“My art is better than your art.” My Art, Le Tigre

Flip that sentiment on its side and you’ve got what seems to be a popular sentiment (Your art is better than my art) in the art and craft community. The industry spends a lot of time making artists and crafts people feel that their art is inferior to what the industry is pumping out, leaving you with the feeling that you MUST have this new shiny tool.

I call it magic-bullet syndrome- you can’t conquer your inferior art without it and you are constantly on a search for it. You have no idea what your magic-bullet will be but you keep searching for it.

Here’s my take on it, tune the industry out.

All this stuff is perception. My art isn’t better than your art. Your art is just fine. Your art is a reflection of  you. You need to set goals for yourself and then strive to achieve them. I wanted to draw faces better, so I set a goal that by the end of the year I’d be able to draw and paint faces better. I set about doing this by practicing. (if you look at my flickr you can see my progression.) I put time in at my easel and with my art journal and I practiced. I enlisted people on FaceBook to send me images of their face. Then I drew them and I painted them.

In the end I didn’t need any fancy tools- simply paper and pencils, later gesso and acrylics and watercolors, and lots and lots of practice.

My point is that I didn’t need a magic-bullet and here’s a secret, neither do you. What you need to do is sit down with your materials and experiment, see what they can do, and what YOU can do with them.

You can make art with anything. Van Gogh cut his own pens out of reeds. Picasso and other artists drew by dipping a stick into ink. The truth is you don’t need all the fancy stuff, sometimes a stick will do.

There is no shortcut. The only way to get to your version of better is to practice and to experiment. Fill up art journals, draw, doodle, paint, and collage.

Enjoy the stuff you have.

I realized I promised you more cult of stuff ranting and raving… However I forgot that I had a family obligation to attend to and if I had bowed out by saying, "I have  ablog post burning my brain." I'd have been looked at dissapprovingly and told to get my ass in the car. So I give you, ART!

As an artist I know the value of having plenty of my materials at hand. There is nothing worse than having to worry about conserving paint because I’m almost out of that indigo blue I adore. It’s also difficult to know the cost of the materials I use. Some of the paint I’ve got cost $20 for a 15ml tube! I spent much of my time in college worrying about the cost of my materials and thus attempting to work small or lean so that I wouldn’t have to worry about buying another tube of whatever color I may run out of. My final project for painting 101, for which I was required to work big, I decided to work in a sepia tone, because I had the most of those colors. This annoyed the crap out of my professor.

If I could go back and do it over again I’d have bought tubes of Liquitex Basics, despite my professor’s sneers toward student grade paints. I’d have felt much more comfortable and free had I not had to worry about replacing $20 tubes of paint.

It’s part of the reason I preach “buy the best you can afford now, upgrade later.” I’d have been better off in college buying better brushes than splurging on the pricey paints. I’d have made better art too.

We’re all after the magic bullet; that special brush, watercolor set, color of paint, stencil, rubberstamp or glue that will propel our art into perceived territory of amazing. WE see what our friends make and compare, usually unfairly. We see them using a particular pen, or ink, or cutter and suddenly we think, “My art could be better if I HAD that particular tool.” We watch some YouTube videos on that product and soon enough we’re convinced, “MY art WOULD be better if I only had that tool.” We buy into the hype. Then we buy it and it sits gathering dust in a corner of our art room and soon enough we’re regretting the purchase. We forget that regret as we get onto the hunt for the next new product.

In the end we feed the machine and our guilt. Eventually the guilt is deep enough that we can’t even go into our art room because we’re reminded of the hundreds (thousands) of dollars we spent accumulating our stuff.

The reality is, if we learned better to use our current stash of stuff we'd be less insecure when we look at art on the interent, Ustream and blogs. Knowledge of our tools is what makes us more secure. Knowledge is security.

Knowing what you can and can't do with the tools is the first tool in the arsenal against the cult of stuff.

I have a rule that I need to use anything new in experiments. I have to learn how to use it to the best of my abilities. It's why anytime I buy a new color of paint I test it out on a page of it's own in my journal. I make blobs and lines, little squiggles. I try and mix it with other colors to see what colors I get. I see if I can add it to the tools I have. Sometimes It doesn't make it and sometimes a new color is magical.

When I was a kid I loved coloring. I never liked to color things the colors they were supposed to be. In my mind a horse could be blue and Smurfette could be green. I didn’t care if the colors stayed in the lines. The blue horse could fill the whole landscape if I wanted it to, she could blend in thewith the sky. In my head it was all good. When I was in 3^rd or 4^th grade the teachers started to praise another girl in my class for having perfectly colored in horses and smurfs. Her smurfs were the right shade of blue, from the 96 crayon set and the colors never went outside the lines. They were perfect. The teachers started asking me, “Don’t you want your smurfs to look just like hers?”

Well, no, I didn’t.

But she got all this praise for getting all the colors to stay in the lines. What I wanted as an 8 year old was for the adults to heap praise on me like they did with her. I watched her one day to see how she did it. She carefully outlined her coloring book with perfectly sharpened crayons, her little tongue sticking out from her mouth in deep concentration, she slowly and carefully shaded in the panels of color using the side of her crayon and carefully rotating it to keep the point shaped well.

I followed suit. I wanted the teacher to be impressed with my smurf. I concentrated hard and did everything she did, and my smurf kinda looked like hers. I used the wrong shade of blue because I only had the 48 color set and the regular blue had been worn down to a nub from making horses that blended in with the sky.

