40: How to Critique Your Own Work: The 10-Minute Portfolio Review

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Transcript:

Sometimes I'm just so close to my work that I can't see things that other people see almost right away. And so I do think it's important to get some feedback from other people, but before doing so, I think it will help you feel more confident if you do these 12 things first.

I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things, creativity, design, business, and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town, tucked right inside the Smokey Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. When I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer.

Fast forward to today, I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want and is wildly profitable.Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

Hey there, and welcome to this episode of the Professional Creative Podcast. I'm excited to give you 12 tips for self critiquing your work. You know, oftentimes we encourage students and anyone who's developing their artwork to go ahead and ask for feedback in our communities or to their friends and family, but oftentimes that comes with a big dose of feeling vulnerable.

So I've formulated a bunch of different ways that you can actually self-critique your work before you ask for feedback. These are things that I do myself, and then I always have someone else or a group of people come, give my work a pair of fresh eyes so that I can hear from them maybe some things that I didn't see myself. Does that happen for you?

Sometimes I'm just so close to my work that I can't see things that other people see almost right away, and so I do think it's important to get some feedback from other people, but before doing so, I think it will help you feel more confident if you do these 12 things first. So let's begin. Once you have completed a piece of artwork, or maybe it's a repeating pattern or a piece of work in general that you are creating, the very first thing to do is simply step away from it. I suggest leaving it for a day or maybe even more and come back to it with fresh eyes yourself. Oftentimes, we're just kind of in this tunnel of design work, and sometimes all it takes is you stepping away from it for a little bit and coming back to it and you'll immediately see things that you were overlooking before.

So in summary, don't feel like there's a rush to ask for feedback. Go ahead and give yourself a little bit of time to look at it with fresh eyes. The next tip I have for you, number two, is to pretend that the work belongs to someone else. Sometimes that's all it takes to allow yourself to feel feedback that doesn't feel so personal, and you can look at it from a completely different perspective. Number three, I love this one, is turn your work upside down. You would not believe what will stand out to you if you simply turn it upside down, shake it up a little bit, look at it from a different perspective and see what stands out for you. Sometimes in my scenario,

I'm looking at repeating patterns or illustrations that I've made, and when I do this, I'll see something that isn't flowing correctly or maybe some contrast that needs to be worked on. Just things tend to stand out in a completely different way. Number four is to change the scale of your work. Now, this is only possible if you're working in a digital space, let's say something like Procreate or Adobe Illustrator, but take the scale of your work really small way down and see what stands out for you. Is there a very obvious repeat to your work if you're working on repeating patterns or is there something that just doesn't fit right? And then alternatively, you can also take the scale way up, zoom way in, and see what your work and your line work looks like at a greater scale as well.

Number five is to consider the value. And by this, I want you to think about whether or not your work has room to breathe. This is something that I very much struggle with. I see an empty space and I want to fill it with something, but sometimes it's really nice to just be considerate of letting your work have a little bit of breathing room for the viewer.

This is a really intentional way to leave a place for the viewer's eyes to rest. And so I evaluate value and not only a piece by piece scenario, but also if I'm working on a collection. So if I'm working on a collection of say, 10 prints, I'll make sure that some of them just have extra breathing rooms so that the viewer doesn't feel overwhelmed or that it's too busy to look at altogether.

Number six is to step back from your work and just squint, squint your eyes and you'll see something that you never saw before. This is a great way to consider the contrast and whether there's enough contrast in your work when we're talking in terms of color, or sometimes you'll be able to see a repeating pattern in a different way. So squint at it and see what stands out for you.

Number seven is a piece of advice if you are working in a collection. So again, my example, if I'm working in a collection of 10 different prints, I like to consider whether or not every single piece is actually needed. Meaning sometimes I'll have two prints that favor each other and almost accomplish the same exact need in terms of a collection overall. And so when I step back and look at my work and this way,it really helps me try to make each pattern or each print stand on its own and really be deserving of being included in the collection. It also goes with my next piece of advice, which is it faithful to the story. If you are telling a story with your work, if you have a theme or a greater value that you're trying to share throughout a common thread in your work, look at every single piece and see if it's faithful to the story. And if not, can you revisit it and make it more?

I am so excited to share with you a brand new project we've been working on. It's called 60 by 60 because there are 60 incredible artists who have come together to share with you one way that they create income from their artwork in under 60 seconds each, which means that it's 60 minutes of incredible knowledge and wisdom being shared by some insanely talented artists that I know you're going to love. Our hope is that it not only shows you what's possible, but it also encourages you and helps you get clarity on the very next steps you want to take in your own creative endeavor, and it's entirely free. We've also created an interactive directory with all of the artists included so that you can go dive into all of their worlds and get to know them a little bit better.To watch the video, head on over to bonnie christine.com/income. Again, that's bonnie christine.com/income. You'll be able to watch the 60 by 60 video right away, and we cannot wait to meet you there.

Tip number nine is if you are working in a digital space like Illustrator or procreate, I want you to go ahead and print out your work at whatever scale you think you want it to be at. This is something that I do every time I finish a piece of work because inevitably, no matter how confident I am in the scale of the work on the computer screen, whenever I print it off, I always tend to change my mind specifically. Also, again, when I'm working in a collection, I'll print off all of the pieces and lay them out and stand back and look at them, and inevitably will always make adjustments. Tip number 10 is to ask yourself if you would buy this particular piece of finished artwork or would you buy it for a friend? You know, I want you to always create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. Now, this is a concept that I've talked about before, so head on over to listen to this super quick episode.

It's number 32 called How a Simple Question Can Transform Your Approach. Because asking myself this question had me reevaluate everything I thought about being an artist. Number 11 is to test out your artwork on a real product, and now if you can't actually go buy a real product, maybe from a print on demand site, you can always use mock-ups. And so for instance,

if I'm designing something like wallpaper, I'll mock it up and put it on a real wall at the scale that I'm thinking about and see what I think. This is a really helpful way to just kind of connect the artwork that you're working on as it compares to a real life situation, and it's a really helpful way to make adjustments to your work as well.

And similarly, number 12 is to just consider the application. Now, sometimes you won't know where your artwork is going to live, and that's okay because you can always come back and adjust things, but some of you know what you're designing for. Maybe you're designing with fabric in mind or wallpaper in mind. And so knowing this, you can make adjustments to the scale or the direction of the different motifs in your design and just make sure that it is best fit for the application that you have in mind.

Now, my very last tip, this is a bonus tip if you will, is to get comfortable killing your darlings. This is a saying that typically gets used in literature, but I find it really helpful in artwork creation as well. There's something that happens when we design a piece of art and we feel like it's our baby, right? All of our creativity got poured into this one piece, and so we wanna keep it, we wanna show it, we wanna put it in the collection, we wanna put it in the portfolio. But a sign of maturity in a designer is being able to edit, being able to kill your darlings. Don't delete them or trash them. Maybe put them in a special folder for maybe revisiting later on, but learning how to edit your work and refine it and not include everything just because you made it is a sign of growing in your skillset, and it will always be obvious to the viewer that you've been able to do some work in this arena as well.

And so those are my 12 top tips plus a bonus for self critiquing your work. Once you've done this, you are ready to ask for public feedback. Use the community that you're plugged into, use your friends, your family, and use any kind of public platform that you have to get your work out there and start receiving feedback.

This will help you refine your style, refine your designs, and become a better artist. That's a wrap for this small but mighty episode. I hope that you are having a beautiful day. Thank you so much for tuning in. Always work to create the beauty that you want to see. Come alive and remember there's room for you. I'll see you next time on the Professional Creative Podcast.