Every Realism Artists Struggle – The Truth of our committed relationship to Realism

If you’re a realism artist like me, you’ll definitely be able to relate to this post. Whether you predominantly work with pencils like me, or paints, watercolours, oils, whatever it may be – we’ll all have this one thing in common: Our inability to be able to create a piece of artwork that isn’t realistic.

Yes. I bet you’re nodding your head right now. It’s one of our biggest character flaws! No, I’m kidding, it’s okay to stick to one style – however it’s not okay to feel like you’re not ALLOWED to play with different styles if you want to. I know that’s how I feel. As if I’m in some kind of committed relationship with realism art or something, and if I try to break away I’m cheating! But no, seriously, I don’t know what it is but I just struggle so much to create artwork without just drawing exactly what I see. After priming myself for so long to draw what I see and capture the image as realistically as possible, my mind is just accustomed to that now. It’s so hard to break away from that and it often feels like it’s impossible for me to.

Realism drawing I did in 2019

Realism drawing I did in 2021

Realism as an Art Style

Realism is my favourite art style to do. There are people who will try to tell you that realism is not true art, as all you’re doing is “copying” an image. Pay no attention to those people, because they are incorrect and frankly artistically uneducated if you ask me. Realism art is of course an art. The second you put a pencil, paintbrush or whatever medium you use, to a blank canvas and are able to turn that blank nothingness into something else – that is art. Being able to visually depict details and transfer them from image to paper like realism artists do, is a great artistic ability and falls right under the umbrella of art. So firstly, never doubt yourself as an artist if realism is your style.

I’ll be honest – realism isn’t easy. If I had a penny for every time I’ve been asked how I do it, or had people say to me they’d never be able to draw like I do, I’d be filthy rich! It isn’t easy, and it can take a lot of hard work, dedication and determination if you are just starting out as a beginner. But absolutely everyone has the ability to draw realistically if they practice enough. It’s an amazing art style, I’m always blown away when I see the works of other realism artists. The ability to take an image and transfer every detail onto paper/a canvas and reimagine that image and bring it to life, is amazing. It’s truly a beautiful thing. That being said, it can get exhausting sometimes. Realism art takes a looong time. Hours and hours (depending on the size of your piece). But most of the time you wouldn’t finish a drawing/painting in a day. It takes a lot of time, and for me I know sometimes I just wanna be able to create something in even less than an hour. Just throw out all the rules of realism and create whatever I want. But I never know what to create. Or how to break away from realism when I want to. It’s really hard and I’m still trying to figure it out, but I think trying to get more comfortable with breaking away from realism is important, because it’s good to shake things up at times.

Why it’s good to change things up sometimes

Change is good. It’s something I’ve been trying to teach myself for a while. Change in any area of your life can feel scary, when we’re so used to something being the way it is, the idea of things being different can be terrifying and lead you to want to keep everything the way it is. But what does change lead to? Development and growth. We can’t develop if we keep things the same, we’ll just always stay stuck in the same place. And the same thing can be said for art. I know that when I stick to the same thing for too long, I can feel so stuck. And that feeling of being stuck makes me lose motivation and inspiration, and I just don’t create anything for long periods of time. And anything I do try to draw in those periods, are done with lack of passion. I need to recharge my battery in order to create pieces I enjoy creating. And letting go of my style of realism pencil portraits can help that. If you don’t want to try out a whole new style that’s fine, even just switching up your subject could help, or the medium you’re using.

For example, recently I decided to try my hand at painting – it’s not something I ever do as painting always seemed daunting to me. With graphite pencils I know I have that safety blanket of being able to erase any imperfections, and I’m comfortable with shading. However with painting, everything’s different. There are new rules to learn. For one, you cannot rub out mistakes. That has always been the main thing that would make me want to run away, however when I started painting I realised there were different ways to fix mistakes, it’s just about learning how to adapt. Another difference between drawing and painting is to do with tone. With drawing, we’re told to build up tone from light to dark, however with painting the recommendation is to begin with the darkest blocks of colour and build up the lighter tones on top. It’s weird to step into a new world, that governs its own rules. Of course you don’t have to stick to the rules, but at this point I was still trying to paint realistically and so wanted to know how I could do that. I chose an owl as my subject and tried to paint what I saw. The outcome was not as bad as I thought it’d be, and I learnt a lot as I was doing it. It was fun to compare what I was doing to what I would be doing if I was drawing it. It was refreshing.

My finished Owl painting 2022

For Christmas I had asked for a set of Arteza’s Pre-mixed Acrylic Pouring Paints. It’s a set of 32 colours and they are mixed with some kind of pouring substance to get it to a more fluid consistency so that you can pour them on canvas and allow them to drip and spread, creating beautiful effects! I decided to try them out the other day. My first attempt did not go very well. The paints I found to still be quite thick and gloopy, not giving the desired fluidity I expected. So I added some water to my paints, however I added too much and the end result ended in a puddle of green! Through this process I learned that I needed to add less water, so I tried again and the end result was much better!

Finished piece I created using Arteza Pouring Acrylics and fine liner pen, in 2022

This shows that when we are trying something new, it’s obviously going to feel daunting and chances are we’ll go wrong! Its natural. But we can’t let this fear of failure, or this discomfort of not knowing what we’re doing stop us. Often we just learn as we go. And even if things go wrong, we’re still creating art! And that’s what important, we’re exercising our creativity. We need to strengthen it like a muscle. Imagine being at the gym; staying on the same machine, using the same equipment (in our case the realism machine, and the equipment being whatever medium you use) can get boring. And we can lose the motivation and inspiration to keep working at it. So often times just hopping on another machine, switching up our equipment etc, can spark a new type of inspiration in us and reignite our passion to work at our creative muscle. And the more we strengthen it on this new “machine”, the more stronger and motivated we’ll be when we return to our primary “machine” as we would of had a break from it and be excited to engage with it once again. with fresh eyes So, if you take anything away from this blog post – remember its okay to switch things up at times. I know it can be hard to break away from realism when you’ve been doing it for so long, but once you realise there’s no harm in trying something else out you’ll see how refreshing and freeing it can feel to do something completely new and out of your comfort zone.

Stay creative, stay creating 🙂

#art