Introducing: Bad Art

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Artists on Social Media

Social media is a perfect place for others to present a false narrative about who they are. It is commonplace now for Instagram models and everyday men and women to edit their bodies to look "better". In reality this creates an unrealistic ideal that other people hope to achieve, then edit their own bodies, and consequentially continue the cycle. This as evolved to pertain to all corners of social media. Aside from physical beauty standards people are encouraged to make every aspect of their life online appear perfect and unattainable. This all to often applies to the art community as well. With this culture of making everything appear perfect it was inevitable that creators would fall into it as well.

It is a trickier situation with artists than let's say travel bloggers because artists often hold themselves to a certain standard as far as design and presenting themselves. Although I still think if you have a clean cut style of working you still make mistakes and hiding them on social media is only damaging. A young artist nowadays has so many resources available online to learn, be inspired, and to find reference. Despite this, because of the way artists present themselves it can create a unrealistic standard for young artists to achieve. If someone is just starting out, it can be hard to imagine creating beautiful work all the time without seeing mistakes being made, when you as a young artist, are making mistakes. Successful artists online generally don't post bad art, they don't post the struggle in getting something right, in getting artist's block, and in making mistakes. Some do, but they are the exception. I want to encourage the online art community to not be afraid of posting the bad and to be comfortable with showing that more vulnerable side.

My Art

As you can see the top I've posted two similar videos that are on my YouTube channel (Link in my about, go check it out). They are both timelapses of the same person, Billie Eilish. One is a graphite sketch with gouache and the other is a gouache painting. The first, in graphite I recently uploaded but it was filmed about four months ago. Then, I liked it but it wasn't my favorite thing I've ever created, by far. I made a lot of mistakes, I used a tough reference photo, I focused on certain weird areas and couldn't stop redoing them, you can see that in the timelapse. Overall, I spent way too much time on it because I wanted it to be "post-able". For me, as a painter, sketching is practice, it's a learning experience for me, I don't feel that I really learn very much from fussing over and perfecting an image. Although, for the sake of this blog and #badart I wanted it to be public to compare to the other video. Now this video was way more fun for me to film and the end product is better, in my opinion. I created it to "apologize" or replace the existing bad drawing that was public of Billie Eilish. My goal, through this blog is to continue to post bad art and explain how we can learn from it, and why it is valuable. I and nobody else should have to apologize, redo, omit something that isn't up to public artistic standard.