, scatter, texture, thickness, color mixing, and direction. I give such basic examples, because I think it’s there that you can see: “This is what you can do with literally a 1 second brushstroke” Skill-level and experience are irrelevant to being able to do basic tasks like loosely mixing two colors and laying down a line.

EDIT: No, this post was not sponsored by Wacom. When the tools you use enable you to do what you love for a handsome living AND can help others who might not know about them, you can praise them without being paid to do so. Hell, even if you like something, you can praise it without being paid for it.