norcumi:

cuzosu-blog:

fierceawakening:

naamahdarling:

gingerhaze:

– false confidence goes a LONG way towards becoming actual confidence. 

– but this doesn’t mean being cocky and arrogant. Be open to criticism. Be self-aware.

– nothing will ever come out exactly the way you wanted it to. Just making it is reason enough to be proud. 

– the way you are now isn’t the way you’ll always be. You WILL grow, especially if you make the effort to do so. And by doing that, you’ll already be doing more than most people ever will. 

– it’s okay to suck. A bad drawing doesn’t define your worth, as an artist or a person. A bad drawing is still a drawing, and you still learned something from doing it.

– be honest with yourself about what you did right and ways in which you can improve. Don’t compare your progress to others. Their journey is theirs – yours is yours.

– no matter how insecure you are about your own art, learn how to say something nice about it, and don’t say “I know this sucks” in the caption. 

No, you don’t understand, this literally works.

It worked for me.

I realized that when I posted stuff I’d made, I would say a lot of shit like “ohhhh, I got this off-center” and “uhhh, I know that the texture is a little off” and “eh, I had trouble controlling the depth here and as a result I almost punched through the carving.”

And I realized how upset I would be if someone else pointed those things out about me in comments to my post.  And I thought to myself, then why am I saying this shit to me?

So I quit.  I just cold-turkey quit.  I would WRITE the criticisms I had and then delete them right before posting.  And I would make myself find the things about the piece that were actually good and I would point those out instead.

And at first it felt uncomfortable and raw and anxiety-inducing.

But after a while, I realized that I could acknowledge the things that I wanted to change and do not like privately, and didn’t have to air it to the world.  So I focused on articulating to myself and myself only what I could have done differently, and I did it in a positive way: “I learned not to use paint that was too thick.” “I learned that yellow doesn’t cover darker colors very well.”  “I learned that I need to wait longer between coats.” 

I learned.  I succeeded at learning.

Not “I failed.”

See, what I was doing when I audibly or in print criticized myself and said bad things was sort of softening the punch: if I said these things, then someone else couldn’t come along and make me look and feel stupid by pointing them out.

Joke’s on me.  I nearly always already knew where the flaws were.  All I was doing was drawing attention to the parts that were not successful.  I was hurting myself just as much as anyone else could.

So I just decided that I wouldn’t accept negativity or nonconstructive criticism. Not from others, not from myself.

And I started saying good things about my own work.

And I started feeling a lot better about it.

A lot.

I still get frustrated, and I still produce work I do not like.  At all.

Just, now I focus on what I learned, and if I still can’t figure out what I did wrong, I set it aside and I wait while I work on other things, and eventually I will advance enough that I realize where I took a wrong turn.

So pay equal attention to your good qualities, and to anything you can learn from your mistakes, do not draw attention to your mistakes because you will see those mean words every time you go back and look at the work you posted.  Work as much as you can, and know that by doing so, you are improving all the time, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

And yes, never ever compare yourself to others.  It’s okay to look at stuff and say “I like how they did X thing.  I would like my things to look like X thing in that particular way.  How can I go about doing that?”  Do not criticize yourself for not being as good as they are.

You are your own worst critic.  Try to set aside some time to be your own best cheerleader, too.  Find nice things to say to yourself.  Try very hard to do that every day.  

And never say anything to yourself that you would not say to a very dear friend who asked for help.  “I think this would have looked better with a warmer blue” is fine.  “This background fucking sucks” is not okay.  You would not say that to your friend.

And never treat yourself in any way that you wouldn’t treat a pet.  Your Artistic Process is a shy little thing that wants you to love it.  Desperately.  Criticizing it and using a mean tone of voice and telling it that it’s bad and did bad and is a bad Artistic Process, so bad, bad Art, BAD, doesn’t make it grow bigger and stronger.  It shrinks it down and makes it cry in the corner and that is very sad.  Praising it and saying nice things to it make it better.  You don’t train a puppy by beating it.  You train a puppy by cleaning up its puppy mistakes and praising it when it succeeds and showing it love when it fails but was trying hard.  Your inner artistic critter is the same.

And don’t tell yourself “I should be better than this, I should be BRAVE SOLDIER DOG, not puppy!”  We are all, every single one of us, puppies deep down inside.  Our artistic process SHOULD be like a puppy, a joyous happy thing, full of energy and potential.  And it can be, if you learn to be gentle and kind to yourself.

Good luck.  ❤

I am not going to claim universality here, but adopting the maxim “attempt to be as kind to yourself as you would be to someone else” vastly improved my mental health.

it didn’t solve everything magically, yes i’m on meds now, etc etc, but it really, really helped.

@norcumi, hope you see this. 🙂

❤ Thank you!

And yes. YES YES YES all of this. It took me a long time to learn
this, and it’s one of the most important tools I have. I have a
very loud Inner Critic – not just for my writing and my attempts to
dabble at art, but for everything (yay fucked up relationships. >_<).
One of the things that saves me is that I co-write a fuckton. If
anyone said stuff about my co-author(s) that I say about myself? I’d
punch that asshole and then block them so fast it’d leave a smoking
crater.

I’ve seen another bit of related advice floating around (can’t
find the direct link for the life of me right now, of course) that
helped me. If someone approaches you to tell you that they like a
thing, that’s no reason to tear it down. This is also true of your
own work. If you went up to your favorite author or artist, and
gushed how you love a particular work, and they sat you down and went
through all the things wrong with it
– that’s not cool. Don’t treat yourself that way either.

As folks said: it takes time, and it
feels very uncomfortable at first.

You are worth it, though.