I only went to an art school once, for approximately 3 months before i gave up on it. I was in a terrible place back then. I hated my art, i hated myself. I phoned in every bit of work i did as i saw no value in anything i produced. Seemed the entire world was better at art than me and no matter the amount of practice or passion i put in, i would never reach above mediocrity.

One of the last projects i did then was a short comic, which i put very little effort in as usual. It was hardly more than scribbles. One teacher was trying to be nice, praising the less crappy aspects of my art. The other teacher took one look at my work, shook her head and said:


“You're squandering your potential.”


That sentence has stuck with me until today, almost 20 years later. My mind goes back to it whenever i see no point in trying to better myself.

I don't believe there is value in patting someone on the head just for the sake of propping up their ego. Sometimes the harshest critique is the most valuable. If it stings, then there is probably truth to it.

You don't say what kind of art school it was, but I'm guessing some kind of fine arts thing, not graphics? Having been through the fine arts system myself, I think this teacher is saying two things:

1) you have obvious talent (which is self evident) and the ability to develop it in whatever direction you choose.

2) Comics are not fit for your attention. This is a deep rooted, outdated prejudice, from a time when comics were popular entertainment, much more so than today. It's a deeply ingrained snobbery which is probably not as bad as it used to be, but ‘high art’ often comes with a superiority complex.

So as far as I can see, you have not only a skilled hand and eye, but also an open mind and this art advice was half valuable, while the other half needs to go in the bin.

(At art school I was accused of being ‘not visual’, of wearing an overcoat, of having ‘an air of regal equanimity’, of being ‘such a booby’ and of being a ‘dark horse’ for painting black subjects. Just a small selection and I'm not making them up.)

I had a pretty tangled youth in art told Inhad such talent and potential but I left it all behind in total disillusionment. I did squander my potential.
Went back and finished a degree in graphic arts when I was 38, a bit late and all I ended up with was doing webcomics as wrist and elbow pain destroyed destroyed any attempt at drawing and I had to invent a medium with my collection of action figures.
Do what you love and love what you do. Don't think of waste, just do what you love.

I personally have always been a firm believer in there being two kinds of people in the world: people with talent, and people with skill. And I've also always been a firm believer in that talent should be put to work, not sent to school. Talent comes naturally, people either have a talent for something, or they don't, it's not something you can learn to pick up, and the only way for natural talent to flourish and thrive is to put it to good use. Skill, on the other hand, is something that can be learned, improved, and strengthened, and if you're going into a field where skill is a requirement (say medicine, law enforcement, or anything like that for example), then yes, by all means, get yourself a thorough education to sharpen those skills so you can use them to the best of your ability.

I did a lot of art school back in the 90s :D
Ooooh a lot.
I had good advice and bad advice then.

It was a weird time in that back then representational art was basically like hardcorce violent porn to most art educators: something to forbid, hide away, be ashamed off. People who did representational art were troglyditic freaks.

The only place we could express ourselves freely was life drawing, and even then our skill was treated with suspicion by other students, like showing fire to cave-people XD

-20 years later I was invited to an art show at my old university where students were showing off their beautiful proudly representational art and talking about the new representational movement that's happening at the moment. With all sorts of comic and manga influences…
I felt such chagrin and grumpiness over that.
The stuff I was pilloried for doing back in the day, risked failing for it, DID fail for it, had to repeatedly justify… these people were being actively celebrated.
I dressed to show up the art in cheetah print flares, snake skin cowboy boots, a long red coat with velvet collar and big brass buttons, a silk scarf and a big fur hat. And I got lucky that nigh haha!

Anyway, a good piece of advice I had back in the 90s was while I was doing life drawing. My lecturer was a famous artist and an excellent drawer of figures. He took one look at my work and said grumpily that I should pick a harder angle because there's no point just doing pretty pictures of easy views, he said I was wasting my skills.
-it wasn't a compliment, it was advice aimed at telling me figure drawing isn't drawing good pics of the model, it's about learning to do what you can't do, or else why attend a class? You're not there to show off and preen, you're there to learn.

Draw what's hard?

So I shouldn't draw front facing OCs with both hands behind their back and emo hair covering one eye with the other eye super detailed, plus the pic is cut off around there characters thighs and they are inexplicably leaning to one side.,????

lothar wrote:
Draw what's hard?

Hahaha, not at all! Only if you're in a life drawing class.
Plus, only if you find that you're spending your time making good looking pics of the model because the pose is easy for you to draw.

So I shouldn't draw front facing OCs with both hands behind their back and emo hair covering one eye with the other eye super detailed, plus the pic is cut off around there characters thighs and they are inexplicably leaning to one side.,????

Nope. You should do all of that ^_^
It sounds awesome!

Ironscarf wrote:

2) Comics are not fit for your attention. This is a deep rooted, outdated prejudice, from a time when comics were popular entertainment, much more so than today. It's a deeply ingrained snobbery which is probably not as bad as it used to be, but ‘high art’ often comes with a superiority complex.

Unlikely, the harsh advice came from the comics teacher. xD (Not a fine arts school btw, lotsa teachers were counter-culture rebels themselves there.)

She really meant the lack of effort i clearly put on display back then. It was obvious i did not care, and if i didn't care about my art, why even try to draw anything?

TheJagged wrote:

Unlikely, the harsh advice came from the comics teacher.

Comics teacher? O brave new world, that has such people in it.

I went to a state university in the early 80s to study art. I was only interested in learning classical, illustrative art. But back then, post-modernist art was the only acceptable art form to pursue. Seeing a student stoop to the depths of actually dragging a brush across a canvas was anathema to the tenured professors. Getting into any of the advanced senior-level classes was by portfolio review only, and needless to say, I never got accepted to take any of them. So, the best advice about art that I got was from myself: “ignore those who tell you that you have no talent.”

“No, I don't want to take you up on your offer of free art. But you sure have an ”Interesting“ style.”

fallopiancrusader wrote:
I went to a state university in the early 80s to study art. I was only interested in learning classical, illustrative art. But back then, post-modernist art was the only acceptable art form to pursue. Seeing a student stoop to the depths of actually dragging a brush across a canvas was anathema to the tenured professors. Getting into any of the advanced senior-level classes was by portfolio review only, and needless to say, I never got accepted to take any of them. So, the best advice about art that I got was from myself: “ignore those who tell you that you have no talent.”

Same experience as you but in the 90s :D

That self advice is good but I'd go further: You don't need tertiary education in art, if you already know what you're doing you can learn it just as much on your own. The only thing tertiary art education is for is introducing you to new things and equipment you don't otherwise have access to, using their gear and equipment, qualifications, and making contacts with fellow students and lecturers.