artist-confessions: "My 10-minutes sketch gets more attention than my 7-hour painting."
I’ve seen many confessions about this, and I’ve seen many people complaining about this. And yes, I’ve experienced this myself many times.
But when that happens to me, I often already KNOW that it’s going to happen and why.
Because most of the time when this occur, when your work that you…
Don’t usually reblog artist-confessions but this one is actually a lot of good sense!
This applies not only to casual feedback online—I was actually told many times when I was at Calarts that my portfolio work looked “too finished” and that I didn’t include enough really quick rough material. Being a perfectionist, I was frustrated because to me, showing rough sketches was lazy and only showed your weaknesses to potential employers.
Then a teacher explained to me: Look at the art books you like (for films like Kung-Fu Panda, Tangled, Up, what have you). What are the things that are most exciting to you? Oftentimes they are not the polished, fully detailed background paintings you’ll see (though you might admire those for things like color and composition). The things that REALLY excite people are the quick character sketches. The reason for that is not because they’re perfect drawings but because they have an enormous amount of energy and personality—and they tell a story.
So basically a repeat of what has been said above—the basic elements of a drawing are what tend to get a strong emotional response from people, NOT the time you spent etching in every little detail on your character’s fingernails. Also I consider it bad form to complain about people not liking your art in EXACTLY the way you want them to—keep in mind that no one is ever obligated to like or comment on your art and if people’s responses bother you that much, you always have the choice not to post anything. :\
advice to myself
