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Striving for Improvement

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Improving your skills in art can seem daunting - where do you even begin? What mindset will get you the most out of your work? I feel I have nowhere near mastered animation yet, but every step forward feels exciting! Here are some tips I've had to develop and keep in mind to help push myself further:

1) Practice, practice, always practice unconditionally.
The more you do it, especially with purpose and knowledge of what you are improving, the better you will get regardless of talent. Always push yourself! It's important not only to know what you want to improve in your art, but also essential to growth in never being satisfied to sticking with what is easy. Even if you're not where you want to be, you'll become more comfortable with the tools used to make your art - this leads us to the next point...

2) Your tools are half of the battle in art.
Your mastery of tools is just as important as the concepts that make the art - if you can't wield a pencil, how will you be able to create the concept in your head? You want the act of creation to become second nature, and that only comes after struggling against the unfamiliar through practice.

3) Break down how and why it works. From there, you'll discover your own rules.
If you see something engaging in an artist's work, study it and figure out why it caught your attention. What attracted you to a part of the artist's work in the first place? Why does it work so well? How can you apply what they have done to your own art?

Discover beyond the surface why you like a particular artist's work - break down and discover at your core your own rules for why things look appealing and pleasing to you. Once you discover why you like a piece of art, rather than just being satisfied liking it, there is no limit to how you can apply the "why" to the rest of your workand better solidify who you are as an artist.

4) Keep Testing.
When building a style, most people run into artistic rules for what they find pleasing, and narrow their skills accordingly. However, "there's only one way to do this" as a mindset can be a dead end to growth. Test variations and completely new concepts in a million different ways, see for yourself if there are better ways to do them - if the new ways work better, they can be exciting to use! If they don't quite work as well, then you can go back to what you liked before and perhaps explore it from a different angle. Even with ideas that don't work, you at least gain that knowledge by testing them.

5) Push your boundaries.
Concentrating on a specific focus, especially in practice, can lead to improvement. However, refinement can only be achieved to the degree of the scope of the field by which a person engages in. If an artist practices drawing only shoes, they may soon become masterful at depicting a shoe's form and shape - but, this does not guarantee the same degree of perfection in drawing other objects besides shoes. The scope of the boundaries tested, by subject, expression, thought, study, and technique, determines the potential creative limits an artist can grow to in their craft.

6) As in any craft, there are patterns of guidelines but no set rules.
If it works, it works, and there is usually a solid principle behind a work that works, unconsciously perceived or not. However, just as there is always talk of breaking down art into grids, patterns and principles, we've all seen that a straight use of these rules can lead to a passable, but rather artistically self-referential and "flat" result.

All that can be depicted may have its own unique approach in creation. Separate works of art may require different mindsets and general rules, along with a few rules of your own, in order to achieve a satisfactory final result. Some of these rules come inherently from practice, as the "rules" an artist in question accumulates from discovery in refinement and often times trial-and-error exploration of a subject. Other rules come from other artists, at least some of whom have grown up with an approach to art much different than your own. They have found their own rules for what works and appeals to them in their craft according to strongly felt values and principles - and, most importantly, under their beliefs of what constitutes "good art."

7) Research - Study the best and those better than you.
Expose yourself to and study artists you know to be much greater than yourself, with those whose work you admire as the "impossible" standard to which you strive. Even if you don't want to work in a particular artist's style, if there is an aspect of their work which attracts you then it is worth breaking down and learning how they did it. If an artist has more appeal than you even if you do not admire their technique, then study what makes up their appeal - you can learn something from everyone. Even simple exposure to those works will make up the standard for you judge your own art.

Even deeper in studying those artists, where did the best take their inspiration from? How is this apparent in their own art? Art does not exist in a vacuum, and there are sure to be many, many other inspiring artists, living or otherwise, in museums or in obscurity, who have mastered or have been working to master their craft and have something to teach us. By drawing on these artists and their works, we can be sure to gain knowledge not only of what has been done, but what can be.

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