10 Habits of Highly Effective Artists

Whether you are a beginner or a professional artist, you have certainly adopted a few habits over the months or years you have been practicing art, whether it be 2D or 3D or any other form of art.

Today we are going to talk about 10 of the most effective Habits of Highly Effective Artists.

10- They Listen to Feedback.

A good artist always listens to what people with experience are saying about his work. Artists sometimes or often take the feedback personally and instead of really listening to what other artists are saying to help him improve, he starts defending his work and getting upset about the criticism. Successful artists know that behind every piece of advice or criticism is a hidden opportunity to improve and become better. Art is created by the artist but experience by others whether they are artists or ordinary people. So, if you want to apply these Habits of Highly Effective Artists, a good thing to do is to detach yourself emotionally from your work and try to see your creation from the eyes of others.

9- They Learn/Work in Chunks.

Being productive as an artist means learning and working in chunks of time of your choosing, depending on how long you will be able to keep going. A good period of work to rest ratio is 90 mins of work and 15 mins of rest. This isone of the best Habits of Highly Effective Artists, it allows you to detach yourself from your work temporarily and then come back to it energized and looking at with fresh eyes. Getting up from your desk is also a good idea to avoid hurting your back due to long sitting hours. 

I would say this is a more realistic plan for learning more than it is for working because working as an artist usually happens under deadlines and artists can easily lose themselves in their work for hours, on end without realizing how time went by, this actually is a mind and body state known as FLOW, where you, as an artist, can become one entity with your work and lose track of time and space. Some artists who work very long hours usually enter this state and they don’t want to lose it. So instead of taking breaks, they buy desks that allow them to switch between a standing and sitting position every hour or so.

8- They Set Goals for Themselves

Successful artists set goals for themselves. If they want to work in game development or a VFX studio, they write their goal down and work hard to make it a reality. If they want to make a certain amount of money or to reach a certain goal in their career, they also set it as a goal and keep working and thinking about it all the time until they get there. 

Aspiring artists or even established artists, who created a career as an artist, but don’t set goals for themselves will never reach their full potential because they are just following the current and they are not taking themselves intentionally in a direction where they will find themselves working even harder and getting better results. This takes us to the next point of Habits of Highly Effective Artists.

7- They Always Challenge Themselves

Artists who don’t challenge themselves by expanding their knowledge or working on more complex projects also can’t reach their full potential. You can actually do the same thing over and over again but this means that you will lose your edge and get stagnant because as an artist, either you are becoming better or you are becoming worse.

If you ask professional artists, they will tell you that they often work on projects that they don’t always think they can complete successfully without trying and learning new things to be able to do so.

6- They are Good but They are not Perfectionists

 “a piece of art is never finished, you just run out of time“

“a piece of art is never finished, you just run out of time“

Successful artists are not perfectionists, they move on, they don’t spend months trying to make perfect pieces. But they create multiple ones instead, to be able to try new things and hone their skills even further. 

If we look at the best artists in the world, they are not perfectionists, but they are prolific, meaning they create ridiculous amounts of artistic work constantly. For example, the best artists in history like Picasso or Leonardo Da Vinci created thousands of artworks throughout their lifetime and they were able to produce masterpieces that are still masterpieces today. If they tried to be perfectionists they wouldn’t have worked on as many artworks, and as a result, their chances of creating a masterpiece could have been greatly reduced.

5- They Learn One thing at the Time.

Effective artists are not dabblers, meaning they don’t try to learn and practice different forms of art at the same time. For example, a dabbled would be someone who will try to learn 3d modeling, then concept art, then animation, then VFX, and so on. Instead, effective artists stick to learning one thing at a time, this way they are not trying to stretch themselves too thin by focusing their strength on one thing that they can be good at. And after they acquire the necessary knowledge and skills in a particular area, they grab a new thing and learn it religiously to be good at it the same way they did with the previous one. Basically, those who have enough discipline to stick to one thing at a time will do great things as artists. Remember this on as the most effective piece in the Habits of Highly Effective Artists, and write it down in bold on your desk.

