The idea of being an “amateur” can put you in a headspace that blocks your creativity. You can be frozen with the inability to act, afraid that anything you do will be wrong or that you might look silly. As an educator, I have seen so many people stop themselves from enjoying their work and being in the moment because they are focused on creating in what they see as the “right” or best way, instead of doing what is natural to them and forging their own way. If you let it, being an amateur can be liberating, allowing you to invent your own style and freeing you from only creating in just one way. My entire creative journey has been through the lens of an amateur, learning how to move from being envious of those who have mastered certain techniques to leveraging my own strengths and growing from those. When I was in seventh grade, I remember a peer in art class who could draw any Pokémon from memory. They would look exactly like the game models. Another could draw faces that were somewhat realistic, and yet another could draw and shade anime characters, and it looked so good (from the standpoint of a seventh grader). I was envious because even with a picture of a Pokémon, my ability to draw lacked in comparison. But even then, I wanted nothing more than to be an artist and make drawings that looked like what my peers were producing. Despite not being an “artistic” child like some other students, I stayed with my dream and continued art classes through high school. My senior year, I was president of the art club, but I would still look at the works produced by others and feel discouraged. One friend drew sports cars with high precision. The kid who drew realistic faces in seventh grade was painting portraits and developing her own style. Though I felt discouraged, I persisted with my creative endeavors and set my sights on a becoming an art therapist. After two years of going to school for psychology and getting over feeling discouraged about my art, I transferred to a new university and became a studio art major. Being in a university with art students, I once again felt defeated, seeing students who in an intro to drawing class had already mastered the basic techniques I thought I was barely beginning to grasp. It wasn’t until we did a project that took combining three works of art that I understood the advantage that had carried me this far. I was not afraid of experimentation, while some of my peers played it safe and practiced only what they knew. While most others took pieces from the same movement, I wanted to try and combine three different styles and do it on a four-foot roll of paper. Although my technique was still far from perfect, this was the first time I felt joy in doing a class project. Once I took my first 3D course and moved toward sculpture, I understood that the process and concepts were sometimes as important as the appearance of the finished product. In my 2D classes, I began to use my time to experiment and play around with non-traditional media, painting on metal and stretching canvas with rice paper and throwing heavy globs of paint and sand on the delicate media. Even though most of my class work was in 3D media, I continued to grow in my 2D work because I was willing to take an amateur’s approach. Sometimes, my work would not get me the grades I would have liked to have, but it no longer mattered because I was doing what I loved in art and making. Now, in my work at the Center for Creativity, I try to leverage this ability to help aspiring makers expand their understanding of their ability to create. - Mike Campbell, Center for Creativity Assistant
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