Talk to yourself like an artist

I still don’t know how I do it.

Sometimes, the art comes out of my fingers without me even thinking.

Sometimes, I can spend hours, or even days agonizing about a project, or an idea, only to have it come out kind of… fine… but not particularly noteworthy.

I‘d rather be abysmal than not particularly noteworthy.

As an artist, I find that the process of coming up with the ideas for making the art is the hardest part of the art. What do I draw?

A kitten? A boat? A multi-volume epic graphic novel about the human condition that’s also beautiful and has lots of cool explosions?

The kitten, obviously. But what should I do next?

There are lots of books and classes about how to create art, and they are almost all full of lies. Not because they don’t teach you anything, but what they teach you is not how to make art. What they do teach you is how to draw. How to hold a pencil. How to make marks with a brush or pen. There does not exist (to my knowledge) any book about the weird, weird process of how to get the ideas. There isn’t a book, or a class for teaching you how to decide what the idea looks like. The ironic thing about this giant loophole in the whole of art production is that the ideas are the first step. People who are trying to learn how to draw often skip over the lesson of what to draw.

This is why your sketchbook is blank.

You might call it “creativity,” or even “composition,” (as a more tangible skill) but the process of figuring out what you are going to draw, and what you want it to look like is the hardest and scariest part of making art. It’s the longest part, too. It’s the part that makes people want to quit art forever. And the really odd thing is, even people who seem to be really successful at it can’t seem to explain it in any sort of satisfying way.

But, if you want to know what I do, I will tell you.

I talk to myself.

In lieu of any real artistic relationship, such as a mentor or an apprentice, I am forced to be both mentor and apprentice to myself. So I talk to myself. I tell myself what I am going to do. I explain my reasoning, while I work out the problem of art. When I don’t have any solid reasoning, I make it up. I don’t let the conversation die.

Incidentally, do you know what the difference is between solid artistic reasoning, and the made up type?

Neither do I.

So I sit, alone, in my space, and I talk, and I explain, and I think out loud, and I stop to convince my wife that I am not going crazy (sometimes through more made up reasoning), and I do it over and over until the problem is solved.

I’m my own editor too. When I sit down and try to work out what to do on paper, I make notes to myself, suggestions for corrections, and little messy drawings about what it should look like. “I’ll get it eventually,” I think to myself about myself.

And I do. So I was right all along. I was rather smart, it seems, to put my trust in me. As my own production, drafting, and editing team, I have less people to win over.

But the thing that has made the most successful art in my life is conversation and collaboration. I’m not about to let something a silly as having no one to talk to stop me from having a conversation.

The whole thing is crazy already anyway. The fact that I can create the things that I can create. I might as well act the part.