Patience for Your Craft

It’s All Relative

Patience for your craft or your passion will baffle most people who are not also passionate about the same thing. Sometimes, that passion has to be super specific. For example, for as long as I can remember, I have envied people who have the patience for painting, doodling, and animation. As an animal portrait artist, you’d think that I would have patience for other art forms. The truth is, I don’t. I am fascinated by them and can even sit there and watch the artist work. But to do the work myself? I don’t think so.

(Photo Credit: 123RF.com Copyright: Sergejs Rahunoks)

Let me explain. Art is a wide, expansive, and wonderfully vast realm. There are countless ways to express oneself through art with an endless array of supplies, types of canvases, etc. Mine happens to involve paper and pencils. People will often comment on the tiny details and incredible patience I must have to do what I do. But for me, I don’t feel like it requires any patience at all. Why? Because it’s what I do. It’s what I’m passionate about. I can lose myself in my work, so much so that it can become a therapeutic, cathartic experience and I easily lose track of time. When you love what you do, it hardly seems like work.

On the other hand, if you set me down with watercolors, I will be a bit more uncomfortable and have a lot less patience working with that medium. Primarily, I am out of my comfort zone. Working with watercolor is not my craft. I have no patience for its fluidity or the dry time (oils are even worse). There is also an element of unpredictability (though professional watercolorists may disagree). Have you ever tried controlling anything remotely watery? So I have no patience at all because it is not my craft and certainly not my passion, though I admire it when it’s done well by others.

I can narrow this down even further. My patience for drawing animals (usually) has no limits. But set me up with the same paper and pencils, and ask me to draw a building, a landscape, or heaven forbid…a human being? Little to no patience at all! This is when it truly begins to feel like work and time creeps along instead of flying by.

So yes, patience for your craft is relative. Granted, you may have a few people out there who are passionate about creating art in a multitude of ways, but most folks that I know are passionate about their own thing and have an appreciation for other things with little patience for actually doing them. Is this your experience? Comment below and let us know what you’re passionate about and what you actually admire but have little patience for in relation to art.

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