How I became an artist

https://medium.com/@noahbradley/how-i-became-an-artist-4390c6b6656c

by noahbradley • 11 years ago

437 106 11 years ago

kumarski• 11 years ago

Love this. Well done.

Awesome post! Very useful to have the inside scoop. There was a recent posting on "Ask HN" about pressure to quickly succeed. The exact quote was "I'm 22 and I feel if I don't hit it big within the next 2 years I probably won't". [1, 2] Success is a slow road, as this post so nicely illustrates, you need to constantly be putting in the hours! It's easy to browse HN/startup eco-system and only see the career highlight reels and think: "jeez, I will never be successful", or "Man, how did they get to this point person, must just be a natural", or "I can never be like that". But, this behind the scenes view shows you what success looks like on a day-to-day basis (hard work + passion + education + tons of practice + over many many years). What is funny, is that we often only see the end result, and just assume it was an overnight success.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837493

[2] sorry to use this as an example, but looks like new account / throwaway

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

Exactly this.

As an artist, I constantly have people stumble across my recent work and exclaim how much they like it. That's awesome! It makes me feel so good. But they see that without the context of the years that came before it. They don't understand the struggles that lead to that piece.

So this article was all about providing some of that context.

myth_buster• 11 years ago

Thanks for the perspective and this incredible article. It's quite motivating and I love how you use the light (being a photographer I think it's easier for me to see) and the details/texture.

Going through the article, I felt two transitions: a. Where you did portraiture with landscape background, b. where you did the imaginative landscapes

   would do imaginative sketches of landscapes

The place where the article really connected/resonated with me was:

  But then I started getting annoyed. I got annoyed with how students are taught 
  and with how art schools take advantage of eager young art students. 
  I saw too many of my peers taken advantage of. They charge tens or hundreds 
  of thousands of dollars and give very little in return.

  So for one thing, I wrote that angry rant that a few of you might have read.

  In 2013, I started Art Camp.

What you are doing is incredible and it's nice to see your passion being cohesively molded into a purpose which helps you to give back.

Kudos!

thenomad3• 11 years ago

REALLY good piece.

The bit that stood out to me in particular was his embrace of deliberate practice. It's been identified in studies as the most powerful tool for learning skills like this - good to see it born out in at least one practical example too.

bryang2• 11 years ago

One of the things I'm pretty jealous of is that in my career path (as admittedly vague it is... I'm 25 and my education & experience is in marketing, but being a CMO certainly isn't my life's ambition) is that I couldn't really start young and produce a tangible good that's worth anything to jump start a career since Marketing is really all about numbers. Anything without results is just speculation. (Nice job cross posting across the internet, btw)

I'm not a programmer, so I can't build an app... I'm certainly not an artist and can't paint or sing... Although I like carpentry and ok at it, I don't want to be a carpenter... So for me, being successful and earning a decent wage is either from climbing the corporate ladder or building my own company. Both are possible, but talent is really not much of a factor.

Anyways, the point I'm getting at is that it's impressive and inspiring to see talented people (like yourself) with artistic skill-sets and ambitions put the hard work in to get their inherent skillsets noticed and make a career for themselves.

Talent doesn't get you everywhere - and neither will hard work - but together they can do great things.

nedwin2• 11 years ago

I'm not so sure about that.

As a product manager I wish I had spent more time on either learning to program or preferably designing interfaces for product ideas that I had. I did some of this stuff but not as much as I now realise I could have.

As a CMO the best evidence of your skills is in marketing a product of any kind. It could be a blog or product that you've created yourself, or pro bono work for someone else.

None of this is to downplay the chops of this artist - it really is amazing.

bryang2• 11 years ago

I guess I could clarify that what I'm talking about is the time it takes for skills to become apparent and credible. I'm not saying Noah's first works were Old Master level[1] or that they even are now, but clearly you can look at them and say "Kids got talent and has made tangible improvements."

Sure, I can start a blog talking about social media marketing, but basically it's starting from absolute zero - whereas Noah even early at his earliest started from a place a bit higher. For me to start a blog and say unique things about marketing that haven't been said before and then get that noticed... I consider myself to be smart, but I don't know if I'm on that level.

