So earlier in art class today, someone drew a characters hands in their pockets and mentioned that hands are really like the ultimate end boss of art, and most of us wholeheartedly agreed. So then, our teacher went ahead and free handed like a handful of hands on the board, earning a woah from a couple of students. So the one from earlier mentioned how it barely took the teacher ten seconds to do what I can’t do in three hours. And you know what he responded?
“It didn’t take me ten seconds, it took me forty years.”
And you know, that stuck with me somehow. Because yeah. Drawing a hand didn’t take him fourth years. But learning and practicing to draw a hand in ten seconds did. And I think there’s something to learn there but it’s so warm and my brain is fried so I can’t formulate the actual morale of the lesson.
Saying "I'm not going to draw this thing because I don't know how to draw this thing" is really shooting yourself in the foot, because you've now cut yourself off from an opportunity to grow.
I had a friend in college who was an absolutely amazing artist. I loved seeing his work! One time I said something to the effect of "I could never do that."
He told me something that, as an artist, I resonate with. He said art isn't about natural talent; it's a learned skill. When you tell an artist their level of skill is impossible for you to reach, you're assuming their level of skill is a natural gifting they have, and it discredits the hundreds to thousands of hours of hard work they've put into getting where they are today, and you're cutting yourself off from trying to reach that point yourself.
I don't remember where I heard this but I wish I could, because it stuck with me:
Talent is THE RATE at which you learn things, not whether or not you can learn certain skills at all.
And that suddenly clicked for me. I have been very talented with a lot of things in my life and once I realized that I had basically been getting XP multipliers on my normal life experiences, it suddenly felt so much less awful to realize that I did not have the same advantage with other skills I struggle with, and that's okay. I might even have some debuffs on those, and that's okay. It's still all gaining as long as I keep working on it!!
This also holds true for writing: the best way to never be good at writing something is to never write it.
I see people say that they don't write fight scenes, for example, because they're bad at writing them, but the reality is that the way you get good is to write them.
And maybe you write one badly, but then you look at it and figure out what makes it bad. And then you write another one, and it's a little better, or it's bad in a different way, and you repeat the cycle until a lot of "a little better"s get you to "good".
