You Have To Work

By Ian Wilson

I’ll admit, prior to the advent of AI, I was actually something of a mediocre artist. wasn’t that good, but I also wasn’t “bad” either. If you search hard enough, you can find some of my older stuff. A lot of you have some copies of The Emrys Saga with my original illustrations. As I said in another post, those just… weren’t that good, I’m sorry to say. But at the time, I thought they were great, and I didn’t understand why people weren’t lining up to commission me.

In fact, the vast majority of artists you find on the internet are just… not good. Some outright bad, but most are mediocre. I’m not telling them to quit, I would never do that, but they need to stop kidding themselves into thinking they’re the next Michelangelo. But they could be if only they’d apply themselves.

The issue with artists is that in order to be decent as an artist, you have to actually sit down at the drawing board and work. You don’t get good by accident. You see, as was pointed out by instagrammer gr3yrilla, work is almost a foreign concept to us artists. We just sort of expect to have the artistic expression flow out of us like magic. That’s not how it works. You could make the most expressive piece, dump your soul onto the canvas (or whatever) and it could still be crap if you don’t practice. Art is just like karate. You don’t win karate tournaments by thinking about it. You have to practice your forms thousands upon thousands of times. You have to spend hours hitting the bag. It’s the same with art. I didn’t get here by thinking about my art; I practiced it.

The problem is that artists aren’t like other people. Where other people just grow up and get jobs and such, artists maintain a child-like attitude toward everything. How many children do you know with a great work ethic? When was the last time you were able to get a child to do as you asked without having to offer some reward or punishment? Artists are big kids; we like to “play”. Part of us never grew up; that’s why we’re able to create works of art, unlike other people who become plumbers or carpenters— not that there’s anything wrong with that at all. In fact, I often find myself envying carpenters, but that’s a story for another time. Once the art stops being “fun” we lose interest. I’ve had this happen a number of times myself. But life, especially an artist’s life, isn’t not all fun and games. At some point you have to decide if you want to play or if you want to add beauty to the world.

I’ve come to believe that AI was the reality check that some of us needed. I certainly needed it. It was the kick in the pants I needed to get me out of my artistic stagnation and produce great works. Once we realized that there was a machine that could do our job, we got scared, and rightly so. We could no longer get away with being mediocre. We needed to man up and rise to the occasion, or fade away, replaced by a soulless machine. No, I’m not saying AI is “good” but bad art promulgated as good as almost as bad as fake art.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be replaced by a machine. I want to be the best that I can be. If you’re going to call yourself an artist, you have a duty to get better. You just do. That means sitting down at the drawing board and committing to your craft. Your audience is counting on you to do that. So stop wasting time on social media or whatever and work!!