This might seem very basic to anyone out there that is a truly talented artist but in my classes I try to encourage my students to find an interest in art, not only to become the best at it. I think that in many art classes there is far too much focus on being able to Bob Ross your way through a painting and have it look like it is a photograph rather than a painting. This doesn't mean that I have a problem with Ross, he is one of the GOAT's.
When we are doing simple things like scenery or buildings, I always encourage my students to imagine that it is a cartoon or even a Dr Seuss illustration. I encourage them to focus on making it evident what the thing is, but not so much on making it look like what it actually looks like in real life. I find that this is an excellent way to bring out each student's own creativity and also will set their work out from others.
Take this for example: Those trees are clearly trees are they not? yet they don't look like any tree that you will see anywhere in the world. Well Maybe the evergreens can be cultivated in real life to look that way but the other ones could be just about anything. The point is that these are clearly trees, even though you will be very hard-pressed to ever see one out your window that looks exactly like that and if you ever do, maybe you should step off the LSD a touch.
I reference the greats when I talk to my students about their artwork and how even names like Picasso would routinely have things in his scenes that looked nothing like what the actual person, animal, or thing looks like in real life. You can insert almost any great classical artist's name and you will end up finding the same thing. The Scream is one of my favorite paintings of all time and the person depicted in the picture doesn't look like any person that has ever lived. Realism is not necessarily the point of art, it is more about perspective.
From a youth point of view this absence of focus on making something look exactly like it would with a camera is also much more encouraging because it is VERY difficult to recreate something on paper or canvas that looks just like the real world. Plus, at least for me, if that is something that someone wants to do then maybe just get a camera and do that instead.
Art lies in the eye of the beholder and many of the most famous artists were incapable of recreating a real-life looking scene if they had to. In my mind that is not what art is, that is what technology is. So if you are an aspiring artist, and to quote Bob Ross, "embrace your tiny mistakes." They might be the very thing that makes your work unique to the world and that is what art is all about.
.jpg)