Ask HN: How to Become an Artist?

Sculpture? What kind of sculpture? Metal? What kind of metal sculpture? Painting? What medium? Acrylic? Oil? Water colour? What format? Portrait? Landscape? What scale? Larger than life? Tiny? What subject matter? Pop culture? Anatomical? Foudn objects? Action? Portraits? Humans? Pets? Farm animals? What level of realism? Abstract? Hyper real?

Art isn't one thing, it's a nest hierarchy of rabbit holes.

The best, well recognized artists are hyper specific.

Those other things you're talking about require marketing, nothing else. The thing being marketed is immaterial.

IMHO you're asking this question tells me you're likely lower on the obsessiveness and openness-to-experience scale. It's not a personal failing, it's more of a personality / constitution thing.

https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Openness_to_experience

My question though is, "Why?"

Personally I've seen more than a few friends in similar position (not already artists) exclaim their desire to take up a specific craft because they recently enjoyed a certain piece of art themselves. That's fine, that's great actually. But it's fading.

Art for art's sake is usually a compulsive and life long pursuit. Barring brain damage.

https://people.com/health/mary-steenburgen-brain-became-musi...

p.s. That 'brain damage' comment was supposed to be funny. Life as a creative isn't always easy. Especially if you have confounding personality aspects like high neuroticism or low conscientiousness. Here's a little less than an hour about it. If you're thinking about it it'll be more than worth your time to investigate yourself about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxGPe1jD-qY

Drawing forms in perspective is a large hurdle, and it is important if you want to work quickly on a variety of projects with little reference(a common need in professional illustration) but also not the defining thing of "drawing". The huge number of artists that define themselves in a completely flat style should signal as much.

I found it was more important in my studies to prioritize proportion. Proportion rules over and interacts with everything else - it is unavoidable, and there are many proportioning tricks and strategies out there. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is fine at guiding this basic principle. The other things can be done with a bit of reference and specific techniques:

If you understand the proportions correctly in an orthographic side, front and top view, you can already create character turnarounds: just rotate the top view in 2D and then draw guidelines downwards, and you have the horizontal location of everything after rotation, which can subsequently be matched with the vertical from front and side. It is a major labor to do this because you will most likely not have perfect proportions in your original views if you drew them from scratch, but the process itself is intuitive and accurate, and involves no cubes or cones.

Form in perspective is likewise mostly reducible to knowing the location of the horizon line and then informally distorting proportions according to the rule: "above horizon=looking up, below horizon=looking down". And then doing studies of the perpendicular cross-section to internalize the detailed form of real objects. Again, cubes and cones are not a priority. They are a method of simplifying, which helps when you aim towards arbitrary constructions from imagination, but the drawing assignments I've undertaken are achieved with most accuracy by starting from either using a maximum detail reference image to set proportions, or first working in orthographic views to simplify understanding.

The emphasis on primitives is primarily a yesteryear's art education phenomenon, because it was much, much harder to get accurate references then. Artists were known for possessing giant stacks of source material. We're in a world defined by digital processes, and the stacks are disappearing accordingly. You can easily tell the computer to make an accurate cube and then trace over that, and if you need more details you snap a quick photo on your camera. You can build up exactly the reference you need via photobashing. The process is a giant shortcut that doesn't give the same results, but when pushed hard to be stylized, it still leads back to the traditional skills of observation, and eventually to drawing cubes.

>The XY problem is a communication problem encountered in help desk and similar situations in which the person asking for help obscures the real issue, X, because instead of asking directly about issue X, they ask how to solve a secondary issue, Y, which they believe will allow them to resolve issue X on their own. However, resolving issue Y often does not resolve issue X, or is a poor way to resolve it, and the obscuring of the real issue and the introduction of the potentially strange secondary issue can lead to the person trying to help having unnecessary difficulties in communication and/or offering poor solutions.

Do you want to:

- Make art (express yourself, indulge in activities to create things that capture, or free, a part of yourself, etc.)

- Understand the system: production, promotion, prizes, dynamics, trends, notoriety, the business of art, communication, graph of influences, taxonomies and ontologies, history, etc.

- Have what you consider to be the life of people you consider "artists" (going to parties, being liked, being admired)

- (all of the above)

Which?