How am I creative? Am I? Are we?

I wonder, am I creative? Do people like my work? For that matter, do people like the way we do business? I hear self-doubting voices in my head or in GC's voice alot. We constantly ask ourselves, why do we do what we do? Why did we choose the path of being an artist?

Being an artist can be a very rewarding career, but then again - there is that statement - if you become an artist, you take the risk of being that "starving artist". When we got into our career stream, path... whatever you want to call it, we didn't have the computer to aid in our artistic path - we did everything by hand! Yes, I said - we did everything by hand. Laying out a line of type that went across a letterhead design was created with ruling tape & Letraset press-on type. We took a piece of bright white drawing board, drew out our cropmarks on the edges, and then created our design. If we wanted more than 2 colors on the piece, we created separations by drawing on velum paper & then cutting out the different colors into a film called amberlith/rubylith, we would draw out the black lines with rapidograph pens.... we then took the separate colors on the amber/ruby-lith or vellum paper and taped them on top of the page - overlapping where we needed to overlap the colors. Gosh, it's been so long since I've done something like that, I'm trying to visualize in my head what all the steps to the process were.... just to tell all of you!

Today, we have a different type of tool set. Yes, we still sketch out our designs on paper - but we take those sketches, scan them into our computer & then draw our designs on the computer! We now have tools called Illustrator, CorelDraw, InDesign, Photoshop, Painter, etc. We can do fancier & more complex type designs with these software tools - but have we as artists become too dependant on the computer to create our elaborate designs? Maybe the true artists are those artists that still create their paintings or illustrations with a pencil, paintbrush, and paint. They love the feel of paper - the moosh of clay in their hands, the splatter of paint on their clothes.

Have we lost our creativity to the inanimate computer world? Are our talents undervalued because now everyone can draw.... or think they can draw? My feeling is that we live in a very visual world - we are surrounded by art every day. It's on the signs we see that direct us, the cereal box that we reach for in the morning, even the newspaper. Creativity is all around us & we need to reach deep in our sole to see the true art in all that surrounds us.

Value the fact that you can drawn a doodle, write your name ... that's art. Hug an artist the next time you meet one..... & just think of it this way... "Artists are just children who refused to put down their crayons."