Harder Art vs Smarter Art

       This subject is something that I struggle with a lot, even to this day. Its the idea of pushing as hard as you can, or should you just study more intelligently. So for this I'm going to talk purely from my experience; 10 years of an art career. I started training in drawing/painting at age 19. I had no drawing background and my art was total garbage. I would see the advanced students in class and romanticize that if I could just do a tiny portion of they could do, that I would be happy. So I went insanely hardcore in training for about 2 years. Drawing was my life, and it absorbed every aspect of my social life to where I really had no social life, I hardly went out at all in fact. I stayed to myself and the friends I did have just stopped calling me. I improved extremely fast and then something strange happened..... I stopped improving. I completely got stuck at one level. And I saw others pass me by. I had hit a "plateau" as they call it.

The Pencil Bag that Helped Me

      Flash forward to when I was attending Art Center School of Design; They had us on a strict regime of art projects. Almost bootcamp-like. And I felt something I had not in years, I felt myself improve again. It was one of the hardest times on me mentally ever. They would give me a project I knew I could not do, and somehow I had to get it done in a few days.

        So why did I get better? Hindsight is 20/20. During my first plateau I put myself under intense pressure, but didn't know the way to get out of it. I was running my head into a brick wall and the pressure ended up eating me alive. What I should have done during that time would have been to pull back and relax a little bit. The reason I improved in Art Center was due to my teachers pushing me hard, but also guiding me in the right direction. That was the biggest different than in my first plateau. The quality of teacher was better at art center coupled with enforced regime. It pushed me through and I had no choice but to get better. It was both harder and smarter!

         During my time at art center I created my pencil case, the arm-adillo. I wanted to streamline everything in my life because I didn't have a lot of time to mess around. So I streamlined everything including my cool artist bag. It was created when I was working my hardest at Art Center. I thought if I could just strap my pens to a book or my wrist I would be more organized overall. This worked great and I've been selling them steadily ever since. check them out at: http://arm-adillo.com/video.html