 Does making either bad or unoriginal art undermine your identity as an artist? It can if you let it. A number of comments on my previous video called when is a crafter called an artist indicated that some of you had assigned the word artist based on the quality of the work produced or whether or not it was made with any help from a class or tutorial. And if the art doesn't live up to that standard, well, it has to settle for a lower description than being called art. Well, I am Sandy Allnog. I am an artist and I want to talk about this and I want to share three tips that I've used to overcome bad art days and to learn to respect myself as an artist. Everybody has bad days. That day when nothing you do seems to click. Nothing comes together and you need some help. You're still an artist even on your bad days or your bad weeks. It's part of the process. If you're an accountant and you can't find that four dollars and sixty-seven cents anywhere on the spreadsheet, you're still an accountant. A marathoner who finishes last, are they no longer allowed to be called a runner? An actress who I just spoke with this week about this very topic said she's in a theater company with people who are both better than her and worse than her at acting. But that doesn't make any of them not actors. It's no different for artists. We have bad days too. Bad weeks. Times when we need a tutorial or a class to kick us into gear. Personally, I schedule my bad days regularly once a week. I go to a drawing group where we practice drawing people from live models. That is my most humbling day of the week because drawing people is no longer my forte. I was very good at this during college. So good that I taught a class on the topic, but I lost that skill. I'm definitely getting better. I can see the improvement. But honestly, if I come out with one drawing on a Thursday where I feel like I got all the body parts in the right place at the right length, and the fingers don't look like claws, I'm pretty happy. I've actually found that I'm really good at doing the warm up drawings that I used to hate. They're two minute poses. And I struggle with the 25 minute poses. It's the opposite of what I used to go through. But I go anyway, week after week. I talk with the other artists there about art in general and sometimes about what's specifically in front of us. We bemoan for shortening and laugh about it. We say things like, oh man, did you see what the light did to the shadow on that elbow? We all go through the exact same thing. And that's what keeps me going back, knowing that other people have the same struggles as me. And if they can keep at it, so can I. We encourage each other. We all have different styles. Some use watercolor, charcoal, pencil, gouache. We're all learning from each other. Some of these folks have been at it for decades longer than me. I'm the youngest one in the group at nearly 60. And it's good to see those ahead of me still learning, too. So it's OK that I struggle. Now, I know that some of you are going to tut tut and tell me that every day is a bad day for you, that you never make anything good. Some of that is just having too close of a perspective on your own art when you tear down everything you do. You need someone with a fresh perspective to speak into your work. And I'm going to talk about an idea for that in just a little bit. But I also want to address those seasons when we fight through our art. Sometimes it's a day, a week, a month. I've lived a long life and had long dry spells, and it's often enough to make you want to give up. But it's also often based on where you're at on the spectrum of art and how you handle that. In the previous video, I explained that art is that long spectrum. We start out at the beginning using crayons and learning how to hold a marker and making macaroni art. As we grow and get more experienced, our art gets maybe more refined. We use better tools and practice and develop more motor skills. We start to see colors and maybe find a style that we like, even if we aren't great at it. But this whole thing can be a super long stretch and can get discouraging if you're not careful. It's often during this stretch that most people quit art entirely. Now, some of you may have passed that long period and come back to your work as an artist. And I know a lot of people who have stopped their art for many, many years to have a family, work, a job, handle family issues and life stuff and are getting back to it in their later years. And that is nothing to be ashamed of, celebrate that you're getting back on the wagon. But something else not to be ashamed of is going back a few steps and relearning some things you've forgotten, like I am with drawing people. You might need to go back and relearn hand to eye coordination. You might need to refamiliarize yourself with the basics of the medium that you want to use, develop a more refined touch with them. Understand how to have that more delicate touch or maybe a looser brushstroke or whatever it is that you want to learn, all of that takes time. But as we get older, we get impatient with ourselves and we look around at somebody who's younger than us and doing the same kind of thing we want to do and they're rocking it and we're not. Well, if you could sit down with them, you might find out just how long they worked on that skill to get where they are. But it's also easier for younger people to learn things than for us older folks. There is nothing wrong with you that the three tips I'm about to drop on you won't fix. I promise you that these are things that I do, not just things that I'm telling you to do, because I wouldn't say so if I didn't believe that it worked. Get a pencil and paper, write this down. Number one, 10 minutes a day. At the end of most of my videos, I try to remember to tell you to create something every day. And I want to talk about what that means and detail it out for you. 10 minutes a day will develop a practice habit. You can do it while you're having your morning coffee during that baseball practice where you need to wait around for someone else. You might think you can't do this because you need to drag your entire studio with you in order to practice your art. But I want to give you a suggestion. Doodling is practice. A tiny notebook and a pen or pencil is all it takes. It'll help you to build hand to eye coordination, become comfortable and confident in making lines and shapes. But the real benefit is learning to loosen your mind while you're working, figuring out when you have 10 minutes to sit still and just make art without thinking. Now, if you want to draw a thing, if you're at a place where you can, then that's OK too. That's what I do. But give yourself permission to just