And sure, like you and I both said, I can build a product (I'm trying as we speak like everyone else is on HN) to develop my marketing skills, but then lets face it... if it's actually worth doing, my job isn't going to be primarily about marketing; it will be about leading a team, building a great product, and yes a bit of marketing.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Master

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

I don't, nor have I ever, considered myself particularly talented. At best, I would say I have the drive to force myself to practice. To say things came easily to me is an outright lie.

Hard work, persistence, and luck. Stir and serve chilled.

dieg0• 11 years ago

Awesome work. Would love to see the path that follows. Cheers

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

You and me both.

leafo• 11 years ago

I'm also on quest to become an artist, I created a site for keeping up consistent drawing streak (although I'm struggling at the moment).

The site is for anyone to use and we have quite a few artists using it already: https://streak.club/s/8/daily-art-2015

Here's a post I wrote talking a little more about the site: http://leafo.net/posts/introducing_streakclub.html

anilgulecha• 11 years ago

Big fan of your work leafo. Moonscript/Lapis/streak/etc. An inspiration.. :)

sktrdie• 11 years ago

This is great and you're of great inspiration to young artists or simply anybody that wants to pursue their dreams.

I think that living a humble life doing simple things that don't necessarily lead to professional success, is still a very noble lifestyle. The pressure society has brought upon us to follow our dreams, simply because it's nice to follow your dreams, is a bit of a pipe dream.

What I'm trying to say is that success isn't objective, it cannot be measured with the amounts of projects you've built, or with the amounts of professional artworks you've produced. Success is being happy about the simple things in life, whether these are output of your work (art, code, music, etc.) or experiences you've had in life.

tjradcliffe2• 11 years ago

The one objective measure of success in art is mastery of technique, which is something the kind of dedication and practice he has done can produced. A mature artist of any kind should be able to deliberately set out to create a particular effect or experience for their audience, and create a work that has that effect or produces that experience.

This is a reasonable goal for artists to pursue, because it's one that only really depends on them, and they are unlikely to be successful by any other measure without it.

hiou• 11 years ago

I could not disagree more. What you are describing is craft and not art. Not to say that one is in any way better or more valuable, only that once something has a firm set of "particular effects or experiences" it have moved on from art and into the world of craft.

superuser22• 11 years ago

I'm not sure this is true. You can be happy with work that anyone skilled in the art thinks is terrible, i.e. maybe you're really proud of your $REGISTER_GLOBALS dependent, SQLi-vulnerable, spaghetti PHP app. Maybe you're really happy with your scientific paper that the peer review community has ripped to shreds as false. Or you really, really like the novel you wrote, despite well-articulated and uniformly scathing takedowns from editors, English professors, literary critics, etc.

Or, conversely, you're a perfectionist and kicking yourself over the single calculation mistake in an otherwise field-defining paper, masterful performance, etc.

When you participate in a craft, there are measures and standards of quality orthogonal to your emotions, and they matter a great deal in determining whether a work is successful.

xyzzy123• 11 years ago

And on the other hand, there's Wordpress.

hemdawgz3• 11 years ago

What I think OP was saying was that the success of /an individual/, not the work he puts out, is not objective. There are certainly objective standards of quality for the work an individual creates. I think OP's point was that even a person who's put out nothing but unsuccessful work is a successful person if he is happy with it.

thenomad3• 11 years ago

"Or you really, really like the novel you wrote, despite well-articulated and uniformly scathing takedowns from editors, English professors, literary critics, etc."

This description != a worthless piece of art.

E.L. James is probably the most obvious recent example of someone who is almost universally decried by the above professions, but still writes something that at the very least is enjoyed by a lot of people. However, there are dozens of - often very successful and much-beloved - writers who fit the same description.

Defining quality in art is a very, very difficult proposition.

