Would you say that art school is worth it? I've heard horror stories from lots of art school students who say that they didn't learn anything because they were too concerned with getting their massive load of homework done asap without actually retaining the lessons the assignments were supposed to teach them. Do you feel like you've learned a lot?
mmmmm im gonna say i dont think its possible to be forced to do massive amounts of drawing without retaining anything. a lot of learning as an artist is just brush mileage- racking up experience by working with the same tools a bunch of times. i definitely feel like im learning a lot, because even when im not paying attention to the lectures, i have to do work every day, which makes my art muscles stronger through use. (also, homework is assigned so that you actually apply the things you learned in those lessons)
aside from just racking up a bazillion “brush miles,” i do feel like ive learned stuff! some of the things i already knew but didnt know how to use/contextualize correctly, and some of the things are concepts that i had never heard of before.
also, and this is a HUGE one, art school is about training you for your field. when youre not learning new techniques, you are learning to do a bonkers in yonkers amount of work at once, VERY QUICKLY. that’s a valuable skill to hone! Knowing how to work with deadlines is part of your artistic progress.
one of the main things ive taken from art school is that my standards for a “small piece” are WAAAYY bigger now. Drawing anything besides the human face used to feel like a huge mountain to climb, but now I can draw the interior of a room for a background without thinking twice about it. When I sketch, I now think more like “What’s the coolest composition I can come up with, and what elements can I use to make it?” and less like “I have to find a way to hide the parts I don’t know how to draw well”
here’s an example! i drew this about 4 years ago, and drawing this window/exterior was a HUGE deal for me. It felt like a massive undertaking.
I took forever to render the water, and I wasn’t interested in trying to render the curtains at all because they were difficult. The window was my main focus in the drawing.
Fast forward to now! My professors didn’t teach me how to specifically draw curtains and windows, but now I’m less intimidated by them. I’m so comfortable adding elements like this that it’s not even the focus! It’s just a background element that I didn’t NEED to have, but I can include it now because it doesn’t feel like such an undertaking anymore.
(This is a work in progress btw)
And the best part? This doesn’t even feel like a big piece to me anymore! Simply drawing a person from the waist up in this pose might have been really scary for me before. Now that I’ve stretched myself, a composition with a person AND a dog AND a window AND an outside scene isn’t intimidating at all.
ANYWAY this was a very long winded way for me to say YES, i have learned plenty here! Just some of it isn’t the stuff I expected to learn, like light and shadow, but instead how to manage myself and talk about my work.
janainaart
kaledo-art
stormborns
gummygunk
blakekathryn
snowghoul
ellievsbear
yousharknotpass
