Blog Post 2

The pain and agony associated with writing a first draft is seemingly inevitable. It is easy to perfect and review an already finished piece, but getting the ball rolling altogether is the hardest part when creating almost anything. As Anne Lamott states in her piece that "very few writers really know what they're doing until they've done it." As an artist, this is an all too familiar statement to me. My passion is photography, but I try to practice other forms of art as well, such as painting or sketching. It is difficult to dive straight into an unfamiliar concept, especially when the title of "art student" is at stake. It is commonly assumed that all art students are phenomenal at all forms of art. Therefore, as a photographer, when I start to paint something, I begin to doubt myself, not knowing how to make my ideal piece at the moment. A common exercise most artists take part in is thumbnails, basically a first draft for any kind of art. A paper is divided into sixteen squares. The top four squares are four ideas for a piece the artist may have. After that, the three boxes below it are new versions of the same original idea. Drafts are needed in order to make the best possible outcome of one's work, because more often than not, the first idea is not the best one. This is similar to a writer, in that a writer feels as though every piece of text they publish must be better than the last. In reality, there is time for mistakes, and time to make those revisions. The whole world is not going to read the first shitty draft made if it is not shared to the whole world. It is there for practice, and getting the ball rolling on an even better piece.