On a side note, there are plenty of dreadfully-written, insecure, $register_globals - dependent PHP apps out there solving real problems for real people.

tjradcliffe2• 11 years ago

The best thing about this piece is the rationality of his decision-making: didn't get a scholarship so take a year off to get better. School was getting too expensive so find a cheaper way to go. Need to pay off student loans so move back in with parents. These are excellent artistic decisions, because they allowed him to practice his craft and never take his eyes off his goal, yet didn't wed him to any particular path forward.

He treated high costs as damage and routed his career around them.

This lesson is as true in business as it is in art: always look for cheaper, more efficient, yet still effective alternatives. Productivity is output/input, and when the output (commercial success, in his case) is a very noisy function of many factors you don't control, figuring out how to minimize input costs while keeping P(success) as high as possible is the key to making good choices. He showed creativity and pragmatism as well as dedication.

Also: failure is always an option (I say this as someone who has failed more often than he has succeeded in his major life goals, although the successes have been more than worth the effort.) Hard work and talent are necessary but not sufficient conditions for success. Maybe there is no audience for the kind of art you love (I'm a formal poet, and have more-or-less made my peace with this.) So make sure you're doing it for love, not money. If the money is there, you've won the lottery, but regardless of that aspect of it, making the art you love, and putting in the hours and deliberate practice to get better at your craft, is worth it.

tomcam• 11 years ago

I was going to write this post, but you did it better. I think for anyone to get substantially better than average they need not just to work effectively, but to self assess honestly and make regular course corrections.

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

Thanks so much. I'd chock that up to a mix of luck, the influence of watching my dad run his own successful small business since I was born, and all of the business books I read on my own throughout college.

melling• 11 years ago

My goal is to simply to become a good designer so I can design more inspired apps. This Quora answer by Karen on how to become a designer without going to design school contains a lot of useful information, if that's also your goal.

http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-get-a-job-as-a-designer-with...

kendallpark• 11 years ago

I love this. I'm a hobby artist myself (though I've never wanted to make a career out of it). It's great to know that people can still succeed in a career that is common prefixed with "starving." I also love to see the artistic progression of a youth to a professional. It's a fascinating visual journey.

A great takeaway is how he offered free prints during his Illuxcon convention. I rarely see artists (even amateurs) doing this at conventions. I imagine this accelerated his success as his free prints were probably hanging on the wall in various art directors' offices.

pault• 11 years ago

If you haven't already seen this thread on conceptart, it follows an artist's progress over ten years from crude sketches to masterful portraits. Very inspiring! http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php/870-Journey-...

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

Bingo. I could have made a few dollars off of selling prints or spent a few hundreds dollars and had everyone there talking about them and taking them home. That was worth a lot more to me.

kbv• 11 years ago

OP please add an nsfw tag ..

zzkt• 11 years ago

your workplace isn't safe for art?

pavlov• 11 years ago

Fantasy landscapes are known to cause daydreaming, which irritates middle managers.

budu3• 11 years ago

I presume that he's talking about the nude sketches.

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

If that's NSFW where you work then you probably should simply avoid browsing the web.

irl_zebra• 11 years ago

I really enjoyed this piece. I don't connect with the artsy side of my brain too often and didn't think I would enjoy your piece, but definitely the best and most interesting thing I've read all day! (currently now reading your "Don't Go to Art School" piece).

ak392• 11 years ago

And this, dear friends, is how Noah Bradley actually became a writer!

What an excellent piece. I am reading this to my kids.

prawn• 11 years ago

Great idea. Going to show it to my toddler. See if it inspires him to draw.

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

I do my best. :)

Hope they're inspired! Give 'em plenty of art supplies!

ak392• 11 years ago

I will, I will!

I want to read your story to my eldest, 16 years old, who says he is struggling to find what he really wants to do with his life (career choices etc). He is a good kid. The truth is, I am going to read that story again mostly for me too.

I didn't know at 16 what I wanted from my life either ... but I spent a good decade in my 20s "going with the flow", rudderless. I wish I had been more awake to my possibilities then. I don't regret those years completely, I became a father when I had him in those years. But ... it would have been nice to be told that your brain's plasticity is more forgiving earlier than later. :-)

You keep painting. And loving it.

