Raw LLM Responses

“You don’t get it, I used to have creativity and imagination. I used to make fun little drawings as a kid.” “Why did you stop?” “I sucked at it… Also, I had to grow up and work for a living.” This attitude stems from an underlying mindset that society had toward art (and other creative works) that I’ve come to despise, which is the mindset that, “All successful artists are just naturally born with the ability to make good art.” As a kid, I was susceptible to people telling me that I had a “gift” or “talent” for making art. Being that I didn’t know anything about the world, since I was a child, I assumed that adults were right when they told me this. I assumed that whatever I drew was just automatically good, because that’s “how it works for artists”. Once I got older and began taking art more seriously, as in viewing it as a future career after high school, this is when that mindset begins to crack and eventually shatter. You begin to actually see the flaws in your art, you start to realize that your creations aren’t as perfect as your naive child brain thought. And because everyone spent all this time telling you that art is this innate ability that you can only get by being born with it, you begin to assume that they were wrong, that you actually _don’t_ have that gift or talent. If you did, you wouldn’t be making mistakes, your art wouldn’t have flaws. How could it if creativity is an inherent trait? This is the reason why I slowly gave up on art and began losing hope of a future in it after graduation and into my early-20s. It wasn’t until around the end of 2022, when I started listening to certain videos on YouTube that discussed this idea of “art as a talent” and reflected on some of my older drawings from high school that seemed so much better than what I’d been making as an adult, that I learned to shift out of this mindset and finally see art for what it is: a skill. Something which can be taught and learned, and something meant to develop over time through practice and experience, instead of this mythical force that you somehow control simply by the luck of having been born with it. I realized that this isn’t Harry Potter, there’s not wizards (artists) and muggles (non-artists). Ever since then, I have been at peace with the art I make, and I can say with absolute certainty that my art has been at its best in these past 2-3 years. Rather than looking at mistakes as a sign of my failure as a human being, or however you wish to describe it, I instead see it as a learning experience. I can tell myself, “You drew this poorly because you’ve not drawn it enough times yet to know how to do it right on the first try. It isn’t something you cannot do, it’s just something that’s new and unfamiliar to you.” And I think there are a lot of other people out there who’re like this, who’ve been in that position and need to make that change in how they see their art, the way that I did.