Why You Shouldn’t Get Jealous Of The Ways That Other Artists Make Their Art

Although this is an article about why you shouldn’t get jealous of the ways that other artists make art, I’m going to have to talk about when this happened to me (and how I got over it), in the hope that it might be useful to you.

Earlier this year, I was trying to get into more of an “artistic” mood. So, I decided to take a look at some art by one of my favourite artists on Youtube.

Anyway, the thing that really caught my interest was the fact that this artist had also started posting daily artwork on Instagram too. As someone who posts daily art online myself, it’s always really cool to see other artists doing this.

But, as I was looking at all of the drawings, I realised that most of them contained something that I often seemed to be lacking in my own art – spontaneity.

Thinking about it logically, I imagine that there was probably quite a lot of time, thought, planning and preparation put into each of the daily drawings in the gallery. But, from the way that they’re presented (eg: photographs of sketchbook pages), they look like brilliantly inspired drawings that were created in a fraction of the time that it takes many artists to draw a picture. They all look like they were drawn furiously in sudden moments of inspiration.

By comparison, my own daily art practice felt extremely stodgy and formal. I usually try to make most of my paintings a standard size (although this varies slightly over time) and I also usually try to ensure that most of my paintings take less than 60-90 minutes to make. When I’ve finished a painting, I scan (rather than photograph) it and then I usually edit it digitally (at minimum, this can involve cropping the picture to size and then changing the brightness, contrast and colour saturation levels).

Usually, after I’ve finished a daily painting, I’ll write two dates in the margin – the date that the painting was made and the date that it will be posted here. There’s usually a significant gap between the two dates. If I ever become famous, this will probably baffle art historians for decades.

About the closest thing to “spontaneous” that I get is when I make B&W comics like this one or this one and, even then, I usually tend to make them months in advance.

Then again, this is the kind of art practice that actually works for me. It’s something that I’ve developed over about four years of daily art practice, and it’s meant that I’ve actually been able to keep up my daily art practice.

If you’re doing something every day for a long period of time, then you will naturally gravitate towards a style of practice that works best for you. In a way, it almost becomes an expression of who you are.

It can be very easy to look at another artist’s work and conclude that they have a much better relationship with their art practice than you do with your practice. Whilst it’s probably true that successful artists have a good relationship with their art practice, what this actually looks like varies significantly from artist to artist.

So, looking at something that is right for one artist and then concluding that your own way of making art is “wrong” or “inferior” is a foolish idea. It’d be like looking at a list of someone else’s favourite foods and feeling bad because your own favourite foods are different.

My own way of making art may not be very “spontaneous”, but it’s what works for me. If I tried to be “spontaneous”, then I’d probably produce art that I didn’t really like. I’d constantly be rushing around in a panic and trying to make art within much shorter deadlines than I’m used to. After a few weeks or months, I’d probably end up either going back to my old “not spontaneous” style or I’d just stop making art.

My own way of making art is something that has developed alongside me and it is uniquely suited to me. With enough time and practice, your own way of making art will become uniquely suited to you.

And, if you’re still feeling discouraged about the fact that there are better artists out there than you, then remember that there are also worse artists out there too. Even the artists that you think are better than you probably think that their own art isn’t as good as the art that their favourite artists make.

If you don’t believe me, then just take a look at the front page of a popular art website called DeviantART. If you look at the newest updates on there for a while, you’ll see both better and worse artwork than your own art.

So, the next time you see another artist’s work online and you think something like “they’re so much more spontaneous than I am“, “they make art every day! Every day!” or “they focus on detail a lot more than I do“, just remember that they’re using a practice style that works for them. It might not work for you.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂

Three Things You Learn From Making Art Every Day (With Art Preview)

Although this is an article about making art regularly (that I wrote as a last-minute replacement for the article I’d originally planned for today), I’m going to have to start by talking about Youtube videos.

Anyway, I recently watched this random vlog video from one of the art-related Youtube channels (“Mary Doodles”/”More Mary Doodles”) that I watch sometimes.

Although most of the video is about festivals and deserts, one of the interesting things in this video was that Mary Doodles talked about how it can be interesting to start making a painting with no idea of what the final painting will look like. She talked about how this can help artists that abandon their paintings halfway through making them because they don’t look exactly like they planned.

My reaction to this was just “Well, yeah, isn’t this just an ordinary part of making art?‘ Since, for me at least, I rarely plan out my paintings in a huge level of detail before making them. I’ve written about this before, but it’s mainly a result of making art pretty much every day. If you make art regularly, then you don’t always have time to plan every drawing or painting. So, you often just have to launch into it and hope for the best.

