Learning to find confidence in your creative abilities

Ask any adult, and they have often decided they are either creative or terrible at art. This impression of ourselves usually begins in childhood when we start to build our self-image and are encouraged to explore art, or an unkind comment knocks our confidence in our artistic ability.   

I genuinely believe there is no such thing as “not being able to draw”, but we all draw in our own way. How your hand moves across the page, applies pressure and interprets shape is part of this. Often what people mean is that they can’t draw a visually accurate impression.  

It certainly takes practice and time to develop the skill, but it is a skill, like learning to drive. If you want to do it, you can. You just need to want to do it enough, perhaps with some guided classes, to develop your confidence to practice regularly. 

Drawing is simply making marks on a page in its most straightforward form. Take away the voices of judgement, and you will find that you can draw.  

Having the freedom to create and explore art without the fear of what the final piece will look like is so important. Not only does it allow you to get going in the first place, but the unexpected results often give you something you couldn’t even have imagined when you began. 

The mistakes you hadn’t anticipated can be the things that make a piece of work. Whether it’s the gesture in a brush mark, an unplanned drip of watercolour, or the accidental smudge of charcoal, all these ‘mistakes’ can add to your work. These unexpected results may even become a key feature of your style. We should welcome them and learn to recognise mistakes to keep.  

Unfortunately, you can’t hit delete on paper or canvas, but mental editing or reviewing your work is a good habit to develop. It’s about building your visual vocabulary and keeping what you like in the editing process. Over time you’ll learn more about how you work and in what way you’d like to build your ideas. 

Learning to overcome the fear of putting pencil to paper and the uncontrolled elements of making art is the only way to take steps forward. Some of them may lead you to great things!  

At The Art Class, you can access a wide variety of drawing and painting classes that have been pre-recorded, so you can develop your art skills at your own pace and gain confidence in your creative ability with simple step-by-step guidance.  

Take a look at our pre-recorded art classes here.