No Such Thing As An Original Thought?
A friend of mine recently asked, “What are your thoughts on emulating artists works in order to learn and grow into your own technique?”
Every deep thinker eventually has the worry that he/she is only repeating things he/she has heard elsewhere. “Am I really smart? Or am I just building on the work of people before me?”
The truth is, that’s just how thought works. we learn from other people. No child ever started drawing by letting their mind flow… they ALL started by learning from someone else’s example.
In my opinion… there’s no difference between you emulating someone’s style for practice and a child emulating how to draw a flower or a house or a rainbow. Eventually they may develop their own style characteristics, but it’s more a result of experimentation with mixing/matching styles… or learning to embrace your own imperfections/nuances/mistakes and then exploiting them.
Our culture advances one baby-step at at time… and everybody builds on the work of those that came before them. This is especially noticeable at my job, where clients only communicate in terms of things they’ve seen elsewhere. “Give me something clean…Apple-like… with animation like on the sprint commercials…”
As much as we pride ourselves on being “cutting edge”… we are still affixed to the blade. We still have to design within the constraints of what is popular or current. People here are always discussing design trends so we can stay ahead of the curve, so I get to see and discuss a lot of popular trends…. and it’s apparent that each trend is just a slight variation of the last.
Last year grunge elements grew off of the text… now the text is made out of grunge elements.
Last year the logos were colorful and ribbony… this year the ribbons got shaded to appear bent or folded.
Time to stop worrying about being 100% original. The best you can do is to put your heart into your work. Remember, it’s the SPIRIT of the piece that makes it special. Not the execution.
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indeed!
and on a related note:
boy am i ever sick of “can you make it do that reflecting thing like on an iPhone?”
that reflection isn’t as easy as it seems at first…
yes… it’s nice to feel like you’ve been reduced to a photoshop effect.
Originality comes in bursts I think. One big boom, then a paradigm shift. After that its all copies for a while until the next big one.