A nice youtube art channel that helps you soothe Impostor Syndrome
I have been pondering over what the next blog post should've been ever since I started writing the previous one. It's not that I 'overdid it', but with the oddly smart tone I went for I had figured my duty was to produce supposedly enlightening content in a rapid succession. Not that the other one was a discovery of any kind, it was just an asshole stating the obvious, but humbling it down to 'I'm just a guy like you' to somehow excuse a lack of quality, and pretending that my whole deal was aiming for 'being relatable' all along? Honestly an upside down reasoning. The whole thing that makes my schtick marketable is that I have been quite literally imprisoned all my life, that's not your average dude (I hope), that's special and therefore it's not content that everyone can provide. See, I don't mind lying, I am not bad at it, but I can only do so much. Also, I would kind of imply that the reader is automatically either incompetent or a loser with that relatable vibe, and given that I am refusing to do so, well...You're welcome?
Aight, now that we got the obnoxious intro out of the way, let's talk Impostor Syndrome, because that is a relatable thing that is slowing all of us down. The media tells you that you're not good enough until you're a depressed dopamine addict, because you have to buy stuff, because you have to contribute to the economy, blah blah blah, in the worst case scenario you shoot yourself in the head but hey, guns have a cost so the economy thanks you once again. We know it, we don't need to explain it once again, but that's basically it, so you'll see all your friends in social media post only the exciting parts of their life and you struggle to fit in as 'ahead in life enough' as if that isn't what they literally just do, fake for that purpose. Everyone has Impostor Syndrome, so be relieved...Is what literally every fucking video and/or article will tell you.
Don't get me wrong, it is good advice, but it doesn't necessarily erase the fact that you have to run the race. Even if you don't want to, so you might as well embrace it. For example, among my other impulses which always involve writing, I like to draw as a hobby. I almost said 'doodle', because it would be undermining it in a deliberate way, it's easier to dismiss what I like to do as doodling because a 'doodle' by definition doesn't have to be good. 'Just a doodle, just a sketch, nothing serious', then you show something that you put 3 hours into and it still relatively looks like shit? Don't know about you, but I've been there. Still am. Doesn't feel good, but even if I still refuse to call myself an artist since I am 'past the stick figures but not by much', I still draw. So I would shyly watch art related videos whenever recommended and one day I stumbled upon a channel that was very different from everything else I had seen before.
Xabio Arts found a place in my heart immediately, and as a matter of fact I spent the weekend quietly going back through some of his videos and trying out a few of his tutorials to make a reference sheet for myself so that I can always go back to it whenever I feel a bit lost on how to make certain shapes. I found his channel because youtube recommended me his video 'How to fake a good sketchbook'.
The title instantly gave me hope, because it was not skill that one had to rely on to reach that result. He made as an example for that video a sketchbook page full of plants, mostly different shapes of a cactus, a few of those drawings were big and then there were many smaller ones there 'just to fill the page', plus some orange blocks of colour added as a background to the ones that came out the best. It did look good.
The rest of his tutorials too, between one joke and another, have a soft and understanding approach towards learning how to fake art skills. They do teach you important information in a way that is very simple, something that he himself describes as cheating through art.
Regardless of my own drawing level, I tend to procrastinate my writing - when I'm actually good at writing - because of perfectionism, so imagine how I deal with my beginner art. In fact, I had a few canvases that were gifted to me and never brought myself to use them until a couple of months ago when Sister Birdie who was going mad from the quarantine took the initiative to whip out colours and paints of every kind to kill time, and it felt good to create something even if it wasn't the best (wasn't the worst either!). Doing things without the pressure of having them turn out good is the key, and of course this sounds very obvious, probably because it is, and yet we truly are bound to forget it. Thankfully Andrew Bosch aka Xabio Arts does a sweet job at reminding it.
I believe that his approach to art should be translated in many other sectors of life - hell, I would love to teach something the way he does. With the fact that I am, duh, the birdie in the cage, I tend to feel like I don't have much to offer even if I'm imploding with various emotions related to the experiences Iendured had that surely taught me something. For this reason I want this to be a 'learn with me' journey. When I posted the previous entry I was already thinking 'Maybe my first lesson is researching Roman architecture and reporting what I learn, because I wrote a screenplay about 1500s Rome so it would be smart and follow a thread', and I'm still considering it. We'll see.
In the meantime, let's go back to the Xabio Arts channel to recommend you a couple of videos in particular, where he invites another artist. This other art youtuber is a young Bulgarian artist named Angel Ganev, whom I was immediately fascinated with because of how self aware he is about his process, his emotions, and how he approached art not out of creativity but for more personal reasons. His artwork is stunning and at an advanced level, yet when interviewed on the Xabio Arts channel he confessed he felt insecure about his art despite the high quality, in response to Andrew's explanation of his goals 'to make people feel good about their art'.
