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Do I need to go to Art School to be an Artist?

SketchMonster
8 min read

Intro

Do you need to go to art school to be a successful artist?

The answer is, it depends.

There are so many different factors that lead to whether or not you need to go to art school to be good or successful. Do you want to learn easy things to draw or have a full digital art career? Ultimately it’s up to you to make that personal decision, but I will give you some information that will help you decide. It’s a decision that can redirect the course of your entire art life. Here are a few things to know to make the decision a lot easier.

I consider this question to be two parts.

– Question 1 is, do I need art school to be a good artist?

– Question 2 is, Do I need art school to get a job in art?

You can be good and not get art jobs.

The road can be one in the same, but sometimes its not. My first art school specialized in life drawing. Life drawing is where you draw a model on stage.

Life-drawing students that came from the school were amazing and they seemed to have every aspect of it down. I credit this school for teaching me the proper way to draw a figure, but there was a problem.

Producing Artists

That school didn’t know how to produce artists for the workplace. Everyone at the school wanted to be illustrators for book covers, concept artists, or go into design fields. While we have a strong grasp of drawing the human body, we were never taught design, clothing, vehicles, backgrounds, or digital art.

Since the school purported to prepare us for the workplace, yet didn’t teach so much, a lot of animosity started to boil over. Many ended up leaving the school, myself included. I ended up leaving to go to The Art Center School of Design in Pasadena. That school was a perfect example of having the ability to make someone a better artist in one area but did not create great artists for the job field.

I can’t tell you how many artists I’ve met who had amazing sketchbooks, only to never have worked in any drawing job. Those people were and are everywhere.

Saving Time

I started out drawing by learning from an art teacher for some creative fun. It was the fine art school that I mentioned above. In about 2-3 years I was able to draw pretty proficiently. This is due to the fact that I started my art journey with a teacher. It’s undeniable, that a good teacher helps. I make easy things to draw.

A teacher in drawing cuts down on trial and error by so much time and can propel you to places you might not have been able to get along. Instead of wandering around not knowing what to do for many years, I had someone guide me along the same drawing path they themselves had taken. They were spoon-feeding me the entire way through until I knew enough to teach myself.

If I had a difficulty with something, chances are, they knew what stage of art development I was in, and would give me ways out of my dilemma. This process is almost guaranteed to get you great results. The only way this process works is if you find a good teacher. I’m not going to lie, it’s going to be hard to find a good teacher when you aren’t good enough in the skill you are trying to learn.

Things to look for in a good art teacher or school are:

1) You like their art.

2) If you like their student’s art.

3) Their students have worked in art fields. The third isn’t as important if all you want is improved skills.

Pick Art Schools Wisely

Originally, I went to a junior college art class. Junior colleges tend to vary in quality when it comes to art instruction. You could get a teacher who was just filling time with random nonsense, or you got art instructors who really wanted to see you grow and learn. This is why I tended to hear trade schools had better instructors for art than regular Universities or Junior Colleges.

The teacher I received in my junior college class was not very good. For one, her ego was out of control. She kept repeating the line “I normally teach a class of professional artists”.

She seemed to have little interest in helping any of the students and was more concerned with filling her time for a paycheck. On top of this, her own art was not very good. Even though at the time I was 18 and had zero drawing experience, I knew that her mashed potato-looking figures were not good figure painting.

Seeing this, it was obvious she probably couldn’t help us improve in art if she had wanted to. This class was an example of an easy credit for someone who did art as a hobby but wasn’t looking to become a proficient artist. This wasn’t a place to genuinely learn. It would have been a creative class for someone dabbling in art in their free time.

Focus

For the longest time, the only factor stopping me from learning was focusing on one thing to learn. I was in no art schools for the first time in years and I knew enough to continue training myself in art. But I had started a learning process and then just randomly jumped to a different topic. I was very scatterbrained and couldn’t stick to one thing.

Being on my own had me lose the direction of my goal. I had no more structure to my learning. Drawing projects were no longer easy things to draw. I lacked the discipline to carry one project all the way through. One minute I was enamored by animated styles of drawing, then the next minute I thought the style of Jim Lee was awesome and tried to draw more like that. The randomness of my mind was crippling my art learning because I just couldn’t stay on one topic long enough to benefit from it.

