I'm Going to Art School

Well, I promised you guys an update on my art activity after eluding to it over the past few journals, and here it is. The title of this post is basically a tl;dr of what I’ll be talking about in detail, but for those of you who want to know more, buckle up.

I’ve gotten just about everything set up to where I’ll be starting my first semester at a local art college this fall under a Drawing & Illustration major, and it’s been a long time coming. For over six years, I’ve been going to college under a computer engineering degree that slowly transformed into a programming degree to something that I stopped caring about, especially with me juggling a full-time job and my want for drawing, even during my burnout periods. It’s gotten to a point where I’ve become sick of college and all of the problems that plague it (from my experience), and if I’m going to finish college somehow, it’s going to be in a field that I want to work in.

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Other than the want of a degree that I’d actually appreciate having, I have two other reasons for going through with this:

1) Although I’m always feeling like I’m slowly improving in art, I acknowledge that I still have a lot to learn. Coloring and shading is still a weak point for me. I could learn to open up more and start drawing in different ways or using elements of various techniques to improve my own stuff. Settings and backgrounds are one of the biggest areas I need to explore. The list goes on.

I feel that taking a series of classes over the course of some years will at least help me open up some of the limitations I have with my art and improve it, and might be a quicker way to make me more confident in trying new things. Most of my reasons for not really working on other types of art other than character design have mostly boiled down to just not having enough time or energy to do so, especially after work days.

2) Discipline. This is one of the biggest things I lack with my art.

I’ve had a long history of being on and off with my art, but I’ve strangely never found myself one hundred percent unmotivated to make it. Most of the time, I’ve just blown it off, either because I was (again) too tired from work, had other things to do during the week, or had just been too lazy to do anything (I’m especially blaming weekends for this). I’ve tried things in the past to get my lazy self to make some more stuff, most of which have had mixed results. I’ve tried time management apps, setting up dedicated alarms and schedules for making art, and blocking “unproductive” websites altogether… but so far, nothing has really stuck.

The newer, “lighter” streaming schedule has been working a bit better for me, but I still don’t feel like I’m spending enough time outside of random sketching in my sketchbooks. That’s also why I’m hoping that – with art college – I’ll be able to devote more time and energy into my craft. I’ll have to seriously start considering deadlines and prioritizing work on art, not on stuff like YouTube or loafing around. I need that discipline if I ever want to be taken seriously in the professional world.

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I want to go on record saying, before you tell me whether art college is just a giant waste of my time or that I’m crazy for even considering this in the first place: I’ve been thinking about this for a very, very long time, and at the end of the day, this is my decision. All of this that I’ve just blathered on about is one hundred percent MY decision. This is what I feel like will help me in the long run. I feel like I need a semi-condensed time frame of both improving my craft and discipline, something that I’m not confident that I would be able to teach myself via online resources with everything else I have going on each week.

It’s going to be difficult, I’m not gonna lie. There are still some issues with this movement I need to solve that – for the time being – have a lot of unknowns. However… this is what I want to do, and I’m happy to have finally made the decision.

Now I can say, with almost complete certainty… I hope to have better stuff for you guys to see in the future.

Thanks for reading. See you soon.

~ Wade