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

What an incredible journey, and what a tremendous amount of hard work.

mvazquez• 11 years ago

Incredible Journey, Well done. (y)

ninjakeyboard• 11 years ago

That was super - really - thanks for writing this.

mari_says3• 11 years ago

It's good. I'd try to avoid a bit more the emotional aesthetization. That would fit more in painting that lacks technique, but you paint too good for that. Make it more rough. Don't mean to know more than you of course but a good trick is to try to paint humans as if they were landscapes. no it's as if you don't leave anything outside of the painting, for the viewer to fill... Only my opinion do.

contingencies• 11 years ago

Great story. I particularly liked the move to the other side of the world part. If you guys want some time off from Australia come visit southwest China. Great community with lots of artists from around the world, recently described by one of the interviewees in the social documentary I am shooting as "like Paris in the 1920s".

mjfl• 11 years ago

Wow, these are amazing and beautiful.

gbog4• 11 years ago

Most comments seems positive here, nice. I'm a bit less enthusiastic. A twenty-so young boy has no lesson to teach. He can't be an artist because artists are either over fifty or dead, no matter how many times he'll repeat the mantra. One does not choose art among other professional activities: a very few men or women are chosen to become artists and they will be no matter what else they try to do.

Also being an artist is a curse. In just finished reading the trial by Kafka for the fourth time: it must have been extremely painful and hard to write such a deep novel. I wouldn't wish having this curse even on my worst enemy. Normal people far very much being an "artist" and they are right, as bring one means having the most miserable life, no sane relationships with other people, and if success is there you get paranoia.

Even worse is a young guy who knows nothing about that and says "me too! I want to be an Artist!". Just like those fools willing to become soldiers in 1914...

sombremesa• 11 years ago

I think your message is steeped in negativity and what little of value there is is lost. Suppose you had the most important message in the world - we would all still downvote you when you put it like that.

Now suppose that OP has the least meaningful message in the world - however, it is steeped in positivity.

If nothing else, let this be a lesson in how much your attitude matters.

gbog4• 11 years ago

So something useless and positive wins over something useful but negative?

You'd kept slaves in slavery with this powerful reasoning.

mari_says3• 11 years ago

The problem is that art is what a system of galleries and museums establishes as art work. How unfair or not this is I might agree. But artist is not a condition that you can claim. I agree that there is a bit of arrogance, which is a psicological condition that is very tipical in artists, so it should be no problem. The problem is that in this case this work is not only outside the institution but also outside the discourse of art. I'd like to know what message you read here. As someone that has been tought to look at works of art since I have memory I tell you that the only message implied in these pieces is the inner world of the author. I respect it but art is a metadiscourse, art is always about art, or at least provides a means to refer to art history. It can be about literature, take a look at Lovecraft or Allan Moore. Those are artists. The technique is good, even impressive but dificultness is not needed in art. Museums would be filled of ships constructed inside bottles and they are not. So I understand this negativity because it's not only arrogant to claim to be an artist at the age of 20, but to claim it without having been interested yourself in art history much. Art is not about artists, that is some romantic stuff we've been told from 1800 and stoped working 50 years later, until the new media started emphasizing in personalities so insistently. So of course attitude is really important, but I think the one showing the wrong attitude here is the one claiming to be artist. There is nothing wrong in not being an artist.

ryan-allen3• 11 years ago

I don't know why this comment is being downvoted, do we downvote on differences of sentiment now on HN?

smtddr• 11 years ago

>A twenty-so young boy has no lesson to teach.

That indefensible statement alone is enough reason for a downvote, imho.

vacri6• 11 years ago

"No TRUE Scotsman..."

lectrick2• 11 years ago

No True Scotsman fallacy. Pessimistic bitterness. Is insane enough to read Kafka fucking four times. Appeal to some ominous nameless oppressive judgmental force in order to discourage (perhaps this was informed by all that Kafka reading). Is obsessed with nihilism. Spreads negativity unnecessarily, which does not help anything. Senseless comparison to optimistic soldiers entering a warfront... Getting rejected by art directors until you're successful is not the same as killing "enemies" in cold blood, I'm sorry.

