Sunday Mailbag: Master of None?

Q: I’ve drawn my whole life. Pretty much everything I know is self taught. No one taught me how to “start to become an artist” step by step. I looked up stuff online or in books. I’m always learning to draw a variety of things, with a variety of different styles, and in a variety of different mediums. I know a lot but I’m not really a “master” at anything as an artist. I take on a lot of different things at once. Is that a bad approach to learning? Should I first study and “master” figure drawing, then portraits, then anatomy, then caricature, then landscapes, etc? Should I focus on one thing and put effort into learning one thing at a time? Or is it okay to learn multiple different things at the same time?

A: Of course there are different opinions on this sort of question, but in my opinion there is nothing wrong with experimenting and trying new mediums and approaches when you are developing as an artist. You’ll never know if there is a type of art or medium or approach that is “you” unless you keep on trying new things. Eventually you’ll find something that clicks with you, and that will become part of your identity as an artist.

I went to a small town Minnesota high school that had a correspondingly small and under-budgeted art department (the art teacher was also the school guidance counselor.) I would finish whatever project the class was working on in one or two classes and then sit around and do whatever else I wanted to while the rest of the class spent a week doing whatever it was we were doing. The teacher didn’t let me get away with doing nothing. He challenged me with special projects and required me to work in different medius I had never tried. He allowed the subject matter of my art to be something I was interested in, but I had to do the art in watercolor, or acrylics, or whatever. Sometimes I had to do something very realistically and sometimes I was able to do something very comic-book or cartoony. The point was to expose me to different mediums and different visual approaches. I look back at that now and am grateful he made me do that, rather than letting me draw Batman in a sketchbook over and over.

It wasn’t until I got a summer job doing caricatures after my first year of college that I realized I had found an art form that fit me very well. Up until then I had been doing art more geared toward commercial advertising or imagery for album covers. Experimenting around and applying for that summer job was a life changer for me.

You never know what you will stumble over that will resonate with you as an artist… you might just find your “calling”. In the meantime any kind of art you explore and work at only increases your skills and visual acuity. My only suggestion might be to give the fundamentals a little more attention than the style or finishing. A strong foundation in basic drawing skills like the human face and figure, perspective, etc. benefits you more than being able to render the hell out of something. A really well painted badly drawn figure is still a bad figure. You can work on the fundamentals while you still branch out and experiment with different mediums and styles though. They are not mutually exclusive.

The great thing about growing as an artist is that it is not a linear progression. You grow in fits and starts. Time spend behind a pencil or a paintbrush is never wasted time. You learn and grow with each drawing or painting. You never stop “learning to be an artist”.

Thanks to Jane Myers for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!