Steal Like An Artist

Steal Like An Artist gives you permission to copy your heroes’ work and use it as a springboard to find your own, unique style, all while remembering to have fun, creating the right work environment for your art and letting neither criticism nor praise drive you off track.

Back in 2011, there was a huge uproar about our German then-minister of defence, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. Someone stumbled across a few un-cited references when reviewing his doctoral thesis and reported those to a newspaper. This launched a full investigation by the university, and led to a crowdsourcing project, where people dissect PhD theses to determine if they’re plagiarized. Ultimately, Guttenberg lost his title and his job as Minister of Defence.

That’s the bad kind of copying. Putting your name on other peoples’ work isn’t cool. Trying to imitate your favorite artists however, is a different story.

Especially when you’re starting out, it’ll be hard to come up with ideas and how to do things. But you can always start with re-building what someone else has done. For example, my very first website was the result of nothing more than me following a 2-hour, step-by-step, Youtube video tutorial on how to make a Wordpress site.

The reason this works is that inevitably, at some point you’ll realize you can’t exactly copy any more, because it just won’t work. Where you fail to copy your chosen artist is exactly where it gets interesting. In those gaps lies your own, unique way of doing things, and that’s what you should explore to find the niche that’ll define your career.

Being an artist is one of few professions where procrastination is actually quite productive. Because sudden insights and flashes of genius occur during down-time, when you let your mind wander, it’s a good idea to make that down-time part of your routine. First and foremost, this means not giving up all of your hobbies and side projects when you start creating your art. If you play the piano, love to sing karaoke or tend to your garden, keep doing it. It’ll be the source of many new ideas for your paintings, writings or song lyrics. That’s because like with copying, an artist’s output is always the result of all of the things that influenced her, and the more diverse your inputs, the more creative the outcome. If you’re not a person with many hobbies to begin with, don’t fret though. Your side projects don’t have to be as creative as your actual art. Even doing the dishes at night, taking care of chores and grocery shopping, as well as downright procrastinating by watching Youtube videos (one of my favorite ways to start the day) can…