4- They get Inspired not Discouraged by other Artists

A good artist sees great artwork as a calling to action to improve their skills and become better.

I can sympathize with people whose soul get crushed when they see an amazing piece of art, but I personally never felt this way, because the way I see it is, these great artists are expanding the horizon of what we can possibly do as artists and if they can do it you can do it too.

3- They Learn from Others

One of the best characteristics of effective artists is learning from others and being open to new ways or methods of doing things. Learning from others does not necessarily mean copying an artist who you look up to, because this way you will become a copycat and you will always live in his or her shadow. This is one of the Habits of Highly Effective Artists that demands your cleverness.

A better way of learning from other artists is taking what you need from different artists’ workflows and trying to incorporate them into your own, this way you will be more original and no one will tell that you are copying or learning from other artists.

For example, if your point of weakness is anatomy, texture painting, or compositing, you can buy courses or watch tutorials of very good artists who will give you a closer look at what they do to generate amazing results. And slowly but surely, you will be able to reach the same level they are at after you practice long enough.

Also if you are an experienced artist you can listen to podcasts or read interviews of some of the great artists we have today and you will gain some golden nuggets that you can integrate in your workflow. It does not necessarily have to be all about techniques and tools because sometimes a look at how a successful artist’s mind operate can give you a lot to learn from.

2- They don’t Wait for Inspiration

Successful artists don’t wait to be inspired in order to start working on their projects or continue working on the current ones. Inspiration and motivation in art sometimes are like appetite in eating. When you start, things start flowing and you start feeling doing more after a few minutes but you have to force yourself a little bit at the start by doing a few small things that get you going. 

If you force yourself to just sit every day and create few polygons or sculpt few strokes on your sculpting software, you will trigger the natural momentum that will continually push you and propel you forward for the next few hours at least. 

As a wise man said it best: “do the work and you will be able to do the work” one of the most important takeaways from this saying is that you don’t necessarily have to wait for inspiration to feel like working on your artwork. Include this piece of Habits of Highly Effective Artists into your personality and your daily routines and you will be just fine.

After all, effective artists don’t wait until they feel like it to start, because over the years they spent practicing their craft, they learned to respect their routines, their clients and developed a symbiotic relationship with art that allows them to work under different circumstances, any time of the day and they will do it, for no matter how long it will take to finish their work.

1- They Practice Daily

Effective artists practice their art every day or at least as much they possibly can. If you are still learning, practice is even more important, but if you already are an artist who works for clients, online or at a studio, then your work is the majority of your practice because inevitable you will face new problems that you need to solve and new things that you will need to learn to be able to finish the job successfully and sharpen your skills along the way.

I would say, the habit of practicing daily is one of the most important Habits of Highly Effective Artists, but it is highly important for new artists who are trying to break into this wonderful world. Practicing has different forms but the most important type of practice is known as Deliberate Practice.

Deliberate practice can be defined differently depending on what you do but generally, it refers to a special type of practice in the art that is purposeful and systematic, which is kind of different from how a good portion of new artists practice. Regular practice usually is all about mindless repetitions, but the deliberate practice requires focused attention and must be conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.

For example, let’s just say you are a character artist or an environment artist, regular practice, for most people, is all about creating the same characters or the same environment that they created before without really intentionally practicing consciously to improve the way they model, texture or paint their characters or environments.

It is actually one of the most significant Habits of Highly Effective Artists because when artists are practicing deliberately, they are consciously trying to push themselves forward to become better by identifying points of weakness in the results they are generating and working on improving them through conscious practice. This means, for example, if your point of weakness is anatomy, you need to consciously learn new techniques and practice deliberately on becoming a better character sculptor, while you are doing the other things on autopilot as you usually do. And you will repeat the same process to strengthen the rest of your points of weakness as you become better. Over time being Excellent will become your new autopilot mode. 

I tried to collect as much information as I could, from my own expierince and from other succesful artists’ expierience to put togather this rich article on the highly important Habits of Highly Effective Artists, which I hope you will adopt in your daily life so you can get better artists in shorter periods and with less efforts.