This is where I HAD to go to school in order to have someone else to get me to focus again.

In order for me personally to step forward, I needed a “drawing coach” per say to keep me on one topic and force me to do one thing for a long time in order to grow in one area. In order for us to learn any one thing, I need to work on my weaknesses in art. Art has so many facets that It was impossible for me to learn by only dabbling in one little thing at a time. Your weaknesses are something you have to bring up one thing at a time.

How Much Time You Have

Sometimes it feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day to learn the thing you need to learn creative fun. This is mainly due to disorganization. If you organize your learning time well and know what to do to move forward, this becomes a more manageable issue. It can feel like you are wasting time if you are mentally struggling through a certain task.

I can give you a clear example. Have you ever drawn something and then dragging your thoughts through the whole process? The first several times drawing a car in digital art class is unbelievably hard and feels like it takes more hours than necessary. You are mentally pushing your mind and hand to draw something you have never drawn before.

And as you do that same drawing 20-30 times, you start to feel it goes faster and faster. The repetition makes the mental load lighter to lift. Creative fun can be fun again. Part of it is that you know what to do, but the other part is you are putting up less mental resistance to the task. It takes less energy out of you to do it. Perceived time is much shorter because it’s a simple task you are walking through. And maybe eventually cars become easy things to draw.

Financial

The main question is, if the money is worth it. If the money is completely unreachable, then don’t do it. But If you have researched a school and know they check every mark I mentioned above about producing good artists, then the money is absolutely worth it.

I went into some debt for Art Center, but the school was an amazing experience that propelled me forward mentally. It made digital art class a joy. Be very careful with this, when I was a caricature artist at a theme park, I was surrounded by former students of Art Institute in San Diego. Some of these former students had 150 thousand dollar debts and their basic art skills were not very good.

So make sure to investigate the school you want very thoroughly before you invest so much money and time. So I declined to go to that school and instead went to Art Center of Design in Pasadena.

There I was around some amazing artists daily having creative fun, my classmates were obsessed, and I was pushed in a direction I wouldn’t have gone on my own. You can take several months investigating before throwing yourself into a situation where you will be for several years.

Connections

All the connections you’ll make in art school are some of the longest relationships you’ll make through your art career. The problem is thinking of them as connections primarily. If you think too strongly about networking, you’ll start to see people as just a venue to some sort of goal. The better way is to naturally make friendships in the surrounding area of school. It gives you a natural way of going about networking. It makes the connections feel more genuine and easy to keep up with.

Osmosis

Having another student who’s better than you at the exact type of art that you are, is invaluable. The specific type of art really matters as well. At first glance, an art group can be great, but if my peer is into animation, and I’m into illustration, I don’t feel the mental push to improve at my illustration. A push comes from a pursuit you see as achievable, but have not reached yet. If the pursuit isn’t relevant or achievable the mind tends to just relax and not try.

When I was a student at the art center, I was surrounded by talented younger artists who were all striving to be concept artists and illustrators. Watching your peers work harder and study harder is infectious. I found myself putting in more hours to impress my peers and myself. It’s hard not to imitate the others learning around you and this change would occur almost unconsciously. If you find a group of creatives that really push you, then that is invaluable to learn.

Be wary of groups that might hold you back. When I moved back home after the art center, I was surrounded by local artists who really didn’t have much going on in the part of the organization. There was this mystery is company mentality. Those groups are great to just hang out in and get creative juices flowing for conversation, but it never helped as far as motivating me to become better. In those groups, there were also different forms of art that I didn’t do. So I need more to look up to.

Conclusion

Art School is not a necessary step, but for some, it might be. For me personally, I didn’t have the motivation or discipline to push myself further. Sometimes, I needed outside motivators to get me to the next level every step of the way. I also got very lucky in that I picked a school that produced great artists as my first real training. Thinking back, I don’t know where I would be if I had only stuck to doing art classes at my junior college.

It’s possible I could even now be struggling with basic art skills had I chosen that path. If you find that you are self-motivated and internally have what it takes to carry through on tasks, then just practice daily and watch video lessons online. It is a personal decision and there are many roads to success.