Building Your Skill Set
In whatever art you practice, there are a set of skills you must develop. Some are basic, some are more complex but they all build on a foundation of the basics well-learned and well-practiced. These are the various techniques of your art form. These techniques together form your toolbox of expression. The mastery of these various techniques are what open you up to a wide range of expression and if you do not learn them right and learn them well then your expressive capacity and range is diminished.
Learning all of these techniques does not in itself make you an artist, but it does make you technically proficient and that is a good place to start.
As you work along and develop, various of these techniques might be abandoned because they do not fit the kind of art you end up making but, choosing not to use techniques you know is not the same thing as not using a technique because you have not developed the skill for it. You could say that your artistic expression is then driven not by choice but by the limitation of your own lack of experience or knowledge. Can this work? Sure it can. Artists often use creative workarounds when they bump up against a problem that they do not know how to solve and their solutions can be interesting but over all it is better to buckle down and develop the skills and then choose not to use them rather than the other way around. Most artistic techniques have to do with using your hands, your eyes or your ears (and you nose and mouth if you are a chef).
But the next set of skills is about using your mind: intuition, inspiration, imagination, concentration, contemplation, etc.
Then there are organization skills like inventory management, strategies, time management, logistics, etc.
Then there is the development of your philosophy and sense of ethics. How to deal with your day-to-day life, how to work through problems and obstacles, how to manage your relationships whether personal or business, how to respond to events, circumstances or situations as they arise. There are many ways to look at and respond to things. An investigation of this subject helps an artist to deal with the ever-changing nature of the world.
Thanks for reading. This is a completely reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my work, buy my books and/or become a paid subscriber
Let me know what you think. Comment below.