It is true, in most cases, that one is more talented and competent than they think they are, but it's also important to channel this constant sense of impending doom that comes from the fear of being outed as 'not enough' and to create spaces to learn through what can be dismissed as blatant faking but is still humble learning. It's like I said in my previous post: We are in the culture of 'don't ask, because if you ask it means you don't know, and if you don't know you shall be shamed'. It really does boil down to that, it always boils down to that. I believe that a lot of this comes from school, in fact when I made my voice acting studies after high school my teacher would always remind me and the rest of the students that a lot of the possible progress was hindered by the programming that school has put us through, so I wonder how a more honest approach would impact kids. Either way, while I can't guarantee that I'll come up with the perfect method, I'd like to give my own contribution.
Aight, now that we got the obnoxious intro out of the way, let's talk Impostor Syndrome, because that is a relatable thing that is slowing all of us down. The media tells you that you're not good enough until you're a depressed dopamine addict, because you have to buy stuff, because you have to contribute to the economy, blah blah blah, in the worst case scenario you shoot yourself in the head but hey, guns have a cost so the economy thanks you once again. We know it, we don't need to explain it once again, but that's basically it, so you'll see all your friends in social media post only the exciting parts of their life and you struggle to fit in as 'ahead in life enough' as if that isn't what they literally just do, fake for that purpose. Everyone has Impostor Syndrome, so be relieved...Is what literally every fucking video and/or article will tell you.
Don't get me wrong, it is good advice, but it doesn't necessarily erase the fact that you have to run the race. Even if you don't want to, so you might as well embrace it. For example, among my other impulses which always involve writing, I like to draw as a hobby. I almost said 'doodle', because it would be undermining it in a deliberate way, it's easier to dismiss what I like to do as doodling because a 'doodle' by definition doesn't have to be good. 'Just a doodle, just a sketch, nothing serious', then you show something that you put 3 hours into and it still relatively looks like shit? Don't know about you, but I've been there. Still am. Doesn't feel good, but even if I still refuse to call myself an artist since I am 'past the stick figures but not by much', I still draw. So I would shyly watch art related videos whenever recommended and one day I stumbled upon a channel that was very different from everything else I had seen before.
The title instantly gave me hope, because it was not skill that one had to rely on to reach that result. He made as an example for that video a sketchbook page full of plants, mostly different shapes of a cactus, a few of those drawings were big and then there were many smaller ones there 'just to fill the page', plus some orange blocks of colour added as a background to the ones that came out the best. It did look good.
The rest of his tutorials too, between one joke and another, have a soft and understanding approach towards learning how to fake art skills. They do teach you important information in a way that is very simple, something that he himself describes as cheating through art.
Regardless of my own drawing level, I tend to procrastinate my writing - when I'm actually good at writing - because of perfectionism, so imagine how I deal with my beginner art. In fact, I had a few canvases that were gifted to me and never brought myself to use them until a couple of months ago when Sister Birdie who was going mad from the quarantine took the initiative to whip out colours and paints of every kind to kill time, and it felt good to create something even if it wasn't the best (wasn't the worst either!). Doing things without the pressure of having them turn out good is the key, and of course this sounds very obvious, probably because it is, and yet we truly are bound to forget it. Thankfully Andrew Bosch aka Xabio Arts does a sweet job at reminding it.
I believe that his approach to art should be translated in many other sectors of life - hell, I would love to teach something the way he does. With the fact that I am, duh, the birdie in the cage, I tend to feel like I don't have much to offer even if I'm imploding with various emotions related to the experiences I
In the meantime, let's go back to the Xabio Arts channel to recommend you a couple of videos in particular, where he invites another artist. This other art youtuber is a young Bulgarian artist named Angel Ganev, whom I was immediately fascinated with because of how self aware he is about his process, his emotions, and how he approached art not out of creativity but for more personal reasons. His artwork is stunning and at an advanced level, yet when interviewed on the Xabio Arts channel he confessed he felt insecure about his art despite the high quality, in response to Andrew's explanation of his goals 'to make people feel good about their art'.
It is true, in most cases, that one is more talented and competent than they think they are, but it's also important to channel this constant sense of impending doom that comes from the fear of being outed as 'not enough' and to create spaces to learn through what can be dismissed as blatant faking but is still humble learning. It's like I said in my previous post: We are in the culture of 'don't ask, because if you ask it means you don't know, and if you don't know you shall be shamed'. It really does boil down to that, it always boils down to that. I believe that a lot of this comes from school, in fact when I made my voice acting studies after high school my teacher would always remind me and the rest of the students that a lot of the possible progress was hindered by the programming that school has put us through, so I wonder how a more honest approach would impact kids. Either way, while I can't guarantee that I'll come up with the perfect method, I'd like to give my own contribution.
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