How About You Get Off Your Ass and Make Some Art?

Creativity is a very strange thing. Human society has evolved to the point where we have so much free time that we hardly know what to do with it. Some of us write, some of us make illustrations or music, some of us animate… A lot of us do nothing.

We just sit there, in front of the computer, a tool that has made it easier than ever for us take that need of expression and turn it into artworks that our friends, our families and bajillions of strangers can enjoy (or hate) and yet we do nothing. We (sometimes) pay for and install expensive, complicated software, with the hope of eventually making something great with it. We copy others and make ourselves believe that we’ve actually learned something. We read about ‘real’ artists, and hope we that they can inspire us to become just as good someday.

But what is the sum of all this work?

Nothing. Not much, at least.

You could be awesome at Photoshop, you could have animation techniques that would make Aleksandr Petrov weep with jealousy, and have some beats and loops you made stored on your hard drive that Timbaland would love to steal.

But unless you get that creative brain to really express yourself, unless you use those (proverbial) beats and loops to make that (proverbial) song and get it out there, Timbaland is just going to find someone else to steal from.

They say that there’s a book inside all of us. This is only really true for those of us who aren’t boring or who have peculiar eating habits. There might be a number of great drawings inside of you, however, or animations, or songs, or films, or interactive real time 3-dimensional massively multiplayer online hamster wheels. You visiting my little blog means that you, at the very least, have an interest in creative expression, and at the very most are an accomplished artist who has decided to me with his digital presence, and if he’s really nice also a comment or two. So I’m right in assuming that you consider yourself creative.

All it takes to call yourself  ‘creative’ is that need to create. It’s some weird instinctual message from your brain telling you to do something meaningful with your time once you are done gathering food and procreating.

But guess what? Just as much as you need to create, the world needs your creations. It does. The world can be a terrible, awful place, filled with violence and suffering. Every little piece of creative expression helps to lessen some of that suffering. At the very least your work will relieve some of your own stress, and at most it will inspire revolutionary uprisings hundreds of years from now, finally liberating the human race from their robotic overlords once and for all. So make it good. Make it real.

Your art is your power, your ability to influence the world. Your real voice. Through the digital medium, this voice can spread farther and faster than pathetic little sound vibrations ever could on their own.

Just remember that anyone can slap on a lens flair, anyone can set some keyframes, and anyone can install and start up some software (my grandmother excluded.) You may already have fantastic technical skills, but what about the important skills? What about your creative expression? What do you have to say to the world? What do you have to say to yourself? Don’t just draw some lines, don’t just make anything, make something. Something new, something that is yours. Keep it private, publish it on your website, profit from it, or remove all rights and share it freely with the world, it doesn’t matter.

As long as you make something.

Not just anything.