I Chose Easy Art Over Better Art

When art became Content, I stopped growing…

I recently took a stab at oil pastels!

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I always wanted to make easy, low-effort art.

Art that looked Instagram-worthy, and just pretty enough to earn the dopamine-packed, ego-boosting Likes and Comments.

So I always took the easy route. I never worked on the hard part of art — the strokes, layering and blending techniques, shadows…the boring, unglamourous things that apparently, didn’t matter to me at the time.

Why slog when the likes are coming in even without it?

And before I even realised it, I stopped making art for myself, and made art only for Instagram. Every artwork became content. Something to post, rather than something that helped me feel good, or learn, or improve.

And because I was avoiding the difficult things, I never really improved as an artist. I kept looking for shortcuts around the very “unglamourous” skills that would have made my art many times better.

And deep inside, I knew it. I’ve always been taking the easier, safer, and lower-effort route. Because that’s what scarcity mindset teaches you all along, right?

Offline art classes

All of this was set to change when I recently enrolled for an in-person acrylic painting certification course this February.

But even then, I wasn’t really looking forward to doing the hard things, I was only looking forward to my artist girly era, wearing flowy dresses and skirts and going to art classes, toting a bag of art supplies on one shoulder and a big art board against another.

It was all about living my art student dreams, which I didn’t get to do in my real career.

But sooner than I would have liked, my rose-colored glasses came off.

I found myself face-to-face with everything I had spent years avoiding: the hard parts of painting. Blending. Techniques. Layer upon layer of colour. And the frustrating wait for those layers to dry. Adding shadows. And those awful little highlights that shook the soul out of my already flimsy patience.

No shortcut around any of it.

No clever hack.

No way to make it look finished without actually doing the work.

Only hours of ‘I didn’t sign up for this’ moments.

But because I had already paid this full fee in advance, I gulped all of that down, and carried on.

All that boring, hard stuff. Day after day. Hour after hour.

Until I finished my very first painting in the course.

On the day I completed it and walked out of that class, I felt like a slightly different person. I walked a little differently. There was a happy, hopeful spring in my step. The artist in me had quietly grown a little bigger.

With every shadow, every little stroke and highlight, those ugly first layers got a glow-up! It took an awfully long time, much longer than I would have liked. But in the end, every bit of that effort paid off.

I completed four paintings in total, and here’s how they came out!

That’s me, with all four finished paintings.

And for someone who had spent years trying to avoid the hard parts of art, this experience changed me.

I learned how to blend colours properly. How to add depth with shadows. Use highlights without overdoing them.

How to choose the right brush for different parts of a painting. More importantly, I learned that there was no shortcut around these things.

The road to becoming the person you want to be usually runs straight through the things you don’t feel like doing

It’s never too late.

Start doing the hard things. Do them badly at first. Do them consistently, and do them for a very long time!

I’m an artist who writes.

I share notes on better writing, art, creativity and building a life you love!

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