I have at times been known to be less than gracious when people compliment me on how “talented” I am.  The compliment is usually delivered in that glib tone of wonder and awe, as though the art being viewed somehow sprung forth fully formed, without effort, from the wellspring of that mystical thing, Talent, like Venus springing forth from seafoam in Roman myth.  Talent is often viewed as something foreign and frightening and amazing, a thing which one either Has or Does Not Have.

Am I “talented”?  I honestly couldn’t say.  Maybe?

Talent is a real thing.  It’s a measure of how learning to do something may be easier and faster for some people, but it doesn’t mean that talented people get to skip the whole Learning thing (unless, maybe, you’re a true savant, but that’s something else entirely).

Passion, determination, stubbornness, study, and practice are far more influential factors on whether or not a person is able to achieve true excellence.  A person can have all the talent in the world, but if they don’t care to take the time to get good at it, they will never genuinely excel.  A person can start from very limited talent, but if they have the passion for it, and the determination and stubbornness to take the time to study and practice, they can eventually achieve true excellence.  It just might take them a little longer, or they might have to work a little harder.

I’ve always had a passion for drawing, and a great interest in other art forms as well, but when I was growing up drawing was always what I could get the materials for.  If nothing else, I could always get a #2 pencil and a piece of printer paper, and I created a lot of drawings.  Most of them were, frankly, terrible (even the ones I was proud of), but I enjoyed it enough that I didn’t stop just because it was bad.  I could see that it was bad, and I could see the flaws, and I could see my improvement over time, with practice and the cultivation of technical skills and knowledge.  That’s a lot of effort over a lot of years, which just gets dismissed out of hand when someone tells me how “talented” I am.  It feels like people are telling me Talent should take credit for everything else, like that blowhard in your group assignment in school that claimed he did all the work when he really just sat around trying to look important.

Talent is overrated, and placing all the emphasis on this one minor factor tells people that if they don’t have “talent”, that if it doesn’t come out perfect the first time with little to no effort, that you’re just doomed to mediocrity, so why try at all?  Art is for those with “talent”.

I call bullshit.

Creating art is for those with enough passion for it to do all the hard work that it takes to build the skills you need to be able to make tangible what you see in your head.  On second thought, creating art is also for those who just enjoy doing it no matter how it turns out, but that’s not the topic of the moment.

There is a tendency to jump straight to the good stuff, to look just at the fully formed, developed art.  We have a tendency to cringe at those bad pieces of art and hide them, or maybe even destroy them, but without those bad pieces of art, without a lot of boring practice, you don’t get those beautiful finished pieces.  I’m not ashamed of the learning process.  That’s why I have always posted the vast majority of the art I made, good or bad, and why I am copying and archiving all of my deviantArt gallery to this website, even the not-so-good stuff.  That’s part of why I’m posting all my sketches, even the ones that make me cringe, because they are part of the process, and that process is the road to being able to create the kind of art I enjoy creating.

Because of my illness I wasn’t able to produce drawings and paintings for several years.  Like any other skill, given time and neglect it becomes rusty.  So, I have to retrain myself, remind myself how to do the things I used to do.  It will go relatively fast and easy for me because it’s not entirely new, but it still takes time and effort, and I expect that all of us will be able to see the improvement over time.  These aren’t assignments I’ve been given in a drawing class, but there are very solid reasons why these sorts of exercises are common in drawing classes.  Luckily, the formality of a class environment is not required to gain benefit from them.

My Pinterest Board “Art Reference”
[gs_pinterest user=”sidneyeileen” board=”art-reference” count=”7″]

What I am doing here is finding anatomical technical illustrations on Pinterest and then sketching them.  This is a method that works very well for me.  I’m not going to remember where all the muscles are and how they interact just by looking at the illustrations.  If I draw them, then I am likely to remember.  If I draw them a lot, those details will flow much more naturally into my finished art pieces.  Even after just these few pages, I am starting to see improvement.

These are just the first four anatomy sketch pages I will be creating.  There will be LOTS more of them.  There will be multiple pages of hands and feet in particular, because hands and feet are evil.  Paws are much easier to draw.

If you look at your drawings and think they are lacking in some way, if you want them to be more realistic, or at least have a stronger foundation, take the time to do the exercises to teach yourself foundational skills and knowledge.  Anyone is capable.  It just takes work.