Set aside an hour or more each day to devote to nothing but practicing your technique. Focus especially on those areas that are the weakest for you, but build your strengths as well. Take advantage of the communities and resources that you can find. Artist supply manufacturers, and art stores themselves, often have free literature, tutorials, videos, and websites that are loaded with tips, techniques, and more. Some stores even offer weekend training seminars, where you can not only pick up some new skills, you’ll also meet other artists.
Start with a still life, or a photo that’s yours, in public domain, or that you have permission to use. Draw or paint that same photo over and over, using different approaches—paint, pencil, abstract, realism—whatever moves you. Build up from easy subjects, like a rubber ball or a rectangular block, to more complicated, difficult subjects, like a rose, a clear glass marble or a shiny metal bowl. And try to get the details right: the curves of a petal, the clarity of the glass, or reflections so good that Escher would be impressed! Each of them will improve your ability to draw in general. Practice timed gesture drawing. Pick your subject, set your timer for two or three minutes, start drawing, then stop when the timer goes off, even if the drawing isn’t finished. Set the timer again and start over. Doing 10 three minute drawings will give you more skill than taking half an hour to draw the same thing in detail.
When trying an expensive new medium, visit Dick Blick or Jerry’s Artarama and email them for samples. Many types of art suppliers make sample sized products or the company will send out just one stick or a small piece of the expensive paper or canvas for you to test before deciding what to buy. This gives you a chance to try it first and see if you like it. Try more than one brand—the samples are usually not the same color and you can find out which brand to invest in by those trials.
Don’t confuse critique with personal criticism, especially if the critic is somebody who is not interested in seeing you become an artist.
As you learn more, reach out to those who are just starting. You will learn more every time you explain and demonstrate what you already know. It’s very common for teachers to learn from their students!
The better you get at art, the easier it is for people to compliment you and call you talented. Compliments can sometimes be critiques, and those are very valuable! Should an artist whose work you admire give you a compliment such as, “I love the colors in this,” this means they are not only nice enough to compliment you on your work, but have taken the time to understand and appreciate the choices you made.
Having a personal style is a combination of learning to draw and paint well in your favorite mediums while consistently paying the most attention to your favorite subjects. You will become a specialist, a “brand of one” at a certain intermediate level of competence. Mastering a subject and a medium comes later, at the point when you could do it easily without thinking at all about how you do it, yet always have consistent results.
Make your work available in as many formats as possible, so that there are no barriers for interested gallery owners or art patrons to view your work.
Blog daily about your work, and include illustrations showing your process and a gallery to show (and/or sell) your finished works. Visit all the galleries in your area, and get to know the proprietors. If you’re old enough, attend as many openings as possible, not to promote your own work—there will be time enough for that later—but to become a known artist in the community. Create a Facebook for your art, and encourage people to visit and like your page. Reach out to other artists through Facebook. Like visiting galleries, this will help place you in the community, and Facebook can reach well beyond your neighborhood. Tweet about art regularly. Your art, historical art, pop art, any art at all. The more you know about art, the more you’ll be recognized as somebody worth paying attention to. At the same time, follow artists and galleries, and respond to their tweets. This will encourage more people—including gallery owners—to follow you. Create a Flickr account and post scans or photos of your art. It’s an active community, and while you won’t get a lot of helpful critique on Flickr, you will build your name recognition, and perhaps become online friends with some very talented artists. In today’s digital world, social media and a website are the easiest ways to put your artwork into the world and attract fans who care about what you do.
Teach workshops. This will help you not only get known as an artist, but also as an expert in your field. Build your skills until you can enter major national and international contests in your chosen medium. Enter juried art shows. Getting a painting into a juried art show is itself an achievement to put on your resume. When you have too many, shorten it by listing only the most important shows.
You might also want to work with a reputable attorney who specializes in the art world. While an agent may know a bit about the law, their job is promotion. A lawyer’s only job is knowing about the applicable law.
If you like expressing anger and dark emotions, study dark painters. If you like abstracts and splatter paintings, study them and do them—they take their own techniques and don’t just happen because someone threw paint at a canvas and called it art. If you love wildlife and the outdoors, get a small portable painting kit and paint “en plein air” (outdoors) in your favorite places. Whatever your passion, find ways to capture that passion on the canvas.
Continuing to learn and invent, even after you are famous, will not just keep you on top of your game, focused on the future instead of putting your best years behind you. As your style grows and changes, older paintings you’ve done become more valuable. Collectors will be interested in the entire history of your life’s work. Even the drawings you did as a child become valuable: what your mom stuck to the fridge has the seeds of your current success, so don’t throw away earlier works.