The girl came over and took a look at my smurf and said, “That’s pretty good but you went outside the line right there.” While pointing to a miniscule speck where I’d gone outside the lines. I probably spent the rest of that school year attempting to color in perfect smurfs rather than just making what I liked.

Are we all trying to make the perfect colored smurf by following instructions exactly?
Why are we so afraid of doing our own thing?
How can we unlock our creativity?

I have an exercise that I do when I’m feeling blocked and it helps unlock my creativity. I call it automatic continuous line drawing. The only rules are that you don’t lift your pen, it has to be done in pen and lines can not be erased.

Put the pen to the paper and make lines. You can make a drawing of something or nothing. Random shapes are cool. I tend to start with a face I work my way out from an eye, nose or mouth and build up  a lot of thin black lines until I feel like I’m done.

I’ve filled up entire sketchbooks with these drawings.

Sometimes I leave them black and white and sometimes I add washes of watercolor. I’ve drawn them on board and added layers of gouache or acrylic. Marker, crayon, or colored pencils would work too.

Line and color. These wake my brain up.

The best thing is, this exercise that completely wakes up creativity only needs a pen, a journal, me and maybe some color.

These drawings are my anti-smurf. A complete rejection of coloring inside the lines. I MAKE these lines. I apply color where I want, wet blue watercolor mergine with damp red watercolor creating a mingling of color that would have made my 3^rd grade teacher question why I’d do such a thing and wonder what was wrong with my eyes, mental faculties and question if my hand-eye coordination was off. What she’d fail to see is that these little drawings are escape and awakening. They are my brain on creativity.

These drawings represent a way for me to step away from the teaching of conformity and feeling that I must do this just so.

I want to know, what do you do to break free?

People have been making art for thousands of years. The earliest cave dwellers attempted to document their lives. Simple pigments were spit onto the wall or they applied them with sticks and twigs, these were the tools people used to document the hunt.

The first art journals were on the cave walls.

I am not attempting to create a divide between art journalers and scrapbookers, nor a turf war. (Get off mah lawn!) I think we can all coexist peacefully with our different manners of expression, and overlapping expression.

What I do think is that we need to look at the stuff we’ve accumulated and see how we can better fit these tools into what we do in our art journals.

How can we use them more?
How can we adapt them?
How can we break the rules?
How can we use the tools to express ourselves more fully?

This is the essence of the cult of stuff.

Take what we’ve got and experiment with it.

Rising up against the machine of the industry aimed at our wallets. Or really just being aware of how we are targeted to buy more. Everyone wants to buy their latest product. Machines like the Cricut (here goes any chance of EVER being sponsored by provocraft) are crippled for use outside of their very narrow set of rules. To use them you HAVE to use their carts with their designs and they give you a set of instructions for how to put it all together. Rather than giving you a program like Makes-the-Cut which unlocks the real potential of the cricut. With it you can cut and create anything you want. You can make layers in a photo and cut that out. Amazing.

But it makes more fiscal sense for provocraft to have you buy cart from them at $40 each. That doesn’t open up your creativity. They help you some with a $30 (or is it more) program that allows you to mix up the stuff on their carts, which you still have to buy.

Then some brilliant people figure out how to crack it and give up programs like Make-the-Cut and Sure Cuts A Lot and really unlock the potential of the machine.

Meaning that you can break the rules.

Sometimes being aware of the difference in want and need. I might want that 2 inch circle hole punch but do I need it? Well, if I need to cut out 200 2 inch circles maybe, but if I’m going to cut out 5 2 inch circles maybe I should consider an alternative, like an exacto, scissors, or a click knife.

Do I need that shiny brass bijoux watercolor set or is my handmade mint tin set just as efficient and useful?

Some of the adaptation has been a lesson in letting go. Some were hard learned during those first few years right after college when I truly lived paycheck to paycheck. I survived by buying cases of ramen noddles ($5 for 24) and my fresh veggies off the “almost rotten” rack. I’d save a few dollars here and there and splurge once a month on a tube of watercolors or a pen. Sharpies would go missing at work. I drew in ballpoint.

My point is that I had to lean to let go of my notion that I needed the best and the most expensive artist grade paints.

I had to unlearn a lot of what I had learned. I did this by breaking a lot of rules. I learned to live my life.

I used scotch tape in my art journal.

I walked in Boston at 1 AM with hot pink hair and my good friend with bright blue hair, because we had nothing better to do that night and Boston at 2 am is beautiful. (It’s also incredibly stupid and dangerous, so kids don’t follow my path.) I documented the smells of Chinatown in August (yuck), the heat of Lynn at 1pm in July, the sound of firecrackers on July 4th, and how much my neighbors fought. Our lives aren't cookie cutter identical. Each one is unique.

I taped in bits and pieces of my life until it became whole and manageable and real.

Over time with hard work I’ve learned who I am and I’m still progressing.

So when I see corporations targeting art journaling and the journalers I get a little grumbly. Because I know you don’t need all that shiny stuff they want you to buy.

You need a journal, a pen, some glue/tape and you.

What you don’t need are rules.

You don’t need the trap of all the stuff holding you down and slick clever marketing campaigns targeting you to buy more and do less.

You need to be free of your stuff and the preconceived notions of what your art journal should look like.

Because it doesn’t have to look like anything but what you want.

The cult of stuff posts have really spured a ton of conversation, read what others are saying:

Eveline

DaisyYellow

PeonyBlue

Zom

O-Kami

UK Scrapper's Forum

And more to come!