28 june 2026, 3:12pm
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thinking about how alot of people tell me how they "wish they could draw" when what i think they really mean is they wish they could draw at a high level. my response to that is always "you can draw, you just don't think it's 'good'." heavy emphasis on """good""" - anybody can draw. seriously. even if you dont have hands, if u can pick up a pencil with ur mouth and put lines to paper its drawing. i assume the problem is they think i just magically existed with the skill level i have now. i also struggled thru a lot of "bad" drawings, terrible anatomy, chicken scratching, etc. even now my art is by no means professional at all, but that's something i acknowledge and accept because i know i'm always improving and can always improve.
i also feel that at some point sketches looking "good" is also about the confidence you've built up in ur pen strokes, which takes time. as for painting i'm not too sure i can speak on it because i've only very recently started doing it more frequently
at some point everyone has drawn before, so i don't and can't say "if you've never done art before, maybe it's a different situation for you" or something like that. as a kid, even if it was stickmen and scribbles, it was still drawing. it's still art.
now that i've thought about it, maybe what they meant when they say they wish they could draw is also that they wish they had a passion for art to keep practising it. excuse me if it's a bit of a tactless(?) comment or if i'm generalising it, obviously this won't apply to everybody, but it's just what i think makes most sense if i were to guess their reasons for saying that line. i'm truly curious about how non-artists process the world around them.
speaking of the phrase "non-artist", i've used it here to refer to people who either don't do art as a hobby or as a profession. i know i've said any sort of art at all levels is art, but i wonder, if you doodle on your math homework every once in a while, are you an artist too? it might be a silly question, and the answer might be "no, you've already said it yourself that artists are usually hobbyists or have an art career" but i think we can consider that question for a second even if the answer becomes that obvious
i've suddenly thought about a question my art teacher asked me once: if you commission someone else to bring your idea into reality, who is the artist? you or them? what i told them at the time was something along the lines of "of course the other person is the artist, you would just become a collaborator". i'm not sure if i could flesh out or improve that idea, but allow me to try and do so here (●^∀^●) if anyone reading this has their own ideas i'd love to hear it, feel free to send it to me via the contact page!
anyways, my reasoning for my answer was that an artist is the person who creates - it doesn't matter whose idea it was initially, you're an artist if you created the piece. especially in the industry, you're always being given some idea to bring into reality, aren't you? sometimes you don't work on the whole thing, and instead maybe the initial design, or the final product, but you're still an artist. a designer, to get into the specifics.
and then my teacher asked me, what about in the case of generative ai? i answered that ai is not an artist. you may think of the idea, give the prompt, but there is not the human element behind the process of the creation of the product. i use "process" instead of directly talking about the product, because it could be argued that you are what gives the human element to the idea behind the image. but ai is not an artist
at the time we couldn't finish the conversation, but as i write it now a question surfaces in my mind: "then what does that make you? you give the idea, and the image is created, but if ai is not the artist, and you who gives the idea is not an artist, is the created image art? it looks like art, and could be considered an artwork."
i don't think this can by simply answered. what do we call someone who thinks about creating art but never creates art? a thinker? a dreamer? are you an artist by concept alone? would that make many of us, many more of us, artists? i think it requires us to consider what we call art. and as i've said, there is no simple answer. although regarding the second question - if the image is "art" - through logical reasoning we can conclude that the image generated by the ai is not art, even if it may look identical to a painting. even disregarding the fact that most, if not all generative ai models take artists' works without consent, i struggle justifying how it could be considered a piece of imagination.
it was difficult to phrase my ideas in a way that wouldn't immediately invalidate my view on generative ai due to poorly chosen words, but i do still think there's a better way to put it. however this is just a piece to make me think about stuff and reflect on my thoughts so no research was done on this, but of course it's still open for criticism and discussion as long as it's in a civil way !! polite discourse is always welcome and i want to hear others' ideas and learn more from them
if anyone's interested, i would also like them to ponder about the "outsider artist" as well ^_^ maybe one day i'll write about my thoughts on it, but this entry is getting very long lol
this entry was also partially inspired by a post i saw somewhere referencing finding a restaurant with a really ugly handdrawn mascot and talking abt how genai basically made "amateur" art like that impossible to find. theres a charm in drawings like that too. "bad" art isnt bad. if you're doing art as a hobby isnt it more about the fun in drawing rather than how professional it looks? ofc u might derive more satisfaction thru the end product than the process, personally my objective has always been to create cool stuff but it isnt to say i havent been enjoying drawing itself as well. in my previous post yesterday i was listing stuff to do over summer break and almost all i listed was creative stuff, and in that moment it become much clearer to me how art has got me by the throat to the point idk a life outside of it ( ´;ﾟ;∀;ﾟ;)