The 0 to 10 Skill Scale: Why Most Artists Overrate Their Talent

 I have a scale I use when I look at an artist's work. It runs from 0 to 10. Most artists rate themselves higher than they are, because the people around them have been generous with compliments. My first impulse was to write “blowing smoke up your skirts.” But what does that really mean?

Here's the uncomfortable version:

0 means no talent.

1 means you have talent.

2 means you draw like a twelve-year-old because you are twelve years old.

3 means you draw like a twelve-year-old and you're 30. You got stuck. You never expanded your knowledge, never took life drawing classes, never studied anatomy from the masters.

And so on up the scale, each number representing a real threshold of skill, knowledge, and professional readiness.

Most people who show me their work are somewhere between 3 and 6. They think they're a 7 or an 8 because someone at a family dinner or on social media told them they should draw for Marvel. Even worse, has told them, “You should start selling your art or do commissions.” Reddit is rampant with these types of comments.

I'm not being cruel. I'm being honest. Honestly, the artists who improve the fastest are the ones who can look at their own work without the pat on the back. The ones who can say, "I'm a 5 and I need to be a 7 before I go pro," and then put in the reps to get there.

Self-assessment is a skill. Most art schools don't teach it. Critique Day was my favorite in college. Your friends and family are not equipped to give it to you. The mirror is the only reliable tool.

Can you honestly look at yourself?

Just create.™

AI Can Generate Images, But It Can’t Make Art: Why Human Judgment Always Wins

Generative AI can produce an image in seconds. It can mimic styles, combine references, and generate visual output at a scale no human can match on speed alone.

It cannot decide what to draw. It needs a human to prompt it.

It cannot look at a written scene and translate it into a sequence of panels that control pacing, emotion, and the reader’s eye movement across a comic book page. It cannot choose the camera angle that makes a moment dramatic or poetic. It cannot use negative space as a storytelling device. It cannot place a figure in the lower third of a panel because the emptiness above them is the point or waiting for lettering.

These are not technical skills. They are judgment calls. And judgment is the product of decades of drawing, reading, observing, failing, and drawing again.

I've watched this debate closely for the last two years. I've written about the legal cases (Bartz v. Anthropic, Thomson Reuters v. Ross, the Disney/Midjourney fallout). The law is slowly catching up to the technology. But the more important argument is not legal. It's creative.

The value of an illustrator was never the labor of moving a tool across paper, canvas, or a screen. The value was always in knowing where to put the lines and why. That is not something a prompt can do. Not because the technology isn't good enough yet, but because it requires a human being who has lived inside the creative world long enough to make decisions that a model trained on scraped images simply cannot mimic.

I'm not betting on the tool. I'm believing in the artist who knows how to use it.

Just create.™

Stop Mindless Copying: The 4-Step Method

 I previously gave some book recommendations. https://www.justcreate.net/2016/11/a-word-about-books.html

The books by George Bridgman, Burne Hogarth, and Andrew Loomis are the absolute gold standard for anatomy, and having these as your go-to sets up a firm foundation. If you are serious about building your technical skills, here are some equally highly-regarded, industry-standard books for the other core disciplines to round out my recommendation list.

Color Theory and Light

• Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney. This is universally considered the modern bible to understand light and color. Gurney breaks down and analyzes complex optical phenomena (like subsurface scattering, atmospheric perspective, and reflected light) into highly accessible, practical lessons. It’s essential for anyone working in color, whether traditional or digital.

• Interaction of Color by Josef Albers. For a more academic, foundational dive into how colors affect one another, this is a classic. It’s less about painting techniques and more about training the eye to understand color relativity, making it a great recommendation for students who want to deeply understand color theory.

Perspective

• How to Draw: Drawing and Sketching Objects and Environments from Your Imagination by Scott Robertson and Thomas Bertling. This is the definitive text for technical perspective. It is dense and challenging, making it perfect for students who really want to master spatial construction, grids, and rendering objects accurately in 3D space.

• Framed Perspective (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2) by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. If you are leaning more toward dynamic illustration, storyboarding, or sequential art, these books are incredible. They focus on how to use perspective to create dramatic, compelling shots and place characters convincingly within environments.

• Perspective Made Easy by Ernest R. Norling. For absolute beginners who might be intimidated by Robertson’s technical depth, this is the best starting point. It simplifies the core concepts of horizon lines and vanishing points without becoming overwhelming.

Composition and Visual Storytelling

• Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. This is a masterclass in composition, focusing heavily on how to use light, shadow, and framing to direct the viewer’s eye and evoke emotion. It’s particularly useful for anyone interested in comic art, illustration, or visual development, showing how to compose shots with real impact and energy.

• Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang. This is a deceptively simple book that uses cut-out shapes to explain the emotional psychology behind composition. It’s a brilliant resource to recommend for understanding why certain compositions feel balanced, tense, or calm on a fundamental, abstract level.

A Modern Addition for Anatomy

• Figure Drawing: Design and Invention by Michael Hampton. Since I’ve already recommended the classics, this is a fantastic modern supplement to keep in your back pocket. It bridges the gap between Loomis’s constructive approach and Bridgman’s focus on interlocking masses. It’s for teaching students how to simplify the figure into dynamic, easily understandable volumes.

These should give you a well-rounded curriculum.

