— For an ambitious aspiring artist, it’s easy to get caught up in looking for outside critiques, hoping that others might steer your work more assuredly in the right direction and help you improve. But there’s a risk in that, and there’s actually a better way to direct your course as an artist.
The risk of seeking outside critiques too often or too early is that they can actually end up just confusing you. Real art isn’t created by committee. Your artistic journey is ultimately yours alone, and if you are to find your authentic voice, only YOU can find it … and it’s hard to listen for that voice amid the clamor of outside voices intruding on the process.
There’s also the challenge that other artists see things differently. They have different tastes. They also have different skill sets.
Too often beginning artists clamor for “critiques,” almost as if hoping to hammer their very first works into masterpieces by sheer force of will. But developing masterful skill and technique takes time. It’s kind of like a beginning writer trying to write and rewrite and rewrite the first page of his first book, wondering why a publisher won’t give him feedback on it. Or like a painter worrying over every single brush stroke on his first few canvases, running to a gallery every day to ask their opinion. But that’s not how writers or painters are made.
In order to become really good, you’ve gotta put in the time. It’s about volume as much as anything else in the beginning. You’re learning the ropes, and you’ve just gotta create a hell of a lot of art.
But asking for outside “creative critiques” is a challenge even when you’re more advanced, though for a different reason. A beginner will be turning out beginner work with beginner technique — that’s inevitable. There’s almost always something you could recommend, but they really just need to keep at it, keep cranking stuff out, develop some experience. A more advanced artist, however, runs into the altogether opposite challenge: everything they produce looks great! It’s hard to know what you could possibly suggest.
With most of the art I see produced by our “AWAKE” group, for instance, there’s nothing obviously wrong, and nothing obvious to improve. Look through our magazine every month. It’s all great.
In fact, other than pointing out clear mistakes in a beginner’s work, the vast range of possibilities (and tastes, and talents) makes it incredibly challenging to offer up more than alternative ideas — ideas that the artist might or might not even be able to pull off yet … ideas that might or might not even improve the piece in any case.
Because let’s face it. We’re talking photo artistry here. It’s not like straight photography, where it’s easy to point out possible improvements in crop, lighting, focus, and exposure. What we’re talking about here is ART. And there are a thousand different directions any given piece can take.
Ultimately, your personal artistic development comes down to your own artistic journey — which, like it or not, is a solitary path.
The REAL progress you make as an artist will have next to nothing to do with what someone else has to say about your artwork. The REAL progress you make will come down to the time and effort you put into the pursuit: time and effort spent looking at art and finding what you absolutely love, what you hate, and what just leaves you indifferent … and time and effort at actually creating one work after another after another after another as you master new techniques and learn to combine them in new and interesting ways.
And that, friends and neighbors, just takes time and practice.
One thing that can help speed along the process, however, is the habit of regular SELF-critique. Others probably can’t offer up much regarding your work — and in any case, they’re not YOU, so what they think about your art is largely irrelevant, or should be.
Learning to critically assess your own work and uncover paths for improving it can open up real treasures. And I think for the most part, valuable “self-critiques” come down to allowing the work to sit a day or two, and then coming back to it with a fresh eye, and simply learning to ask yourself a few helpful questions.
Consider this my “System of Self-Critique For Ambitious Artists” . . .
1.) Do you even LIKE it? (And if not, can you figure out why?)
My first impression of an image almost always tells me if I like it or not (and roughly how much I like it or how much I don’t). Most art falls somewhere in the middle. I pretty much like it … it looks cool … But that’s honestly about as far as the first impression goes. Other art just grabs you all over again and you’re immediately floored and can hardly believe you made it. Most stuff, however, falls in the middle.
When something is amazing, there’s really nothing to say other than it’s amazing. When there’s nothing to critique, there’s nothing to critique. Pat yourself on the back and start your next piece.
On the other hand, when something doesn’t strike you as unconditionally awesome, the first thing I’d suggest you look for would be anything that could be easily improved with an obvious fix. Is there something you could quickly change that would immediately make you like it more? What’s bugging you about it?
Maybe the one thing that would actually make the piece work is something simple — maybe your main subject needs to be made more distinct, maybe the textures are just too heavy, maybe your layer masks need to be improved or some adjustment layers added for post-production polishing, maybe the image could benefit from a more dramatic crop, maybe something in it just needs to be taken out because it’s distracting?
Start there. If you don’t immediately like it, decide if there’s something simple or straightforward you could do to improve it or to remove something that keeps nagging at you.
