I was flipping through my Instagram feed the other day and was just blown away by some of the amazing artwork in there. Then I got that feeling. You know the one. You see a piece of art, and you can’t believe how good it is. You stare at it for a while, then a little voice in the back of your head says, “You’ll never be that good.”… You move on to the next piece, and it’s more of the same. There are two ways to handle that little voice. First, you can listen to it, pack up your goods and switch careers or there’s the second. You can use it as a little kick in the pants to motivate you to do better work. I decided to go with number two.
They all had two things in common.
The art world has become so on-demand lately that I felt the need to streamline my art just to keep up. That meant cutting out some of the background details and simplifying light and shadow in order to meet ever-demanding deadlines, which is exactly what I did.
My work became so streamlined that I could basically meet just about any deadline, no matter how crazy. That’s all fine and good, but because it was so streamlined, I felt it was also missing something. I decided for this piece I was going to try and switch things up. I was going to take my time and see what I could come up with.
It’s okay to slow down.
I knew my stuff wasn’t going to come out looking exactly like those pieces on Instagram, but that wasn’t really the goal. Basically, I just wanted to use those pieces as inspiration and see if I could improve my work. Anyhow, here’s what I came up with. I learned a lot working on this piece, but if there’s one takeaway for me it’s this, it’s okay to slow down because sometimes to get what you want takes time. Art takes time. Hopefully, my clients will see things the same way, and this will be the start of something new. I’ll keep you posted.
Until next time. Keep on keeping on!