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What do you think of the art?

Been getting back into being creative. Tell me about some of your creative outlets

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  • I'm gonna say that it depends. Are you self-taught? Then you're doing great, keep going!

    Serious critique and suggestions:

    spoiler

    The work you're doing is pretty basic, fairly competent. You're getting a rough feel for what you're depicting, but not really finishing the impression. The color is okay, but the water and sky feel flat. It's an idea of a mountain landscape, but not yet fully fleshed out in form or feeling. It's more a quick sketch than a finished piece. This isn't meant to be cruel or mean; if you're a relative novice, then this is fantastic work, and you should be proud of your progress.

    My suggestion is to take some drawing classes at your local CC, really learn to look at and see things, and then try to reproduce them on paper. Start with still lives, and work up to life drawing. (The schools I've been to had drawing I & II as prerequisites for painting classes; both were 3 credit studio classes. They end up being a little cheaper if you're auditing rather than working towards a degree.) One of the things that you pay for when you take college level art classes is brutally honest criticism, with the intent of helping you find ways to improve and be more true to your subject, and to your vision of that subject. That's hard to replicate outside of school, since friends and family usually aren't going to really critique work for fear of hurting a relationship. (I had one teacher--German--that ended up making about a quarter of her students cry at one time or another because she was so blunt in her critiques.)

    And hey!, you can ignore everything I've said, and keep painting the way you want to because it makes you happy, and that's okay! It's absolutely fine to do a thing just because you enjoy doing it! You don't have to be an expert in order to enjoy doing something.

    For myself, it's taken me over a decade to get back into trying to make anything since I burned out so hard at art school. I'm slow, but I'm gradually working on patterning new apparel pieces. I might even have something finished by the end of the year. School pushed me to make fashion that was artistic, and I've realized that my own aesthetic is more utilitarian; I'm never going to need a mood board to create work.

25 comments