If you still don’t like it, I suggest you try to figure out why. And then, rather than keep pounding away at it, just close the file and move on to something new. Great artists throw out a lot of work. Get used to it. Be OK with it. Not every work turns out the way you hoped. That’s all right. Start something new.
Now, assuming you DO like it, and you want to try to make it even better . . . What then? I suggest continuing on with a few more questions, beginning with:
2.) Could it be improved by a shift in the focus or composition?
Before you even worry about adjustment layers or layer masks or color grading or any of that stuff, start with the big obvious stuff — what’s on the canvas and how it’s all orchestrated.
Where does your eye go first? Where does it go second? How does everything on the canvas stack up in terms of visual weight? Where, as a viewer, are we meant to focus, and how is the eye meant to travel the canvas? Are your eyes pulled this way and that around the canvas, not knowing where to rest? Does anything pull too much of our attention? Does nothing pull our attention sufficiently to give focus and clarity to what the piece is about? Is there too much going on? Would it help if the main subject were larger, repositioned, brought forward, rendered differently, enhanced in some way?
Really take in the composition as a whole and determine if it might work better were you to reorganize (or simply reduce) the components in the piece.
This should almost always be your first real step in assessing how to improve your work. Heck, save a master version of the piece, and then go in and just move things around, turn layers on and off, resize various elements, change the crop or the aspect ratio of the entire canvas. Experiment. You might stumble upon something altogether astonishing that you otherwise never would have dreamed up.
3.) Are there any other artistic techniques you could bring into the piece to give it a different feel?
Often the difference between a great piece and a truly great piece comes down to the excellence of its technique. When offering critiques to other artists, this is the tricky bit, because it’s just so hard to know what to recommend (“Um … maybe if you just … sort of … spent longer on it … and made it BETTER?”)
But with your own work, you know what you know, so your job is to just mentally scroll through your list of options and think which might actually improve the piece.
It’s astonishing how much difference an extra 15 minutes of dodging and burning and a few adjustment layers can make to a piece. But you can’t really know that until you get in there and DO it.
A simple portrait can look OK … but with the right treatment it can become fantastic. Taking an okay image and turning it into a fantastic one often simply requires time and practice in applying the techniques you’ve learned. Maybe you want to see how it looks with a subtle painterly effect? Or maybe you want to try out one of the monochrome treatments you picked up in the Creative Black & White course? Or maybe you want to experiment with that dispersion technique you learned last session … ?
Point is, you won’t know how things will really look until you try them out. And one of the things that especially separates the best AWAKE artists from the rest — is their continual willingness to experiment with creatively combining the various techniques they’re learning.
No one else can really provide you with this kind of “critique.” They might be able to tell you which of two versions of a piece they like best. But only you can cook up those two versions. And what kinds of art you are able to produce comes down so often to that altogether unique combination of subject matter, composition, treatment, and technical execution.
Your job is to become more and more proficient at more and more techniques … and then to put in the countless hours playing around combining them in new ways.
This is how you find your own voice as an artist.
4.) What would make this piece just flat out cooler and more interesting?
It’s easy to just take a piece as is, and try to figure out how it might be improved just by removing stuff that distracts or doesn’t fit or improving the stuff that is already there. But always take a moment at the end to imagine what would happen if something were added or changed.
Just say aloud the words, “I wonder what would happen if . . .”
Always look for ways to introduce unexpected images or components that might give a piece more for the viewer to think about, elements that deepen the story. Often an image is just pretty, and it’s only meant to look pretty. But bring in an arresting additional image or component, and the whole piece could become thought-provoking in a fresh new way.
If you can dream up something that would make the piece more captivating, why not give it a try?
Try to imagine possible enhancements that might make the image more interesting, more captivating. Try to dream up changes or additions that would make the viewer THINK a bit more.
These are the fun ideas to explore, but they’re of course just ideas, and whether they will work often depends on how well they’re executed. First you’ve gotta think them up. But if you come up with an idea that excites you, see if you can bring it off.
The most important thing to remember is that there is no right or wrong answer in art. Over time you’ll find your own voice and your own way.
And I can’t repeat it often enough: What others have to say about your work is immaterial.
Getting some tips or advice along the way can help. But this is YOUR journey.
Have fun with it. Put your attention on creating a LOT of art. Lots and lots and lots of art.
And then periodically return to a piece and run through the questions I’ve laid out here.
That kind of self-critique will propel you forward as an artist.
THAT’S how you’re going to get really good.
– Sebastian