Until You Create, You Won’t Know Who You Are As a Creative

The second lesson learned from reading Steal Like An Artist

In the second chapter of Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist, he gives the advice to just get started.

As a creative, you won’t know who you are until you actual create.

This is a truth I recently wrestled with and had to accept if I wanted to develop my own creative styles. As a creative who wants to be a master many different facets art, practicing and learning is key to develop my skills and taste.

To figure out who you are as a creative, you have to start the arduous and laborious task of creating.

Make Things To Find Your Voice

You can’t wait around to figure yourself out before you start creating.

To find your creative voice, you must develop a bias towards action. Cast aside your fear of starting. Regardless of how scared you may be, you must start somewhere even when you don’t know what you are doing.

The secret is that most creatives (including me) don’t know what the hell we are doing.

What matters is that we create something every day.

Fake It Until You Make It

Kleon gives the advice to fake it until you make it.

I largely agree with this advice. To be an artist, you must act like an artist. That much is true. But I want to expand on this thought just a little more.

It’s not so much fake it until you make it, but embrace the identity you want to have.

Want to be a designer? Then design. Want to be a musician? Then make music. Want to be an illustrator? Then illustrate. It’s that simple.

Think of your creative work as a kind of theater. A play you are an actor in. Play the part you have chosen for yourself and embody it until you can no longer tell the difference between being and acting.

Start Copying

Faking it until you make it naturally means copying the work you want to emulate in your own art.

You don’t want to plagiarize.

You want to practice and develop your own creative process and style.

Look at every opportunity you have to reverse engineer what your creative heroes are doing so you can create art you enjoy. To achieve this, you need to figure out two things:

1. Figure out who you want to copy.
2. Figure out what you want to copy.

And then, get to work.

Imitation Is Not Flattery

However, imitation is not enough. Eventually, your art must emulate rather than imitate.

It’s fine to copy the work of creatives whose art you enjoy. But to find your own creative voice, you need to move beyond imitation. Through emulation, you show your artistic inspiration while adding your own style to your creative work.

Your artistic uniqueness relies on how you remix the art that inspired you and add a twist to your art that others will eventually seek to imitate and then emulate.