Number 10 is a bit silly, because tracing can help you learn the basics of how other people put things together, what shapes they see, and so can master studies, where you attempt to recreate a finished piece of art to try and understand how and why people do things the way that they do. Look at Snow White and the Seven Dwarves by Disney, a lot of that movie was directly traced from film that the studio shot of the story being acted out, because they had no frame of reference for how things should look during complex shots. That technique is called Rotoscope Animation.
That said, your entire body of work shouldn’t just be you copying other people, it should be you learning what you like or dislike about other peoples’ styles and making them your own. Finding your unique voice in the universe.
I would like to add a few of my own:
16: Do carpal tunnel stretches and take care of your arms, wrists, and hands. You’ll get into a rhythm and forget and probably wind up injured. If something bad happens to your hands you’ll have to spend time re-learning how to do art, which can be frustrating, with something other than the hand you’ve always used. A lot of efficiency with movements in art is from muscle memory.
17: Every failure is valuable. Every piece of art you try to make will have faults, this is just the way of art. But those faults and failings are valuable because they are how you grow into an even better artist. Learn from the mistakes and don’t beat yourself up about them, they are precious jewels.
18: Back up all your art in as many places as you can. If you do traditional media, scan or have them photographed, and save them with your digital files. Save your digital files to multiple places. I have a backup server run by a friend, I have Google Drive, Dropbox, an external hard drive, my second hard drive on my computer, and burned backup CDs to fall back on if something goes missing.
19: Never throw anything out. Sketches, half-finished pieces, the frustrated doodles you did at work or school. Save copies of it even if you don’t save the physical art. I wish I had some of the art I made when I was younger and new at things and didn’t know how to look at the world like an artist. This ties back in to tip 14. If you have a copy of something old, you can redraw it and have it side-by-side for comparison.
20: Learn to really sketch well. Not polished sketching, but translating an idea from your eyes, to your mind, to your hand, to the paper quickly. It should be like a visual shorthand with details being filled in later. They don’t have to be perfect, neat, or able to be read by other people. Fill it with as much information and expression as possible so that later when you are taking your sketches to the polishing stage you can see what caught your attention about the thing you sketched.
21: Not every sketch has to be finished, like tip #7 says, not everything has to be polished. It’s true. Especially sketches. Not every sketch is going to be an idea worth following through to a finished piece of art and that’s perfectly fine. Keep them anyway. It’s a record of how you see the world around you.
22: Draw from life whenever possible. Even if you’re practicing new art styles, or drawing in a specific way, draw from life. Learn to see the world in shapes and relationships and abstract that into a drawing. James Gurney recently said in one of his videos that all art is abstraction and I realized he’s right. There will never be a 100% photo-realistic representation of how you see the world, it’s all abstractions of how we see the world around us and that’s okay.
23: Perfection is an unrealistic goal. Try setting better goals for your art like communicating a specific message or feeling to the people who will look at it. Every person has a unique view on the world, including you, and trying to get others to understand what you’re trying to say without writing an artist’s statement about it is a pretty good goal to have.
24: Work digitally in large-scale high resolutions suitable for professional printing of your art piece. Minimum 300 DPI, RGB or CMYK based on the type of printing you want to do, and within the color gamut for the color mode you choose. You can always save lower-resolution, or smaller scale, copies from a high resolution file, you can never take a small low resolution picture and print it in larger size without the computer doing some ugly calculations and making some bad guesses for what to put where, called JPEG Artifacts.
25: Adding to tip #4: Save multiple copies of your file. At stopping points where I’m happy about how things are going I’ll save, and when I go to continue working on it I’ll save it with a new file name. Usually it’s ‘projectname.date.version’. If I do multiple versions in the same day It’ll be alphabetical versions or numbered versions. for example ‘customtypeface.4.27.18.A’, ‘customtypeface.4.27.18.B’, ‘customtypeface.4.27.18.C’, etc. It helps to keep everything organized in folders for each project with the title of the project in the file name. When I am done with everything I also package it (if using photoshop) and make sure that I save it with settings for it to be printed professionally if I want to do so down the road. Not everything I make will be worth printing, but I always treat the piece as if it will turn out to be a gem.
26: When putting together a portfolio for a job interview make sure you do it as high-quality and professionally as possible. Get the really expensive binder with the archival page protectors and design the layout of this book to your satisfaction. Make your portfolio tell enough of a story that they want to talk to you about what art pieces are in it. You should be able to tell them everything about the brief (project requirements), the process you took to solve the problem, the successes it had, all of this should be something you don’t have to think much about it. The piece will draw their attention and it’s up to you to sell how and why you came to that specific solution to the problem. When you’ve designed everything go to a professional printer and get the portfolio printed on good quality paper. It’s an investment in your future. It’s like buying that one expensive suit to interview in. You want your portfolio to make a good first impression on the people who will look at it.
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
blakekathryn
yousharknotpass
janainaart
vaporwave
