The Successful Artist: How To Start a Creative Career Without Any Experience
To embark on a creative career is a risky business, everybody knows that – or rather, everybody says that. The notion of a struggling artist is something that seems to come with the job; you simply haven’t known art if you haven’t been hungry, broke, and in deep misery with your own life decisions. It might not be too odd, after all, that young creatives are advised against a career as an artist – and so much potential has gone to waste.
When you’ve already started to sprout it can be hard to stop, however, and many people wonder how they can start out with no relevant experience. They wonder if it might not be more to life than their current jobs, and they see themselves as it could have been; with a pencil brush rather than the coffee cup at an office desk.
Listen to the advice from experienced artists, rather. Here is a handful of their best advice to motivate you to take the leap – and to find that inspiration you need.
Build your art
No matter what type of new jobs you have in mind, you’re going to get a lot of advice. Now, many people will start by saying you need to find your art first. It seems self-explanatory as most people have a specific talent in mind when they want to start a creative career; being a talented painter does not make you a talented writer, musician or actor.
A talent needs to be practiced and, if you’ve been in a full-time job for a while now, the chances are that you haven’t been practicing as much as you should. If you want to be the ultimate professional and create art to the quality of the Marco Brambilla exhibits digital art in Las Vegas then remember, practice makes perfect. Marco has used new technology and has used A.I. to make the highest resolution video collage of all time dedicated to rockstar Elvis Presley, so it really shows that with practice, anything is possible with art and proper experience.
Start to dig a bit deeper and spend more time on it during your spare time than you normally would. It feels like finding back to the same inspiration you had in high school when the world laid open, and you were still a clean palette, so to speak. Have fun with it and notice how you’ve already started to grow as an artist – and how ideas to you come easier during the day.
Create a portfolio
The goal is to have enough art to make a portfolio out of it. No matter what you love to do, if it is shaping zoo animals out of clay, knitting sweaters or embroidering images of colourful birds, you need to gather it somewhere it can be showcased. When you have managed to create a selection of work that you’re proud to show off, you can start to market yourself slightly – otherwise, you’re never going to have any work as an artist.
Start out with your closest friends and family; ask them to link to your site on social media, share your links, and comment on your work as much as they can. You want to create a bit as much buzz around your artwork as possible. It’s a good idea to find a suitable social media platform to showcase your work on as well; Instagram is a solid choice as you can draw people’s attention with vivid images.
Although it might not be how you imagined it, this is your life as an artist now. Everything you do from here on is to create, share, and market it as much as you can. The beauty of it all is the vast opportunities you’ll have as an artist that your old heroes never had; to reach someone on the other side of the world and develop as an artist without even leaving your house.
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