The hardest part of being an artist isn’t making art. It’s drumming up interest in your work and marketing yourself. We’re told day in and day out that social media marketing is make or break for our careers. The problem with that is social media is ever changing and an audience on one platform isn’t guaranteed. 

You know what is guaranteed? An email list.

Feedback is an uncomfortable ingredient of growth. It can be anxiety inducing to put your work up on a wall to be looked at for the express purpose of finding its weak points. When we hear feedback that rings true, it’s easy to recoil and feel as though the person giving the critique has seen some dirty disgusting part of ourselves that we would rather them politely turn away from without acknowledgement.

Graduating from college has left me in a little bit of a lurch. I have been trained to learn and refine my skills in group settings, but seemingly after college those spaces had disappeared. I no longer have multiple classes a day to keep me accountable for my learning or to get feedback from. 

It was almost enough to make me think that my learning was completely over.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about AI and how it’s affecting the art industry. I’ve heard a lot of different perspectives, many of them very strong ones. I’ve heard that AI will be the death of the human artist, that it’s nothing more than a creative tool, that it will make art more accessible to the average person.

However, my biggest takeaway from conversations about AI and art has been this:

We want stories, and we want to know who made them.

It’s easy to feel like if you’re not diving headfirst into your creative pursuit, you’re leaving it to rot. We receive a lot of pressure as creatives to ‘move fast and break things’. This may work for some. For others, the prospect of losing out on paying bills can be paralyzing.