All of that and more in a mere 3 short paragraphs.

How did you NOT see why it was downvoted?

lectrick2• 11 years ago

In just finished reading the trial by Kafka for the fourth time

Well, if you weren't bitter and depressed enough after the 1st time, having 4 readings under your belt would go a ways towards explaining the nihilist pessimistic emptiness of your post. When you're done staring into the abyss, the actual meaning that we all have the opportunity to elect to participate in (and which young people still rightfully believe in, stop trying to extinguish it) will still be waiting.

methodover• 11 years ago

I'm totally blown away by your art, Noah. It's wonderful.

I have a question for you, if you'd be willing to entertain it: As your own art has improved, would you say that your own imagination has improved as well?

For me, I'm interested in a few things that aren't [strictly] visual art -- creating video games and writing stories -- but I often find myself having trouble fully visualizing the ideas that bubble up from my imagination. For example, I might have a story that involves a futuristic space ship, but I can only retain a shadow of its image in my mind's eye. The general shapes might be there, and a few details, but it's a far cry from the rich detail that I can conjure up of, say, my home growing up.

One idea I've considered, as a means of sharpening my imagination, is getting into sketching or painting. Perhaps learning the techniques of putting imagination to paper will make my imagination all that much sharper, more vibrant, more real. Would you say that there's any merit to that line of thinking?

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

Absolutely.

One of my greatest fears around the time I was beginning to take this seriously was that I simply wasn't creative enough. I didn't know what to paint. But I found that as both my technical abilities expanded, I was also expanding the person I was and the things I was exposed to. Forming the person you are also forms the way your mind can come up with ideas.

kelukelugames• 11 years ago

I'm curious what the flaws in this piece are.

https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1600/1*nLdIY0f1MIa...

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

Shrubs are super flat and boring, rocks get mushy and formless, perspective is a bit off on the path, darks are too black, etc.

dre852• 11 years ago

I would love to know what percentage of your professional and current work is digital and how long it takes you to create one of these beautiful completely finished pieces.

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

95% is digital these days. My work takes anywhere from 10-30 hours to complete one of the finished pieces, depending on complexity and how efficient I am. That time is always broken up into many, many smaller pieces.

dre852• 11 years ago

And when you started, did it still take 10-30 hours or longer? Do you use a Wacom still or a tablet? Any preferred stylus? Did any tutorials help you or was it all due to your formal education and practice?

jlees• 11 years ago

As an engineer recently rediscovering the pure, tactile, offline experience of creating art (not that I would go so far as to call what I have created so far 'art'), this piece couldn't have come at a better time. I really appreciated how Noah shared his journey, it definitely inspires me to keep going. I also recommend giving sketching/drawing a go for anyone looking to spend a bit less of their 'relaxing' time on a computer screen (though of course I am eyeing up digital art as a someday!).

noahbradley11• 11 years ago

Congrats! Making the leap into art is always a good one, no matter your profession. It can give you an entirely new appreciation for the world around you. Quite literally a new way of looking at things.

And you can call it art--I'm not snooty about the word.

archagon2• 11 years ago

This might be a dumb question, but I figure it wouldn't hurt to ask anyway! I'm really interested in learning how to create art, and skill-wise I'm currently right where you were at the start. If I were to follow your exact path, it would take me many years to get anywhere near your level, and while I'm up to the challenge, I don't have four solid years to devote to a new college run at the moment. However, looking back on my computer science education (which forms the basis of my professional career), I can definitely see how I could have acquired the skills to get me where I am today in far less time had I known exactly which areas to focus on ahead of time. Same with my music education; in my music courses, we covered what I had been studying (half-heartedly) for most of my childhood in about a semeseter. Art-wise, do you have any suggestions for specific areas to focus on that might substantially accelerate my education?

