It can take a while for your brain to switch into ‘artist-mode’ and notice all these things.
How to Make Art.
By randofo Homemade Robots! Follow
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About: My name is Randy and I am a Community Manager in these here parts. In a previous life I had founded and run the Instructables Design Studio (RIP) @ Autodesk’s Pier 9 Technology Center. I’m also the author of t… More About randofo »
Art-making is one of the easiest and most lucrative of human activities.
A finished work of art can be exchanged for many desirable things such as food, shelter, sex, fame and money (which in turn could be used to purchase food, shelter, sex and fame).
So, it is understandable that you might want to know how to make art.
In the steps that follow I will share the wealth of my knowledge.
Randy Sarafan is full of credentials. He is a virtual Fellow with the FAT (Free Art and Technology) Lab and was a Resident Artist in the R&D OpenLab at Eyebeam. His works have been in museums and galleries. For a number of years he has been the proud owner of an $80,000 art school education.
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Step 1: Justify Your Existence.
Before you can make art, you have to understand what art is.
A breif history:
Western art has a rich history, arguably dating back to ancient Greece. Of course, since visual artists historically have toiled with their hands, Greeks viewed painters and sculptors as we would today view cabinet makers; skilled laborers. In an attempt to get laid more, eat better and party with the Popes, artists in the renaissance reinterpreted the role of visual artists in antiquity to elevate their position in society. From here, western visual art was kind of like a snowball rolling down a hill of loosely packed snow. In short, it started an avalanch of rationalism that eventually landed upon abstract expressionism (think of a canvas painted white with a slash in it). Three hours later, when we finally dug Jackson Pollock out from under ten feet of packed snow, he was somehow still alive, but very pale and slightly braindead. We now called him Andy Warhol. He, along with a number of other avalanch survivors, created postmodern art. This lead Marshal McLuhan to proclaim:
“Art is anything that you can get away with.”
This will be our working definition of art.
I can attempt to justify this definition by going on and on about death of the grand narrative or by poorly paraphrasing “The Practice of Everyday Life,” but I’m not going to.
Remember, our goal is not to justify our definition of art itself, but to justify our creative (or non-creative) efforts as art. This is easy to do because “Art is anything you can get away with.”
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Step 2: Getting Away With It.
How do I get away with it?
This is the easiest part! If more people understood this, we would all be artists!
To get away with it, all you need to do is:
1) Tell people it’s art with a straight face. Never let on otherwise.
2) Determine some sort of theoretical basis and/or historical context for the creation of your work. If anyone ever question’s the integrity of your work, quickly refer to its theoretical basis (no matter how silly or ill-informed it may be).
3) Context! Context! Context! Remember, a shovel in a museum is priceless. A shovel in your garage is a shovel. unless.
4) You tell people that the shovel in your garage is a priceless work art and act accordingly. It’s important to always be self-righteous and hold your ground.
5) (optional) It always helps to make something utterly useless outside of its own creation. If your art starts having some sort of social use-value or benefit, then people will have trouble believing its art and not something more practical, such as, for instance, a shovel.
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May 8 How to create a Drawing or Painting in 9 simple Steps
Following a tried and tested workflow to create a piece of art can be immensely helpful and a huge time saver for hobby artists and professionals alike.
It sounds restricting, but having your own set process will actually give you more scope for creativity, and lead to better results.
Especially beginners often have trouble working out what to do first when starting a new drawing or painting. They end up trying to do too many things at once and completely overlooking others.
You can find a free one-page summary of this article to print out at home on my Buy Me a Coffee page.
What is this workflow for?
This workflow, from observation to the finished piece, can be used for any work of art that isn’t a quick practice sketch. Even then, a lot of these steps still apply and can give you a better outcome if you take a few extra seconds to go through them.
It’s based on a very simple principle. The process of making art involves a lot more than just applying pigment to paper, no matter how skilfully. The head plays as important a role as the hands; and it should start working long before your fingers.
First, you should just observe your subject. Then you’ll want to think about how to draw it, and only after that should you start setting down the basic shapes onto paper.
Or, as professional sketching artist Ch’ng Kiah Kiean would say: “See, think, draw”.
These steps will work well for drawing or painting anything you see in front of you, be it a basket of fruit, a landscape, or a person.
But they’re also incredibly useful when you’re working strictly from your imagination. Just that, of course, in this case the ‘seeing’ part happens inside your head.
If you are looking for some extra advice on how to work with specific subjects, I have written some supplementary articles. 6 Easy Steps to Draw a captivating Still Life and 8 simple Steps to Draw interesting Streets and Buildings are an excellent addition to this post.
For the process of making art, your head should start working long before your hands.
I have divided the workflow into nine Steps, that I hope you’ll find helpful. Some of these steps might take only a few seconds, or they might take quite a while. It depends on your level of experience, your preferred way of working, and how elaborate your composition is meant to be.
1 Take it in
One of the most common mistakes in making art is to take up the pencils or brushes the second you find an interesting subject.
Instead, before you even think about making the first stroke, give yourself a moment to take in the entire scene, not just your subject itself.
Try to feel, rather than see. You don’t want to draw a house, but the effect of that house on you.
It’s super helpful to try and describe the scene in a few words. Adjectives, such as ‘smooth’, ‘calm’ or ‘gloomy’ work particularly well.
Your lines and strokes should transmit this feeling, so what you draw is as important as how you draw it. If you want to convey a feeling to the viewer, you’re going to need to do more than just faithfully copy the subject.
Try to feel, rather than see. How does the scene make you feel? Calm? Excited? Anxious?
Concentrate on your other senses as well, especially when you’re drawing outdoors. What are the sounds that surround you? How about the smells? If you’re drawing from a photograph, try to imagine all of these.
The simple process of taking in the scene and letting your hand be guided by your senses will flow into your work and make it all the better.
