Discovering your Creative Process

There are two principles of the creative process I’ve always found to be true:

1. There are steps that happen in between the initial conception of a piece of art and the finished piece.

2. The piece you end up creating in reality is always one step removed from what you initially imagined it would be.

With these two principles in place, it’s safe to say that the creative process can be very, very frustrating. As artists, we start with a clearly defined goal, but the path to reaching that goal is nebulous, uncharted, and unmapped. There is no technical manual or instruction guide for your unique creative process. You can emulate other artists and you can take classes to learn techniques, but only you can forge the path that will result in your work being created.

PRACTICE"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - Scott Adams

The only way to map out your own unique creative process is to practice.

Your work is your guide. Your work is both your instructor and your teacher. Your creative process, like your thumbprint, is inherently, organically unique - it can never be replicated by another. There is no book or reference manual available for it. In order to figure out how to put what’s in your head onto paper, you will need to put in hours upon hours of experimentation.

It is an unfortunate fact, but most of your artwork has one function: to teach you how to make the small fraction of artwork that actually soars. One of the basic and most difficult lessons that every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential. X-rays of famous paintings reveal mistakes that even master artists made mistakes in the middle of their painting, only to be painted over.

You learn how to make your art only by making your art, and sadly a great many of the pieces along the way will never be considered finished. Masterpieces are few and far between, and they represent all the countless mistakes you’ve learned to avoid - all the countless hours you’ve devoted to your craft.

If you hold out to make the ‘perfect work’, you will never allow yourself to make the necessary errors which will act as your guidepost along the creative path. You have to be willing to make mistakes and be humble enough to create a large body of work that you are less than proud of.