doodle shapes and patterns if that's not the case for you. Something that's going to make you not think so hard so that you won't think of these daily sessions of making art as a penance that you have to do. It's not a punishment. It's not like exercise, even though it's called exercise, it's not exercise in terms of push-ups. It's exercise in relaxing your brain and getting it used to the idea that when you sit down to make art, that it's not painful. So just doodle, just make lines, shapes, colors, whatever it is that you feel like making that day, but do it for 10 minutes a day. And by the way, this 10 minutes is in addition to or a way to start off a regular session of making whatever art you make. So I want you to just get used to relaxing your brain and stop thinking so hard and making art so scary. Number two, keep a grace journal. Judging your work harshly is a surefire way to encourage yourself to just give up. Remember that you're learning. You have a long time to keep growing. I was recently trying to paint a photo that I loved and it took me seven tries. Yes, seven full, complete paintings of which six got tossed in the can. It takes a lot of stored up grace for yourself to be able to just take a deep breath after each attempt, knowing that you learned something from the last failed try. You succeeded at something in it, but wipe all of that away and give it another go. So what is a grace journal? At the end of your daily 10 minutes, write down a compliment for your art in a little journal, just a date and a sentence. Look at whatever it is you just made in your 10 minutes and write down something like, these colors make me feel joy. The lines in the upper left look really elegant. I sat down frustrated this morning, but I got up peaceful. The note doesn't have to be connected to the piece that you worked on, whatever you drew, but the notebook is about getting practice in putting good words about your art on paper that can stick in your head. And every time you open up this journal, it's going to be filled with short statements of grace that you've poured out into yourself. And that's going to go a long way to conquering some of the negative thinking that creeps into your work. Number three is probably the scariest of my tips, but I think it's the one I've grown the most from and it's to befriend a cross-discipline artist. Every artist learns from somebody else who's ahead of them on the road. The old masters learned from older masters by copying their work. And it's no different for us today. We often do this with tutorials and classes. And if I didn't believe that those worked to help people grow in their artistic skills, I wouldn't be making YouTube videos or teaching. But what do I mean by cross-discipline? I've found that the best people in my life to encourage me artistically are the ones who are making art that is nothing like mine. They don't do what I do. They use different mediums. They have a completely different style. Those are the people who can see your work for what it is, not comparing it to the pool of the same stuff that you live in, where everybody is making the same kind of thing. There's a place for those kind of friendships to talk about your niche. But if you want to start seeing your work on that bigger spectrum of art and not get sucked into thinking your, quote unquote, only a crafter again, then you need some outside input. That's what got me into urban sketching in the first place. Years and years ago, I was looking for people who could look at my work more independently. And urban sketching is where I started to find artist friends. I still remember a lunch with three of the women from the urban sketch group after one of my first sketchouts that I attended. And it was the first time that I remember being automatically respected as an artist without even having to justify myself. Everybody knew that the people at that table were artists. I had no idea what kind of work they did. And they had no idea what kind of work I did. All we saw was each other's quick sketches that day. And I had no idea if they were beginner sketches like me or if they were people who had fancy shows in galleries. And it didn't matter, not one bit. I found the conversation also didn't get bogged down in the latest gossip about what was going on in the crafty world. What was the latest stamp release and whose video, blah, blah, blah. I was instead speaking with artists about our love of color and line, the things that we're trying to learn and practice. And I tell you, the respect from other artists is something profound that you just can't beat. And it really will help you to see yourself as an artist on that spectrum because you'll get an idea where other people are coming from and heading to as well. I know you may not consider yourself a sketcher or even want to sketch, but I can promise you that if you find an urban sketching group, you will find people who literally draw the same way as you do. And even if you're a beginner, there are beginners there whose lines are wonky, their perspective is off, but they're out there having fun and enjoying themselves. And there will be people who you can meet, watch, grow alongside. Maybe you'll even find that person you can have coffee with and ask about their journey. And here are how they got through tough times of self doubt in their own art, and they can be one to help you keep going to. I recommend developing an in-person community as well as an online one. The online is what we do at ArtVenture, my community on mighty networks. Online friends are with you daily in your phone, although your real life friends can be in your phone in texts as well. But an online community is great to share in between when you see real people. But there is nothing better than sitting in a cafe talking about art with other artists. It just feels so artsy. Whatever level you're at, you'll start to see your own work more clearly in the spectrum of art. And it normalizes calling yourself an artist and helps you overcome those bad days. So you've been watching another of my patterned stamp pieces come together. This one isn't in the pattern stamping class, but it's from the same template as lesson two. And I'll include a few notes about what the adaptations were over in the lesson itself. The link to the class is in the doobly-doo in case you want to join in the fun in this new class. But I do hope this video helped some of you and that my stories are informative and will help you to get over some of your own challenges and struggles. And maybe you'll try one of my three tips. Let me know if you do. So get out there and create something every day, even if it's that 10 minute doodle. And I will see you in a new video next week. Bye bye.