This, of course, made me think about other things that you learn from making art every day. Here are a few of them:

1) Uninspiration isn’t the end of the world: If you make art every day, then you’ll learn how to deal with feeling uninspired fairly quickly. You’ll work out strategies that help you to continue making art on days when you either have no ideas, relatively little time and/or no enthusiasm for making art.

These strategies vary from artist to artist, but some of my strategies for uninspired days include things like making still life paintings, painting landscapes, making studies of 19th century paintings and re-painting some of my old artwork from years past. Yes, some of these “uninspired” paintings will look absolutely terrible, but a terrible painting is better than no painting.

But, regardless of how you deal with uninspiration, making art every day teaches you not to worry so much about feeling “uninspired”. It teaches you that you can’t just sit around and wait to feel “inspired”. If you know that you are going to make a piece of art today, regardless of whether it’s any good, then you’ll probably be a lot less frightened about feeling uninspired.

2) The “Rules”: If you make art every day, then any artistic “rules” that you learn will quickly become second-nature to you purely through sheer repetitive practice.

For example, although I had a vague knowledge of this before, I only really learnt the basics of colour theory last year. But, thanks to a lot of practice (and making a lot of mistakes), it’s kind of almost second-nature to me by now.

For example, the night before I wrote this article, I was in kind of a hurry – so, I decided to make a quick still life painting of a purple glass/plastic skull (which will be posted here in January). However, to make the painting more interesting, I decided to add a completely imagined background to it.

Of course, since the skull was purple/pink, it only took me a second or two to realise that the background had to be yellow/brown, because they are complimentary colours. Anyway, here’s a small preview of the painting in question:

“Art Preview – Purple Skull (small version)” By C. A. Brown

Of course, this applies to a lot of other artistic “rules” too, such as perspective, composition, lighting, shading and drawing 3D objects. Yes, you’ll make a lot of mistakes if you make art every day, but you’ll learn from those mistakes a lot more quickly than you would if you only made art occasionally.

3) How not to be a perfectionist: Making art every day teaches you how to actually finish drawings and paintings. It teaches you to adjust the level of detail in your artwork according to how long you have to draw or paint.

It teaches you to know when no amount of tinkering or “small improvements” will actually make a drawing or painting significantly better than it already is. Not only that, the rhythm of making something new every day also means that you can’t spend several days on a single painting or drawing, so there’s a lot more emphasis on actually finishing things.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂

Four Basic Tips For Making Daily Comics

Well, actually, they’re probably more like a long-distance sprint, I guess.

Ok, I have something of a weird love/hate relationship with daily comics – they’re extremely fun to read (when other people make them) and posting daily comic updates that I’ve made is a surprisingly enjoyable experience.

But the process of actually making those daily updates can be more than a little bit daunting and exhausting, even if you’ve made quite a few daily comics beforehand.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, at the time of writing this article, I’m working on a daily retro sci-fi zombie comic that I’ll probably start posting here in a few days. And, just for the sake of it, here’s yet another preview:

“Dead Sector – Preview 3” By C. A. Brown

Like most of my older comics, it will be updated every day. So, I thought that I’d offer you a few basic tips about how to make daily comics, in case they’re useful to you.

Yes, I’ve probably said all of this stuff at least once or twice before, but – at the very least- I felt like reminding myself of it. Anyway, let’s get started;

1) Have a buffer: Making and posting a comic update literally every day is a sure-fire recipe for burnout, stress and exhaustion.

I mean, there will be days when you don’t have as much time as you usually do and there will be days when you’ll probably get writer’s block. If you both make and post your comic updates on the same day, then these things are going to affect both you and your comic pretty badly.

So, a good way to keep your sanity and to ensure that your comic is up to at least a vaguely good standard is to have a pre-made “buffer” of comic updates prepared in advance.

In other words, post your comic updates at least a few days after you make them. This way, if there’s a day where you can’t make an update for any reason, then it isn’t the end of the world, since you’ll be a few days ahead of your comic.

Seriously, don’t even attempt to make a daily comic without doing this – it might start out well, but the chances of you consistently making and posting an update literally every day will be a lot lower if you don’t have a buffer.

2) Keep it simple: As I’ve said a few times before in other articles, one thing to remember when you’re making comics is that the art is less important than you might think. As long as the art clearly shows what is happening in your comic and as long as your characters are easily recognisable, then you don’t need fancy artwork.

Yes, fancy artwork is nice – but the most important part of a comic is the story, rather than the pictures. If you have to focus on just one thing, then focus on the writing.

And, well, if you’re going to be making an update for your comic every day, then you are going to have to work faster than normal. In other words, you need to make sure that your art is simple enough that it takes you less than a day to make each update. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to make sure that the art in your comic is simple enough that you don’t have to spend more than 1-2 hours on each update.

