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Soft pastels are easy for me, but I avoid using them because of the difficulties with framing or preserving the artwork

This is truly something I haven't thought about enough. I have found abstract / expressive art to be easiest. But I'm always feeling like my expressive art looks unfinished. Sometimes I paint very intensely and very quickly like I'm in a frenzy but then I don't feel satisfied with the work even when it comes more naturally.

I have grown into visual, audio arts. I was a bit discouraged when I saw other people's art work, or heard their music. I thought I needed expensive synths, and wall racks of mixers. I didn't. I thought I needed an expensive digital audio work station to create master pieces. I didn't. I use my phone camera to capture images. I also create art work with certain applications. I draw simple things then use color pencils, or water color paints. I use magic markers too. Someone told me my art work reminded them of Paul Klee. I didn't even know him. I just create art that I'm comfortable with. Complicated things are not my thing. I stick with what I know, and build from there. I only use paper for my art work.

I call drawing my "wheelhouse" because it's the art I've been doing since childhood. Currently, I'm using my wheelhouse skills to expand my skills in other areas, to learn to draw with a brush as the beginning of a painting.

I agree wholeheartedly with what you have said. Thank you now I have a direction in which to go.

I used to try to make realistic paintings because that’s what everyone else in my art club was doing, but I hated it more and more. I started making abstract mixed media work and I finally like to sit down and make art again. I never get bored and never have to struggle for ideas, never stress about what it’s supposed to look like. I don’t know that I’ve ever mastered anything, but it’s way better to make art that I love because I will make more of it. Thanks for this video, it makes me feel less guilty for doing what’s “easy.”

Such great advice. I enjoyed making pictures out of recycled paper. It always felt too easy. Maybe I’ll explore it again.

This is such a profound truth and like you said it’s pervasive……and I have never applied it to my art. Thank you ❤

Really appreciated this video. I'm about to rethink my own practice... timely advice. Thanks.

Style, like handwriting is not to be sought after, but rather comes through endless application and discovery of process that suits the individual temperament. People say 'I love your style'. I'm like 'what?'. I don't see it. It's grown with my development as an artist.

I can’t say that anything really comes easy for me. But there are subject that come with less mental effort. I may be bored of portraits, but I can lean into the familiar subject matter and just focus on the medium (watercolor, inks, marker etc)

It appears to me that you have a visitor. A second after you say 'Picasso...' there is a very deliberate orb that moves into the frame from the top left ( YOUR right). It is not dust, as I can see a noticeable streak and its trajectory is not that of dust falling. Just found it interesting!😊

I had this video on my watch later playlist since I watched your first one on batching and forgot to come back. Batching practice really works wonders. And also the tip about preparing your canvas with color. Thank you!

I'm a writer, and I find writers struggle with finishing their projects, too, whether or not they have lots of projects going at once. Many writers do, but not me. I'm sort of a one-thing-at-a-time type. So it's torture when I don't finish! :) I'd like to finish everything. I also paint for fun. I'm not educated in visual art, or even particularly good, and I have one painting of my kids that I just cannot finish. It's because I'm not good at faces, and I can't finish my daughter's face in way that pleases me.

Drawing from the minds eye is impossible for those of us with Aphantasia sadly.

U eloquently explained what we all aspire to do. I’ve always copied art & found it satisfying, using oil crayons, colored pencils, pastels, acrylics, & now watercolors. I’m 71 & I’m trying watercolors. It’s quite different from those mediums, & I can’t loosen up- as that’s the type of watercolor I love. I can do botanicals…. I enjoyed ur talk n will b looking for more of ur content. U absolutely kno Art I hope ur journey is fruitful. Thanx!

Excellent ArtTalk! #artistStrong powered by #purposefulPractice

Thanks for this. It's liberating.

Hello Carrie I recently started watching some of your videos and decided to go back in time and start at the beginning! ❤

I Love to Work on Multiple Projects all at the Same Time! ❤️

“I am not looking for feedback at the moment is very helpful. Thank you. One woman I was in a workshop with was very bluntly saying that “she couldn’t see x” or “it didn’t look like” y - I thought it was a very rude behaviour in a studio setting. I realised later I was working upside down as I was finding it hard to get into the right frame of mind, but still, it was a thought better kept to herself 😡

14:38 ‘My value and vision for my work are greater than discomfort I feel and the moments I receive critiques.’ What a powerful quote. My art journey got ruined by my secondary school art teacher, who always give unhelpful feedback that fits into what he think would give us good grades. Since then, not only have I struggled to make art, I also struggle to take criticisms, especially because I’m currently struggling to land a job and most feedback are not helpful. Thanks for sharing your wisdom, I will keep your advice when I’m struggling with these again.

