5 Proactive Steps to Develop Your Talent

Being both a homeschool family and a bunch of creatives, it’s no wonder summer is a busy time for the lot of us when it comes to our personal projects. During the break the kids and I all take advantage of the extra time to pour a few more hours each day into the creative pursuits we work on throughout the year. So it also tends to be a time of skill growth as well.

This is always a good thing, though both girls have found it to also be a tad frustrating. You see, they have a talent for more visual arts than me, and both have been progressing quickly. This is developmentally normal given their ages and the leaps in fine motor control and abilities to understand and think through complex sequences. However, this becomes a bit of a problem when working on large scope projects such as the comic series one is writing and the animation and game design the other is pursuing. By the time they finish a leg of the project, the art they are producing no longer looks like what they did at the beginning.

This is just the result of daily practice compounded with their continued drive to research and learn new techniques and tools. Then we began taking a little time each day to watch a show together here and there. The eldest started commenting on the fact certain ideas she had come across in the show were making her think differently about her characters. That in turn, caused me to start musing on how one can proactively work toward improving their artistic skill and hone their talent.

1. Set aside time each day to create.

What’s the old joke? “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.”

Perhaps this first point is rather obvious, but too often, practice gets undervalued. Like the benefits of daily exercise, sometimes we are too close to the matter to notice the subtle changes. It begins to feel like all pain and no gain. Others, who do not see the daily work put in, see the leaps because without those smaller changes, it is more evident. 

Keep faith that daily practice will improve your skill. If you need evidence of your improvement, try keeping a dated log of your work. A single recording or image or story every week or month is sufficient. Then you can compare one to another and see how far you have improved.

The creation of Daydreams and Myth was proof enough of this tactic for me. A couple of the pieces had been published at the very beginning of my career and fell out-of-print by the time I compiled the collection in 2015. In going back to “remaster” them, I was able to see how much I had grown in the ten to fifteen years since they were written and published.

This is also a technique both girls have employed with their artwork. The eldest has a collection of her best pieces dating back three years or so, and any time she feels the beginnings of impostor syndrome setting in, she’ll look at them compared to her present work. The youngest is a bit more aggressive toward her older work, so she does not keep old pieces herself. Yet, every now and again, she will look at old images she gifted people and find herself amazed at how far she has come in two years or so.

2. Research techniques and tools you have never used before.

There is a phrase usually talked about with businesses, but it applies just as well here. “Adapt or die.” Trends, technology, and tastes shift and evolve over time. While it is not necessary or even beneficial to attempt and follow all of them or to chase after trends, ignoring them completely can leave you stagnant.

Perhaps it is because of the genres I find myself drawn toward, but I find the new tech and techniques being utilized and discussed fascinating. Will I use all of them? No, but I research quite a few and experiment with several of them here and there. It’s no different than when I took a shot at writing every genre I could think of back in middle and high school until I found my preferred genres. Each had something to teach me, and I grew as a result of that research and experimentation.

The results are even more dramatic when it comes to visual or auditory arts. The girls, like most of us, started with simple crayons and paper. Now both can use digital illustration, photo, and animation software to create intricate images and short animations.

Even as limited and self-taught as I am, software such as iMovie, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Soundbooth have opened up avenues for this website and my stories I never would have found or had access to otherwise.

3. Enjoy and study the work of others.

Art influences art. It doesn’t matter the medium. We are all influenced by the images, melodies, and stories we take in. This has been a truth since the beginning of our species.

Enjoying and studying the work of other artists, within your medium or outside of it, sparks complex, symbolic thought and your imagination. It adds to your subconscious thought processes, and it gives you the chance to learn from what others have done. Sometimes this is as simple as the way they describe a particular character archetype or use imagery or figurative language. Other times, it may be as complex as the way they structured a series or utilized motifs, light, and color to create a masterpiece of music or visual art.

I will speak to fiction since that is the form I know best. With the hundreds of billions of stories told throughout history, there are only a few basic structures common among them and only so many character archetypes. The differences are in the details and the artistry of how they are interchanged and woven together. How many parallel stories do we find throughout the world’s various mythologies? The same basic story. The same ideas discussed, but different in a thousand tiny ways.

Yes, authors pull from personal experience when creating characters and stories, but we also take inspiration from the stories we have heard and read and watched. The more art and media you experience, the more you give your imagination to pull from and blend together in order to create something unique since no two minds will produce the same ideas from identical source material.

4. Get outside your comfort zone.

If you are feeling stagnant, one of the best and fastest ways to push past it is to step outside of your comfort zone. Try a different genre. Try a different voice or style. Or take a slightly more drastic step and give a brand new medium a try.

Creativity and artistic skill behaves like a muscle. The more it is used and the harder it is pushed, the more it will grow. Sticking within a comfortable genre or medium for any length of time can be compared to doing the same workout routine at the same resistance level for months on end. You begin to suffer diminishing returns quickly.

If you have fallen into this type of rut and feel you are no longer progressing, swapping things up and pushing yourself to try a different way of creating can kick start another round of growth.

5. Experience new things.

As trite as it is, the advice, “Write what you know,” exists for a reason. The better you understand something, the more authentic your portrayal of it will be. So it stands to reason, artists benefit from novelty of experience.

This doesn’t have to be some grand, expensive gesture either. Something as simple as taking a new walking path or reading within a genre you have never tried before or picking up a new hobby can suffice. With today’s access to technology, there really is very little excuse these days. Even if you cannot afford craft supplies or have hours to devote to developing a new skill, it takes neither money nor a huge amount of time to watch or read several tutorials. Maybe you will never have the budget or available vacation days for a fabulous trip around the globe, but travel vlogs can give you glimpses. Plus, with websites like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, you can speak with individuals from almost any walk of life these days.