3) Planning: Some people like to plan their entire comic in advance and some people like to, to use an American phrase “fly by the seat of their pants”. I used to do this, but I’ve noticed that – with the comic I’m working on at the time of writing this article – I’ve started planning a lot more.

The good thing about planning is that, if you plan several updates in advance, then writer’s block becomes a lot less of an issue.

If you don’t know how to plan a comic page, then one of the easiest way to do it is to sketch out a very rough copy of your comic page – using extremely simple artwork. After all, no-one else but you is going to see your plan, so it only has to be useful to you – it doesn’t have to look fancy. To show you what I mean, here’s one of my plans for my upcoming comic:

“Dead Sector planning page” By C. A. Brown

But, if you’re the kind of person who finds planning boring or who feels that creativity is at it’s best when it’s spontaneous – then don’t plan. It isn’t mandatory and, like with everything, you have to find what works for you and you alone.

4) Length: It’s usually a good idea to have a rough idea of how long your comic will be and to have a good idea of what comic length works best for you. Unfortunately, the latter of these two things can only be learnt from experience (eg: I’m much better at making shorter comics and I learnt this from wearing myself out by making lots of longer comics in 2013), but it’s important to know how long your comic will probably be.

Why? Well, there are several reasons. For starters, if you know that you’re going to be making a shorter comic, then every page matters a lot more than it does in a longer comic – so you will have to plan each page more carefully and focus on your writing a lot more.

Likewise, if you’re going to make a longer comic, then you need to make sure that the idea for your comic is interesting enough that you’ll still want to work on it a few weeks later.

Plus, having a rough idea of how long your comic will be can also be a great motivational tool. Why? Because, although your comic might be extremely fun to work on when you’ve just started it – if you keep making it for long enough, then even the best comic can end up becoming little more than an exhausting chore.

So, having an end-point that you can aim towards (rather than a comic of undefined length that could, theoretically, go on for eternity) can be a great way to stay motivated and, much more importantly, it can also be a way to make sure that you actually finish your comic.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂

How To Make Art Every Day – Five Simple Tips

Although I’d originally planned to write exactly the same “to hell with new years’ resolutions!” article that I strongly considered writing this time last year, I suddenly thought about a resolution of my own.

Unlike the pointless masochistic ritual of self-defeating self-denial that many people inflict upon themselves today, I actually made this resolution in April about three years ago. Yes, before it was cool.

What was it? Well, it was simple – “I will produce at least one piece of art every day“. That’s it.

And, surprisingly, I’ve actually stuck to this resolution fairly well since then – and my art has improved significantly as a result. Seriously, I’ve gone from making what looked like childish doodles to making art that could just about vaguely pass for something that you might find in a low-budget indie comic.

So, if you decide to make this resolution yourself (and please wait at least a couple of days, just so you don’t feel like it’s a *ugh* “new years’ resolution” of any kind), I thought that I’d offer you a few basic tips that might come in handy.

If you’ve read my other articles about making art, then there isn’t really anything new here – but I thought that, at the very least, you might like a reminder.

Anyway, let’s begin:

1) Start Small: When I started making art every day back in 2012, my pictures were a lot smaller. In fact, each one was only as large as a quarter of an A4 sheet of paper.

At the time, even making something as small as this seemed like a challenge – but it felt achievable. After all, I only had to fill a quarter of a page with drawings every day.

After a few months, I finally made the leap to making A5-size drawings (and then paintings) every day. Then, earlier this year, I started making A4-size paintings, before finally settling on my preferred size of 18 x 19cm for my drawings and paintings.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, making a piece of artwork every day can seem like an intimidating task at first and, if you expect to make a full-size painting or drawing every day then this is probably going to scare you away fairly quickly. So, start with something smaller and easier and gradually work your way up to larger pictures once you feel more confident.

2) Work fast: Making art takes time and, if you’re new to making art every day, then it can seem like this will be one of those things that will take a huge bite out of your day. So, it’s important to learn how to make art fairly quickly. Ideally, you should spend no more than an hour or an hour and a half on your daily art practice.

There are plenty of ways to do this – in fact, I’ve written a whole article about this subject. But, in short, you should aim to make simpler art that you don’t have to rush, rather than complex art that you end up rushing every day.

Although this might sound limiting at first, it’s a good way of building your artistic confidence and – as time goes on – you’ll find that you’re able to draw or paint simpler things so quickly that you still have time left to add more detail to your pictures.

3) Don’t worry about quality: This might sound counter-intuitive, but if you’re making art every day, then you shouldn’t worry about how good your pictures will be.

Yes, you will produce a lot of terrible art at first – but, the important part of this sentence is “you will produce“. The most important part of making art every day isn’t making good art, it’s actually making art.