😢 I have destroyed so many things I've made because someone said something negative about it

I’m not an artist if I don’t follow my own heart and soul. I would for example would not be happy tracing or griding! Because I would not enjoy that! Simple as that!

Enjoyed that. I definitely have gaps in my learning, some skill in drawing, and sometimes my vision in my mind’s eye is beyond what I can do. I can improve my weaknesses or I can make a compromise in my vision of my work. Bonnard’s drawing was sometimes sloppy but his paintings are deeply soulful.

I really appreciate your videos. Excellent content. This one hit a spot. Thanks!

Good video. Never let the scolds keep you down. I've worked with many artists, some famous. I remember the whole 'cheating,' nonsense when David Hockney's Secret Knowledge book came out. Those who insisted, "Renaissance artists didn't cheat!" were all academic art historians.... no artists. The artists I know? If using a camera obscura or a camera lucida or sacrificing chickens at the new moon would lead to better work, they wouldn't hesitate. I've also met many amateurs, some of them Fixed Mindset. Know what the fixed mindset artists say? I mentioned to one that Robert Graham uses 8B and 9B pencils. They flew into a rage, "How dare you compare me to....!" This wasn't the first neurotic outburst. I thought it might benefit them if I shared one more of Bob's practices. " If I told Robert Graham that 'anonymous amateur' artist used X in their work, he'd be curious. If there was an interesting result? He'd want to know everything he could. At minimum, he'd be curious. If it might help him in some way? He'd absolutely want to know. He'd insist." Another artist I met was working in metal body art. They'd started to make shapes that stood away from the body on wires. So I asked, Are you interested in some of the techniques and tools of Alexander Calder? No. Where to get piano wire straightened? No. (Piano wire comes on spools, there are two different twists in it. I know the one place in the U.S. that straightens it. Straightening it on your own, as this artist was doing would always lead to uneven shapes, or take a lot more work. I never worked with Calder, but I've spent a lot of time with his work and figuring out how to make them.) Vermeer is a great example. He clearly did use some form of lens projection. But it's not just a cheap trick. It was a powerful tool. There's a terrific video called Tim's Vermeer. A tech guy set up a replica of Vermeer's studio and used what he deduced was Vermeer's method. And I think he proved two things. First, this is how Vermeer did it, but also that Vermeer did so much more. Tim's Vermeer looks 'true' in the video, but I've heard that in real life it's a lot of daubs of paint, clearly not the same thing - but still marvelous. One thing common to amateur plein air painters. Often colors and shapes, push out of or into the image in odd ways. The water in the background pushes forward of the foreground, the fronds on a palm tree seem to be behind the water. Field Ground Reversal. It's common. (It's also wonderful. Go out just after sunset and look up at the branches of trees.) I was just at a street fair. An artist showing her work. Bright, colorful, pleasant. In some paintings this field ground reversal bothered me, but in a couple of others it wasn't a problem and made for a more interesting (and still pretty) painting. She can paint like this for the rest of her life, no problem. If she really engages in her work and keeps reaching for 'more,' she will eventually turn this 'problem' into a strength and her work will soar. A friend's mom gave me one of her plein air paintings. I've only see two of her paintings. The one I have is absolutely wonderful. A rowboat pops, the sea cove recedes. At first glance it looks like a tourist shop painting, but it's so much more. It's not that she 'got it right,' it's that she painted something in a way that no photograph could capture. It's not better, it's different. I never tire looking at it. Some of the work painted by serious amateurs I've known could hang in major museums. One woman used to have me come to her studio every six to twelve months. At least four times she asked me to re photograph the same painting. The second time I said, Don't bother, paint something else. But then I Iooked at it. It was better. It kept getting better. Abstract, and wonderful. If that painting was hanging in a Hans Hoffman exhibit, it would be a standout. In honor of the painting and her efforts I wouldn't charge her for re photographing it. I'd drive just to see it again. The drawing a dog made me remember another artist. The first few years he was pretty bad. He was trying to draw portraits and they were just not good... He absolutely would not give up. He didn't have limitations, he was going to keep at it. He got to be really good. I know of at least one well known museum that has his work in their collection. The life and career of an artist is the pursuit of positive feedback loops that keep the work and the working moving forward. This can be in almost any direction, and it can start from almost anywhere, any level. Maybe there is a rule for art and creativity. Keep working, keep pushing.