Anyway, thanks for the great article! This might just be the kick I need to start taking art seriously. :)

ljlolel• 11 years ago

Also by Noah, how to do the same thing without going to art school: https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/dont-go-to-art-school-138c5efd45e...

kul_• 11 years ago

I wonder, is art only about education? I used to be pretty good at sketching in general, But i feel i do not have the imagination to create such wildly out of the world landscapes. Is there a way to learn how to imagine? Or would one say art isnt for everyone?

archagon2• 11 years ago

When I was younger, I was really worried about learning how to imagine, specifically in regards to music. So many musicians seemed to have started out at ridiculously young ages, and despite the fact that I had been plunking away at piano lessons for many years, I still couldn't hear any original music in my head. Then, when I got to college, I decided to do a side-major in music, just for fun. As I was doing my listening exercises (hours of analytical listening) and diving into the depths of music theory, I started noticing something in my head opening up. I could hear snippets of music... recombined from others I had heard recently, perhaps, but with definite original streaks to them. I was not actively playing an instrument at the time. I was not even composing. All I was doing was building a solid musical foundation. And just like that, after a couple of "aha!" moments, music was no longer a formless mist. It had structure. It had rules (that you could elect to break). Now that I could see the walls of my room, I could finally start to build on my own.

Anyway, my hunch (and reading between the lines of the article) is that something similar happens with art. Once you learn to intuitively visualize shapes in three dimensions, and once you develop a large mental "reference library" of architecture/landscape/characters/etc., you'll be able to create imaginitive new worlds without much effort. But without having that foundation, you're still stumbling around in the dark.

hawngyeedun• 11 years ago

I was in a similar situation about 8 months ago—You just have to pick up a pencil and go for it.

I had just finished college and found a great job. With all the free time I didn't have in school, I decided to buckle down and start taking art seriously (instead of doodling cartoon figures). I knew I need to start out by building a solid foundation, which meant that I have to really familiarize myself with the basics and maintain a daily habit of learning+practicing (even if my brain no longer wants to operate after 7-9 hour of work). That's what I have been doing in the past 8 months.

It takes quite a bit of self-discipline and sometimes it's just hard to get yourself to commit to it, but it the end it's all worthwhile. I have made (small) decent progress... It's a wonderful feeling, to know that you are able to confidently produce something that you would've not been able to do so several months ago. Here are some of my recent practice sketches: https://i.imgur.com/gtR8T2t.jpg

Proko has several tutorial series that I strongly recommend for beginners that are looking for somewhere to start: http://www.proko.com/

nstart• 11 years ago

Proko is brilliant. And his videos have gotten better over time. His breakdown of drawing faces from any angle was a kind of light bulb moment for me.

throwaway_97• 11 years ago

what a waste of time. criminal

m12k• 11 years ago

One of the takeaways I got from this was that instead of the usual "Follow your dreams no matter what" it should be "Follow your dreams, but be smart about". I think many who take the first advice tend to just hammer their heads at whatever obstacle is blocking whatever seems like the direct to their dreams - and as a result often get smacked over the head with such a dose of cold hard reality that they end up having to abandon their dreams instead. Some of Noah's decisions, e.g. waiting with RISD until he could get a scholarship so he wouldn't bankrupt his family, are great examples of how to do this the right way. Achieving your dreams takes tenacity, sure, but it also takes patience and pragmatism. Learning to fly takes more than just the guts to throw yourself off a cliff.

thenomad3• 11 years ago

Definitely.

I've been a working artist for 20 years now (filmmaker). One of the biggest advantages I've had in sustaining that career is that I'm pretty damn good with a spreadsheet.

As others have said, it's a long game, and skills that will sustain you through that long game are critically important.

astro-• 11 years ago

Hugely inspiring! Thanks for sharing your story, Noah.

harmonicon• 11 years ago

Just curious, How are the pictures, from section III The professional, made? Are they made by with software or by actual painting?

stefanix• 11 years ago

Love seeing the progression in skill.

On a different note, most artists I know are successful because they excel in making insightful commentary on contemporary culture. They look at human agency and make sens of it. They crate a playground of imagination for possible futures.

Skills in traditional art practice are often secondary to the latter.

How I became an artist

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