How To Have A Practice As An Artist

How to have a practice as an artist

Written by Miriam; a product designer, potter, and printmaker, and Nathaniel; a plein air painter and printmaker.

It can be daunting to have a practice as an artist. But there are a couple steps that you can follow to build the habit and begin building up a robust practice. Here are some of the ways that we build up our own artistic practices, and tips that you can use. Not everything works for every person, but starting doesn’t have to be hard, and as you progress, it will become easier until making art becomes a fundamental part of your life.

1. Work regularly enough that it becomes an actual practice.

It doesn’t need to be daily, but close to daily is ideal. The more you work on your art, the more in tune with it you will become, and the more you’ll begin to have a voice as an artist. You don’t need to have stuff that looks all alike, but your touchstones and motifs will start to show up when you work regularly and from there you can build those up. Your art practice must be a common part of your life, to the point of being a habit, something you can’t do without. One way to jump start this is to set yourself or participate in a larger daily challenge, such as inktober, plein airpril, NaNoWriMo, Printer Solstice. This offers external support, project ideas, and has a community of other folks staying on track with you!

2. Quantity equals quality

Create a lot of work. Try everything. Work fast. You can learn as much from a small painting that took you less than an hour as you do from a large piece that you invest weeks in. For each piece  you must grapple with the many aspects of creating art. In painting, that would be composition, value, and color. Every iteration gives you a chance to solve those problems anew, and the more times you do it, the better you will get.

Many people have covered this idea, but one of our favorite anecdotes is from the book Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland. They share a story about a ceramics class, in which half of the class was to be graded by the quality of one single piece, and the other half was to be graded based purely on the quantity of pieces made. So, the first group spent long hours on complicated and difficult pieces, while the second worked as quickly as they could. In the end, those that made the most pieces also made the best individual works. Quality and quantity are not opposites, they are directly tied to each other. The more you make, the better your results.

Make small things, practice craft and technique. Do small sketches, doodle, make stickers, make mugs, make small things and focus on technique, voice, and refinement.

3. When comparing yourself to other artists, completely ignore better and worse as metrics.

Use metrics that are useful for your practice, and apply them. Instead of “this artist does better work than me”, which is both incredibly unhelpful, and makes you feel bad about your work, find ways to form comparisons that are helpful. Here are some examples:

“This artist does plein air painting several times a week, that’s admirable and shows in their work and is something I would like to strive for in my own practice.”

“This artist is a perfectionist about their work, never a brush stroke out of place, I admire it in their work but don’t think it’s right for me.”

“This artist consistently has beautiful deep trimmed feet on their bowls. That’s not something I can do yet but is something I want to work towards.”

4. Share your work!

Be proud of it! Getting feedback from other people is so important to continuing your practice. You don’t need to have social media, you can have a critique group, or just show your work to other people directly, but get it out there somehow!

5. Keep your priorities in order

Remember that our primary goal is to be when and where we are, and enjoy the process of observing and making. That has to come before making a successful piece of art. If this isn’t enjoyable, then you won’t want to do it every day. Joy translates into the work, and brings it to those who see it. That doesn’t mean there can’t be any struggle or challenge, but rather to keep in mind why we are doing what we are doing, so that it doesn’t cause undue anguish. It’s easy for artists to feel that their personal self worth is tied to the outcome of their work, but we can release ourselves from that danger by focusing on the journey. Hopefully we will all get to make many, many bad artworks in our lives.

6. Get inspiration!

Surround yourself with art! Befriend artists! Shake up your algorithm so it shows you cool art that other people are making. Go to museums, go to art shows, look at weird little galleries, watch films and read books that inspire you, go out and look at nature. Find things that are beautiful and copy them. A great resource that we like is Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon (and the rest of his books)

7. It’s work. It’s fun, but it’s work.

Work when you’re bored. Work when you’re not inspired. Work when it isn’t coming out right and everything looks bad. Work with it, work through it. Take breaks and take care of yourself but don’t let a bad day stop your routine. If you need to step away from actually making things, read about art, take your normal creating time and use that to actively search for inspiration. Return to what brought you into the practice. Try a new style, or a new medium, and try to find the joy in that. But don’t stop working when it feels like work. Work through it.

8. Work regularly enough that it becomes an actual practice.

This is the most important one, and I can’t stress enough how important it is so it’s in here twice. A consistent art practice needs to be built up over time. Something done regularly becomes a habit, then becomes routine. Doing art as part of your routine makes it an integral part of your life, and then, just the thing that you do. Making becomes, not effortless, but simply something that is a part of your life, like scrolling through instagram. I, an ADHD guy, take classes that have regular times every week. I have markets which are every weekend, and get direct feedback from customers about what’s selling, what people want to see. That creates benchmarks for me to set and keeps me dedicated to creating new things and refining my work.

If you have any other thoughts, more tips and tricks, or any comments, please feel free to leave a comment here or email us at chat@spookyhaus.com :)

Ok get out there and make stuff!