Great video, thanks for sharing!

If anyone gives you grief for tracing or using a grid, offer to share your outline with them so they can reproduce your finished work. Oh no, are they not up to the task? Could it be that there's way more that goes into a good finished painting or drawing than just accurate outlines? Interesting. Also, like every single class on realistic art I watch from professional artists is like "okay, here's how you draw this... and now in the next lesson we find out we're just going to trace it to save time."

Just do art!

I'm not an artist... until I make art a priority. Until I found your channel, I didn't dare to call myself an artist. Per general definition "artist" is a profession. I'm not a professional artist. Per my own definition an artist needs to have skills, needs to know and master his materials and should be able to express with his art what he wants to express. By this definition I'm not an artist either. But I'm learning. So I accepted a new definition that I also found somewhere and that I can identify with: An artist is someone who has made art a priority. That being said: I don't think tracing etc. is cheating. Who would be cheated? But since my own understanding of being an artist involves being able to express what I want to express, I need to learn the skills, the materials, the techniques.

So I’ve used the term crutch before but not to dissuade people from using an approach at a difficult problem. Left unchallenged we may never learn a topic and limit our ability in the long run. That said, there’s nothing more limiting than avoiding the problem altogether. Because that’s a path to not doing art at all. Let’s substitute the term “crutch” and “cheat” for approach, make art and keep challenging ourselves to grow as artists. #artiststrong

Thank you so much

Thank you for this. So much helpful information

Batching is a very neurodivergent friendly strategy because we struggle so much with task switching! I am currently doing 11 paintings at once. Love creating that way!

Neurodivergent artist here 👋 for me, art and mental health are are my special interest topics 😊 they help me access joy. Procrastination is a way of regulating the nervous system to reduce dysregulation. If art is your special interest then doing it will give you the joy you need to regulate. However art requires our front brain to be online so we can make judgments on composition, colour etc. When we are dysregulated we are stuck in survival mode. A few things can help, 8D music and butterfly hugs for grounding. They use something called bilateral stimulation that coordinates the right and left sides of the brain/nervous system bringing them back in sync. Next I usually watch art videos to get myself into art mode whilst I prep canvases/pages. Then I usually get in hyper focus so try stopping me 😂

yep, that’s me all right! Afraid to show up, putting off actually doing anything. I tell myself I don’t know where to start. I watch a lot of videos and get inspired and sit down and don’t know where to start. I don’t wanna copy other people I want to be original, but I don’t have anything inside of me, which of course isn’t true. Thank you so much for the video! I really do need to show up and work through the discomfort of not knowing what to do and getting past that.💕

I think is not that we don’t like “being all over the place”. It’s just that we feel we aren’t making anything meaningful with any of the mediums. I think that if we were “progressing” as much as we’d like, we’d enjoy the mess of several types of pursuits at the same time. We feel like we’re loosing time and money investing in things that we abandon half way.

❤❤❤

Thank you

You nailed it! Then I took a few minutes to look at my RUclips history, countless hours looking at how to videos on painting! And I know that when I’m watching those videos, there’s a huge part of me that just wants to turn the video off and start painting! But I don’t. But now, I will. I am going on a Mediterranean cruise and I want to art journal every day, but I have been looking at RUclips and I think I have been sabotaging myself thinking that I want my art journals to look just like theirs

I resonate with everything you have said.

I suppose another way to look at it could be that if we didn’t face discomfort in order to bring something new into the world, everyone would do it. Great video!

Procrastinating about making art while I watch your video. Studies have found a correlation between procrastination and creativity. Creatives tend to procrastinate more than other people because they have so many ideas floating around that they find it difficult to commit to something then move forward.

Ah, resistance to expectations, my nemesis!!! I'll try recording when I actually show up rather than make lists that I don't follow through on.

Thanks