This can easily be applied to artists and forums as well, I think.

In other news, it’s slowly been dawning on me that my site’s theme needs improvement…

Don’t be dependent on others to validate what you do. Keep a sense of perspective, enjoy art, and beat failure with an attitude of humility and determination.

Greetings, my loyal followers!

I’m in the process of realizing something. I know people usually say “I’ve realized something”, but learning typically happens slow for me and I’ve come to recognize when something’s slowly sinking in.

What I’m talking about this time is art contests (sketchoholic, specifically), and forums. My city is not big on the arts, and there aren’t many opportunities to meet other artists in real life (there are some, admittedly, but being 100% politically correct takes too many words). Solution: The Internet! I’m REALLY into Internetting and posting my work on forums and in contests. If you want to become further involved in art, this is a great way to do it.

HOWEVER…

The Internet is a really big place. You wouldn’t believe it. I mean, you may feel that it’s a long way down the road to the art supply store, but that’s just peanuts to the Internet. The result is that it’s really easy to get lost in the crowd or simply overlooked because there are artists out there who are better than you. It pains me to write that, but it’s the truth. You go to forums, you enter contests, and without fail the best artists get the most attention. This led me to believe that comments and pageview statistics were a sort of unofficial way of determining whether or my artwork was good or not. There are problems with this way of thinking.

First, it’s really depressing. You just don’t get the attention that lets you know you’re doing well. It’s not about the attention, of course – if I’ve made what I consider to be my best work, I don’t feel the world really HAS to know (although I usually let them). If you’re making work to get attention, that means you’re working to please others and not yourself. The goal of getting more comments and pageviews was to help myself know that I was improving and keep myself motivated. Using this logic, I was routinely disappointed at seeing a work of art get no attention or votes in a contest.

Another disadvantage to this is that when you DO get comments, they are usually a very shallow reward. I’m not trying to degrade anything anyone’s said in a forum, but for the most part you will either get comments that say “very nice!” or “you need to improve X”. The first is unhelpful and usually unconvincing (you know your own level of talent), and the second doesn’t make you feel that you’ve improved.

So what’s the solution?

I’m not sure it makes sense, but I believe the solution is to readjust my perception of what forums and contests are really about, and what comments/votes/views really mean.

Art should be something that makes YOU happy. By that, I mean that you shouldn’t feel a need to validate what you do with others. To be sure, others are going to judge your work, and listening to them is one of the precious few ways to improve, but ultimately you have to have the determination to work by yourself and improve without the help of others.

With this in mind, forums, contests, and even blogs become tools for you to use to showcase your work and improve it – not crutches for you to feel dependent on and get depressed about when they don’t work out. COMMENTS mean that someone is giving you a pat on the back and wants you to keep at it. PAGEVIEWS means you got lucky and some combination of factors makes people want to view your stuff. It’s pretty much meaningless. VOTES in a contest are a little stickier, but I realized that even if you get as little as one vote, that vote could be from an art director and every other vote from novices. Someone thought you were good enough to win the entire contest – that’s an encouraging thought!

Am I contradicting myself a little here? Saying that something doesn’t matter and then it does? Maybe a little. Let me sum up:

Don’t be dependent on others to validate what you do. Keep a sense of perspective, enjoy art, and beat failure with an attitude of humility and determination.

There. I think that’s good enough that I should copy/paste it to the beginning of this post. Getting a feeling of deja-vu? It’s like time travel now, isn’t it?