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I’ve spent my adult life illustrating; the mechanics have become pure muscle memory. Translating my teenage instinct into an organized framework is exactly the pivot from student to educator. What seemed like "just copying" to my teenage brain was actually a highly effective, intuitive form of reverse-engineering.

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For beginners, unstructured copying often leads to mindless tracing where they capture the final lines but miss the underlying forms. When someone asks how to get the most out of these dense books, they are really asking for a repeatable learning framework.

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Here is a structured, step-by-step method, often called the “Iterative Study” or "Read-Recall-Apply” method.

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The Art Book Study Framework

1. Read for the 'Why', Not Just the 'How':Keep the pencil down at first.

Read a single chapter or section without drawing anything. If you are looking at Loomis’s head construction, you need to understand the logic of the cranium sphere and the jaw plane before you try to replicate the lines.

2. The Analytical Copy (Master Study): Copying to understand, not to produce a pretty picture.

Now you pick up the pencil and copy the drawings directly from the book. The goal isn’t a perfect replica, but to recreate the artist’s process. If Bridgman is showing interlocking wedges for the torso, the student should be actively thinking about those 3D volumes as you draw them, rather than just copying 2D outlines.

3. The Memory Test: This is where actual learning happens.

This is the most key step beginners miss: close the book. Then try to draw the exact same concept or diagram from memory. You will inevitably get stuck or make a mistake. Then open the book, compare your memory-drawing to the original, and use a red pen (or a different digital color) to correct your structural mistakes.

4. Application to Original Work: Proving the concept is internalized.

Finally, you need to take the principle you just learned and apply it to a completely original drawing without looking at the reference. If you just learned Hogarth’s foreshortened arms, you should try drawing a character of your own design throwing a punch toward the camera.

A key piece of advice: Art books are reference manuals, not novels. You don’t read them front-to-back once and graduate. You study a specific mechanism (like the mechanics of the knee), practice it until it sticks, and then put the book back on the shelf until you hit your next plateau.

I get a piece of the action if you buy a book from my links.

Just create.™

Where Art Schools Fail: Why Passionate Creatives Must Learn the Business Side

art by Howard Simpson

 I've been drawing since I was 2 years old, according to my mom. I made a conscious decision to keep drawing because I like telling stories and reading comic books. I committed myself to it in the fifth grade when I saw the positive response it got from other people.

I did not start drawing to make money. I didn't start drawing to have a career or support a family. Drawing is like breathing to me. I would die without it.

Most people have jobs to pay the bills. I have a career, not a job. I draw whether I am paid or not. Getting paid is icing on the cake. I never understand the question "How do you stay motivated?" because I have never needed motivation. This is a passion that burns deep down inside me and has never gone away.

Which is precisely why the business side matters so much.

When you love something this deeply, you owe it to yourself to protect it with structure. With math. With clear limits around what your work is worth. Because the alternative is letting clients set your value for you. And they will almost always set it lower than you deserve, not because they are bad people (well, some of them are) but because you let them.

Here's where I feel schools fail art students. Basic business courses are not a requirement as part of the curriculum and they should be.

The art is sacred. The business protects the art.

Just create.™

How My First Hollywood Gig Humiliated Me And Revolutionized My Pricing

Photo by Luan Fonseca for Unsplash

On my first Hollywood feature film job, I was hired to design a set. A talk show set for one of the characters. Real production. Real budget. Real stakes.

They asked me for my fee.

I had been freelancing for quite a few years at that point. I had the portfolio. I had the client list. I had done the work for agencies, publishers, and entertainment companies. I was not new.

I quoted them a few hundred dollars.

There was a long pause on the phone. Then the producer (I think he was tired) said they would give me $5,000.

Five thousand dollars. For a job I had priced at a few hundred.

I did not feel happy. I felt humiliated. Not because they lowballed me, but because I had lowballed MYSELF. I had been doing it for years and didn't even know. Every quote I had ever given was a guess dressed up as confidence. And clients could feel it, which is probably why the producer sounded exhausted when he corrected me.

That moment permanently changed how I think about pricing. The problem was never confidence. The problem was math. I had never sat down and worked through the actual economics of a deal. The time, the costs, the rights, the usage, the territory, the exclusivity. None of it. I was pricing feelings, not deals.

I spent the next several years building a system to make sure I would never guess again. That system eventually became The Pricing Verdict. 

You don't have a pricing problem. You have a math problem.

Just create.™

 

Faceless Art Tutorials: Letting the Work Speak for Itself on YouTube

I have been running a YouTube tutorial channel for years and I have never shown my face on it. Not once.

People ask about this more than you'd expect. The assumption is that a faceless channel is hiding something. That you need a personality on screen to build trust. That the algorithm punishes you for it.

Here's what I've learned: when you teach someone how to draw hair, they don't need to see your face. They need to see the process. The work is the authority. The process is the content. The marks on the page (digital or otherwise) are doing the teaching, not my expressions.

There is a long tradition of this in art instruction. The camera points down at the paper. The voice explains what's happening and why. The student watches the lines appear and learns from the decisions being made in real time.

I'm not against showing my face. I'm indifferent to it. The art does the talking. That has worked for Bridgman's pencils, for Loomis' books, for every anatomy reference that changed how I draw. None of them needed a personality to convince me the information was valuable.

The work either teaches or it doesn't. Everything else is packaging.

Just create.™