Are You Being Too Harsh On Your Art? - How Crippling Self Criticism Leads To Selfishness

🎓 For more comic art tips, tricks and tutorials sign up to our email list, for FREE, at: www.howtodrawcomics.net/
Thumbnail art by David Finch.
It's often true that we're our own harshest critics when it comes to drawing. Of course we want our art to look amazing, which is why we raise the bar so high for ourselves.
But it's an arbitrary bar. A bar manifested by the fear of failure. We don't want our art to be rejected by the very audience we're gifting it to. We don't want to feel inadequate, or ineffective. For what would that say about us as artists? We'd be utter frauds, pretenders.
So we set the bar at an impossible height, so impossible that for us to meet it would mean the impossibility of failure - and unless we meet it our work shall be redone, again and again until it reaches that standard lest it ever see the light of day.
This pressure is paralyzing. And it makes us selfish. Selfish enough to hide our work from the world. To leave it undone. To trash it.
Selfish because our bar doesn't matter. It never did.
The audience only ever asked us to give them our best. Our best, regardless of where it's at. For our best work is the greatest gift we could ever give - the culmination of all our effort, all our learning and experience up until that point, poured into the next piece of art we create.
And we want to hide it? Bury it? Because it doesn't meet the bar for us? How ungrateful are we to look down upon the work we're capable of creating now, after coming so far?
The only way to grow as artists is to realize that we don't just create for ourselves, but for others too. And when we start to put the beholders of our art first, the insecurities, perceived shortcomings, and apprehension slips away - and finely our body of work is able to grow, and with it, our abilities.
That's what we'll be covering in this video.
If you enjoyed the video be sure to hit like, subscribe and ring the bell for notifications. Let me know in the comments below what topics and tutorials you'd like me to cover in future videos.
-Clayton

[@PeterGilmoreArt]

Learn from your mistakes, improve on your failings, do better next time.
Always be moving forwards.
It's how we grow as artists and hone our skills.