 Hey there, it's Sandy Olnok and I bring you the return at least temporarily of two things in a rant. My two things are first, a digital image that I have for fundraiser all week long. It'll remain available longer than that, but fundraiser just during Shark Week and the money will all go to Sea Shepherd so you can get the detailed image as well as the outline image and color it any way you like. The second thing is that it's the end of World Watercolor Month so you want to go check the sale category, make sure if there's anything there that you wanted during this sale that you have gotten it added to your account. So let's get on to the rant. I want to talk about changing our art language because the language we use about ourselves is important. I posted a very short video here on YouTube recently and on other social media and got some interesting feedback and I thought it would be helpful to expand on that a bit. When we talk about our work, I know a lot of us are trying to communicate humility by what we say. We're trying not to say, come and look at my art, aren't I wonderful, I am great, this is a beautiful thing. We try not to make ourselves sound like more of an expert than we are. Totally get that, totally understand it. But there are some things when we say them that might sound on the surface to be humble in that way but really what they're doing is damaging us as artists and I want to talk about those things and give you some alternate ways to think through them and to say things that will not harm you and stop you growing as an artist. The first one is the word just. There's a lot of people who say, oh, I'm not an artist, I just stamp, I'm not an artist, I'm a scrapbooker, I'm not an artist, I'm a whatever and I want you to think about it this way. Does someone who makes beautiful pottery, a ceramicist, do they say, well, I'm not an artist? All I do is make pots, I mean, you know, I don't oil paint, if I oil painted then I'd be an artist. No, of course they don't say that. Does an oil painter go to a gallery showing with watercolors and say, yeah, well, this is beautiful stuff, I'm not an artist, all I do is oil paint, look at these watercolors, they're amazing. No, they're different mediums, that's all it is, they're different mediums and we all work in different levels in whatever the medium is. Just because we're not at the top of the heap of famous people in our medium doesn't mean we're not an artist, it just means we're in a different place, that's all. When you want to say I'm just a fill-in-the-blank, instead just own it, say I'm an artist and here's the medium I work in. I create these things, period. You don't need to apologize for it and just say, well, I'm just at this, that and the other. There's no reason to do that, there's no need to apologize in that way. The second one is when people say I wish, I wish I had that skill, I wish I was born with it, I wish I could do this, I wish I was at that level. When we say I wish, we're telling our brain that we need magical pixie dust to come and land on us and that's not the way art works. Think about when you go to the gym, you don't get to that machine, whatever, I don't go to the gym, so I don't know why all machines are called but you don't get to the machine where you do the weightlifting and you say, boy, I just am useless, I can't believe that I was not born with the skill to be able to lift that kind of weight or to have that endurance on that machine or whatever the thing is. Now, when you go to the gym, you know it's going to be weeks, years, decades of progress and you're going to need to keep working at it. Why is it that we have that understanding when it comes to getting our bodies trained up to do something but with our art, we just kind of think it's supposed to go boop boop boop right off the brush and land on the paper that way or our pencil is supposed to just make motions that we think in our heads and our hand doesn't know how to make those motions yet, it's going to take time and yet we tell ourselves, well, I just wish I could do that thing, I can't do it like so and so, well in addition to dismissing the amount of work that so and so has put into it, we're telling ourselves that we have to wait for that magical pixie dust and there is no fairy godmother who's going to come and just go ding and everything's going to be different. It's going to take time and you're going to have growth happen during those years of practice. I've noticed every year I've done shark art on Shark Week, I've painted oceans every summer and I've noticed this year I'm finally making some really great improvements. It's like something clicked in me recently that I am super excited about and that is something that artists at my level experience as well as whatever level you're at, whether you're ahead or behind me on this journey, we're all progressing. We need to celebrate that and be able to keep growing and keep moving forward instead of just wishing we were somewhere else. Enjoy where you're at, enjoy the process. There's something about the process of learning that I just love and it drives me nuts when people think that not being at that end stage of the journey, not being at that place where everything's easy is somehow makes them less of an artist and it's not true. That's not how things work. The third thing that people say a lot is a group of words. I'll just lump them together. I can't do this. I'll never be able to do this, never ever be able to do this. It won't ever happen. There's just no way. I don't have that skill. I wasn't born with it. That whole genre of I can't. What that does inside your brain is train your brain to think, OK, that thing is true. They keep saying it over and over again. We can't do that. And when you sit down, even if you don't realize you've trained your brain to do this, when we sit down with that brush or marker or pencil and we think, OK, I'm going to try this, your brain says, oh, wait, for years, I have been told we can't do that. And if you've wondered what that thing is when you sit down and that blank piece of paper is in front of you and you're in an abject panic, it's a lot of times because you have told yourselves, I can't do it. I'll never be able to do it. I will never be that good. And when you train yourself to do that, it takes a long time to untrain yourself. It takes a lot of time to rewind those tapes and to go back and undo the damage that we've done to ourselves. Believe you me, I have lived this. I've had to peel language out of my vocabulary and stop saying I just or I wish or I can't or I'll never be able to fill in the blank. I've done this as well. It's not an easy process, but picturing your brain like it's a separate character. I think of it almost like a little cartoon character in my head. And it's more of a child because it just takes information in, doesn't assess it, just says, OK, she's telling me that we have to wait for a pixie to come along and magically make this happen. So when we sit down with a pencil or a pen or a marker or something, we're going to not be able to do it. So I'm going to make sure that thing doesn't happen. Like we tell our brain to stop us from being any good at that thing by the things that we say, I have done this and I want to encourage you to think about it and change your language as well, because that's going to help you to start growing as an artist and opening up possibilities that you never thought were there. You never thought would be within the realm of what you could accomplish. I've seen the power of people studying and learning and growing in the students who have taken my classes and followed my YouTube videos and stuff. I've watched people blossom. And to areas that they never thought they could. And maybe even I may not have thought they could when they started, because they were at a certain level and I didn't realize they were going to be able to grow as fast as they did. And it's amazing to me. It's encouraging to me to see other people grow and it's discouraging when I hear people tearing their work down. When I hear them dissing the medium that they use or the type of work that they create or the style they work in, when they demean things, it demeans all of us because it tears down all arts by saying one is better than another. It's not better than another. It's different. I just wish I could get a hold of the art world and say, can we just rightly assess where we are and to know that we're at one place or another in our journey and it's okay to be there wherever that place is. That's all. If you have been watching this video and wishing that I was talking about what I was painting and why I was doing things and what was working and what was not, there were some areas where I ended up just painting over top of something because it wasn't functioning the way that I wanted it. You can hear all about that on Patreon because I put another version of this video up on Patreon with that voiceover in it. So you can check it out. If you're interested, link in the doobly-doo if you want to become a patron. Also link in the doobly-doo for that shark digital image if you want to download it and color it up and help us fundraise to save the sharks. I will see you guys again next week. Take care. Have a wonderful weekend. Bye-bye.