What do you listen to when you make art?
In my high school art classes, the teacher would turn on music while we did our drawings or paintings. In college, some teachers would put on music and some teachers wouldn’t. The most common response as to why they would not turn on music was they felt it was a distraction.
In college, I took the professor’s comments about leaving space in your mind to find solutions to problems to heart. I was 40 something and I didn’t have the luxury of a 20 something student who could roll their eyes at the professor and wax on about how I could both listen to music and make great art.
Since then, I’ve found that when I am designing, listening to anything is a distraction. I don’t have the brain cells to be able to focus on more than one thing at a time. Perhaps Yoga music might be the exception to this. But when I am rendering or painting my composition, I can listen to podcasts, audio books, music, anything really. In fact, I discovered if I can listen to something that is about the illustration I am painting, it helps. If I’m painting a pirate ship, if I can find a podcast or even a YouTube video that is talking about pirates or ships from the 17th century, it makes the illustration better.
Today, I was practicing drawing hands. I’d find an image on Google, and block out the basic shapes, then go back and refine it. I wasn’t making any new commentary on hands. I was basically copying them. It’s not the most exciting work I do as an artist, but it’s a necessary skill for me to learn as an illustrator. So I was bored. And when I’m bored, it is helpful to have something to listen to. I didn’t know if it would help me or not, but I was bored enough to try. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could do observational drawing of photos of hands while I listened to the Learn to Paint podcast.
What do you listen to when you create?
My current favorite podcasts include: