How To Be Positive About Your Artwork (Even If It's Not Perfect!)

In this video I'm going to tell you how to be positive about your artwork even if it's not perfect yet and how that will really impact on your ability to be a better artist and to move forward. My name is Michelle Webber and on this channel you'll get art tutorials and art business advice so do consider subscribing. I'm also going to give you several exercises that will help you to speak and think more positively about your own work. So we've all seen market traders and they're promoting their goods and they're shouting about how wonderful their stuff is and they're trying to get you to buy. Artists tend to be a little bit different especially amateur artists a bit nervous of how they put their work forward and can you imagine if you went to the marketplace and a market trader was selling tomatoes and he said come and buy these tomatoes. To be honest they're not as good as last week's tomatoes and they're not quite as fresh and one or two of them are a bit mouldy but you know they're not bad they're really good if you want sort of average tomatoes you know these are these are the tomatoes for you. So can you imagine how awful that would be and you wouldn't be inclined to buy anything from him. Now you might not be thinking yet about selling your work but I'm going to explain to you in this video that just being negative about your work will impact your ability to be a better artist. So one difference between an amateur artist and a professional artist is that the professional will never point out the in their own work if somebody's admiring their work they won't say to them oh but I didn't do the sky very well and you know I should have put more blue in the foreground and they just won't do that because if you think about it even if you're not ready to sell your work yet if somebody admires your work and they pay you a compliment and you say you know you tell them all the faults in your work and you tell them what's wrong with your work what you're actually doing is you're insulting them you're saying to them you don't have good judgment you may say you like this but actually you're wrong you're not very clever you know you have poor judgment you have poor taste and that's what you're doing is you're insulting the person that admires your work so that's something you never want to do whether you're an amateur or whether you're a professional. Now thinking negatively about your own work also has a really detrimental effect on your ability to be a better artist so just telling yourself that your work's no good will um will make you give your brain a sort of a psychological instruction just to stop trying so you know it's it's almost a bit of a cop-out well my work's no good so you it stops you having to think carefully about what's wrong with your work and equally as importantly what's right with your work until you can analyze what's wrong and what's right with your work you won't move forward so by telling your brain oh everything I do is rubbish you're really not helping yourself in any way. Now it may be that in other areas of your life you're quite confident about what you do maybe in your job I've always been quite confident in my job and I've always been quite an outgoing person so a few years ago I ended up in a martial arts class I went with my daughter and I ended up staying and so there I was a middle-aged woman in a martial arts class and I didn't feel very confident I still don't always feel very confident and one day my instructor took me to one side and he said we really have to work on your negativity and your self-confidence levels and I almost laughed out loud because I'm very confident as a person so I I said you know what are you talking about I'm you know I'm this friendly happy confident person and he said well not in here you're not not in the training hall you're not so I sort of thought about this and I thought ah and I realized he was right and I thought to myself why is that why am I not confident in this environment and I'm confident in other environments and I I realized why it was and I said to him the thing is I said I'm not very good at this I'm not very good at martial arts and that's why I don't have any confidence and as he walked away he said to me if you keep telling yourself you're not any good at this you will never be any good at this and it really had a big impact on me and I I couldn't then go to tell myself I was great at this because frankly I wasn't and probably never will be but I did at least make the effort to stop telling myself I was bad at it and to stop being negative about it and actually to just think to myself okay I'll just see how it goes I'll just keep trying and I'll just keep trying to improve in small increments and it really had a big effect on my training I still train today I still enjoy it and I am moving forward with it and I get a little bit better each time I go and that's what you want to be looking at for your artwork so if you can't bear to tell yourself that you're good at it at least stop telling yourself that you're bad at it and just you just try to keep your attitude towards it neutral I'll just try my best and see if I can improve a little bit each time so the first exercise I'm going to give you to do is something I do all the time as a professional artist and that's to write a paragraph about my work in fact every time I finish a piece of work I write a paragraph about it just a short description paragraph because I can use it on shop listing sites I can send it out to galleries it's always there if I need it and it's best to write it when I've just finished making it because then it's fresh in my mind but you can do this as an exercise I sometimes do this with my students on my one day business course and I get them to write about themselves and not to think negatively so the rules are you write one paragraph two three four lines at most sentences at most and you mustn't say anything negative about your work so exercise number two is I want you to do some role play with a friend and get them to pretend they're interested in buying your work so what you do for this one is you have a specific piece of work in front of you you actually hold it in your hands and get your friend to say I really like this how much would you like for it and you may never have thought that that conversation will come your way but even as an amateur artist that conversation will happen to you one day somebody even if it's just your aunt someday someone is going to say to you I like this and I would like to buy it and you know most amateur artists they get very very flustered and they don't know what to say and some professionals as well just aren't comfortable with it so I want you to go through that and just think about what you would say and see if you can come up with something to say to that person that gives them a straight answer and also is not negative now the next exercise I'm going to give you is just it's a really simple one is it's just to say thank you so when someone admires your work instead of insulting their taste by telling them how they are wrong I want you to just say thank you if the if the conversation just ends there and it's all a bit awkward silence then after that all you can do is just start telling them about your work you said you know what were your inspirations for it how did you choose the colors so when somebody says that they like your work say thank you and then tell them a little bit about the work and the last exercise I'm going to give you is when you finish a piece of work and you can do this with an old piece of work if you pull one out of your cupboard you know and have a look at something I want you to find three things that are wrong with it and need improving and then I want you to find three things that are right with it and you're really happy with and I want you to sort of consider how you did those things and how you could store that information for next time so just a last thought if somebody likes your artwork allow them to like it it's not like buying a phone and then you get it home and you think oh I don't like the operating system they can see all of the artwork it's on display they can see the sculpture they can see the painting you don't need to make excuses for it if they like it allow them to like it that's all you need to do and you'll be amazed at the things that you can achieve when you just start to think more positively about your own work so I hope you found this video useful please like share subscribe you can hit the bell button if you'd like to get updates and when I have new videos coming up I also have a Facebook group you can join if you want to come over and chat to other amateur artists and help them a little bit by helping them to be to see their work in a more positive light as well