The Wonderful Word for This Wednesday is “Steal”
Now you might be thinking of the word steal in the negative sense, but I’m not talking about crimes here.
Dictionary.com gives these first two definitions for the word ‘steal’:
- to take without permission or right, especially secretly or by force.
- to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment
Some synonyms to ‘steal’ according to Dictionary.com are as follows:
- abduct, embezzle, loot, pilfer, plunder, ransack, swipe, take, etc.
OKAY! I always need to look up a word of the day and see what the dictionary has to say about it, so now that we got that official business out of the way, let’s talk about what Austin Kleon means by the title of his book, “Steal Like an Artist”.
The book starts out with this quote:
Interesting huh?
Kleon states that, “Nothing is original”. He quotes Ecclesiastes 1:9 “There is nothing new under the sun” and shares how freeing this is- “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it”.
In this day and age, we are SURROUNDED by ideas and other people and their ideas etc. The only way we can even try to be somewhat original is to disconnect ALL of our devices and stick our heads in a hole.
I think finding our ‘style’ or our ‘voice’ is a matter of following those who inspire us and picking things out that we are drawn to. When we go to do something creative of our own, we have those ideas from lots of different people swirling around our brains and those ideas come out in a completely new way.
We’ve always learned by copying. This makes me think of a good friend of mine who drew Garfield and Odie over and over and over in all their expressions and positions. This is one way she learned to draw.
Furthermore, when we first learn our letters, we trace them, don’t we? YES! We trace and copy and copy until we get some muscle memory and we can write the letters on our own. Eventually we have our own handwriting style and the police even use handwriting samples to find their suspects!
Sidebar: I was called in to Campus Police when I was in college to do a handwriting sample as I was apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time and was a suspect of some hate crime!
Musicians often start as ‘Cover Bands’ who play best hits of those they love. When they get a good following and have built their confidence, they often strike out on their own, writing their own music and lyrics. The Beatles started out this way!
Now, let’s not confuse copying to learn something with actual stealing. This is where the definitions above become important. Stealing is ‘too appropriate without right or acknowledgment.
So, as creative people, we try to imitate or emulate our favorite creatives until we can call certain skills our own. We cannot share our work as our own in this stage, we must give credit to the one we are imitating. THAT’s the important part.
Kleon shares this: A Wonderful flaw about human beings is that we’re incapable of making perfect copies.
WHEW! Thank goodness! So copy away to learn something, and know that you are inevitably putting your own self into it whether you like it or not!
When we want to learn something, we head to Youtube right? Yep! We find people we enjoy watching and learn all we can from them. We SHOULD use our resources. But I find it’s a balance. We have WAY too many ideas coming at us at all times from all over the place. We need to pick a few, learn, do, master, and repeat.
After consuming ideas from Instagram or Youtube, I like to take a break from classes and tutorials and just go rogue for awhile and let the current ideas swirl and mix in new ways. This is NOT easy for me because I LOVE taking classes and would take them all if I could in ALL the mediums. But, alas, I must limit the mediums and the ideas and limit screen time for myself.
So, get out there and steal like an artist people! But don’t be a criminal about it, okay?
There is a LOT more awesome tidbits in this little book, I just gave you some of the beginning ideas in there. Check it out, you’ll read it in an hour and there are pictures and diagrams ;-). Here’s a link to his book on Amazon: Steal Like an Artist
Until next week friends!
Kimberly Snider, Virtuoso, Signing off
Check out my Link Tree of ‘all the things’