You see, if you keep making art every day until it just becomes an “ordinary” part of your daily routine, then your art will start to improve through sheer repetition alone. It will probably happen at a glacial pace that you’ll only notice a few months or a year later when you look back at your earlier art, but it will happen.

However, if you’re a perfectionist and you don’t dare to make art literally every day because you’re worried about the possibility of making bad art, then it won’t.

4) Artist’s block: If you’re making art literally every day, then you’re going to need lots of ideas for new drawings and/or paintings. And it’s only natural that you’re going to run out of ideas from time to time. It happens to us all.

When this happens, you still have to make art. So, it’s good to have a backup plan or two in place – a few “standby” ideas that you can turn to whenever you can’t think of anything new. These can include things like drawing nearby objects, making fan art, copying old paintings, drawing random landscapes or even just making something a bit more random and abstract than usual.

Whatever it is, make sure you have a backup plan for the times you feel uninspired. Because you will feel uninspired occasionally if you make art every day.

5) Post it online: If you’ve got a scanner, digital camera or graphics tablet – one way to make sure that you stick to your commitment to make art every day is to post your daily artwork online, so that everyone can look at it.

You can post it on a blog, on a dedicated art site like DeviantART or even on *ugh* Twitter and Facebook. But, putting your art online makes you feel like you’re actually doing something rather than just scribbling things that no-one will ever look at.

Don’t worry if you feel that your art isn’t “good enough” to post online, I can assure you that it is. In fact, there’s a rule that you must always remember when posting art online that will help you with any anxieties you might feel – “No matter how good or bad at art you feel you are – there will always be better artists than you online… and there will ALWAYS be worse artists too.”

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂

How To Keep A Daily Webcomic Running

Although it’s been quite a while since I last made a daily webcomic of any kind, they’re one of my favourite types of webcomics – both as an artist/writer and as a reader too.

Still, if you’re new to webcomics – then the idea of making a daily comic can be kind of daunting. Yes, it gets easier once you’ve been doing it for a while and have got to know your characters a bit better – but it can still seem like an almost impossible challenge at the beginning, so here are a few things that might help you out.

This is all pretty basic advice and there’s nothing groundbreaking here, but I hope that it’s useful 🙂

First of all, you need to build up a “buffer” of comic pages before you even begin to post your comic online. Personally, I’d recommend making at least ten pages before you post your first one online but you can make more or less than this, depending on your preferences.

If you’ve started your comic without a buffer, then try making two comics on a day when you have more time (or making a couple of quick filler posts) and gradually build up a buffer this way.

The reason why it’s a good idea to have a buffer is because it means that not being able to make a comic on a particular day and/or getting writer’s block (and you will probably end up getting this at least once or twice) isn’t as much of an issue as it would be if you’re posting your comic pages on the same day that you’ve made them.

Secondly, you need to keep your art fairly simple. Not only will this mean that you’ll be able to make each update in a reasonable amount of time, but it also means that it’s easier to make sure that the characters and/or settings look the same in every panel.

For example, my very first webcomic from 2010 (an embarassingly badly-written sci-fi comic called “Yametry Run”) used simple black and white artwork for almost every update:

It looked a bit like this *cringe*

Don’t worry about your audience looking down at your simple art – people have much lower expectations with webcomics (compared to print comics), and if you’re writing/dialogue is pretty good, then people won’t care too much about the quality of the art.

Thirdly, if possible, choose to post your webcomic on a site that allows you to schedule your updates in advance. Not only will this mean that your updates will be automatically posted at precisely the same time every day, but it will also mean that your comic will still be updated even if you don’t have a chance to visit the site you’re using on any particular day.

Fourthly, learn how to make filler content. With a daily webcomic, the most important thing is that you post something every day – your audience expects nothing less.

As such, it’s ok to post filler content occasionally when you’ve got writer’s block or if don’t have time to make a proper update. There are many ways to make filler content, but a good example of a filler post would be a quick sketch of one of your characters.

If your webcomic has been going for a while and you know other webcomic creators who like your comic, then a slightly better way of adding filler content to your comic is to ask them to make guest comics for you.

Not only does this give the other artists some extra publicity (and the chance to make an episode of your webcomic), but it also means that you’ll have high-quality content posted on your website on the days when you can’t make an update yourself.

Finally, you really have to care about your webcomic. I know that this sounds obvious, but don’t start making a daily webcomic unless you’re a massive fan of daily webcomics and are really passionate about making one.

Yes, your daily webcomic might seem new and exciting in the beginning but, after a while, you’re going to need all of the internal motivation and enthusiasm that you can muster to keep it going. Ok, making daily webcomics gets easier with practice, but it can still be fairly draining – unless you really care about your webcomic.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