{"id":62646,"date":"2022-07-29T06:19:48","date_gmt":"2022-07-29T06:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/?p=62646"},"modified":"2022-07-29T06:19:48","modified_gmt":"2022-07-29T06:19:48","slug":"late-to-the-party-how-to-make-beautiful-art-in-the-wilderness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/blog\/late-to-the-party-how-to-make-beautiful-art-in-the-wilderness\/","title":{"rendered":"Late To The Party How To Make Beautiful Art In The Wilderness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/I_5Hi-LGSEA?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe>My name is Robert S. Hawley, I&#8217;m a nature photographer and writer with a National Park Service background. I&#8217;m also the author of two books, including &#8220;Late to the Party: How to Make Beautiful Art in the Wilderness&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I am here to offer you my tips on how to incorporate art into your trip and how to make it work for you. I am a late convert to nature photography, so I have made many of the mistakes that you may be avoiding now. I have also had some success, and my goal is to help both those who are new at it and those who have been at it for years.<\/p>\n<p>When I started out in 2008, I knew nothing about photographing nature, or even how to use a camera (it&#8217;s not as hard as you might think). My goal was simply to make my own beautiful images of places that I&#8217;ve visited so that whether or not anyone wanted them, they would be mine.<\/p>\n<p>Many visitors to the wilderness have a desire to do something artistic while they are there. Some of these folks end up doing art that is a natural extension of their daily routine, such as taking photographs, sketching, writing in their journals, or singing along with an iPod. Other folks want to do something different, and so they buy some art supplies and try to create something in the wilderness that they would not be able to do at home.<\/p>\n<p>Trying to be an artist in the wilderness raises many questions for people. How much planning should I do? What kind of art should I do? How should I present my art? Should I display it at home or put it away somewhere?<\/p>\n<p>These questions are important because the wrong decisions can ruin your trip. If you choose poorly when it comes to planning your project, you may find yourself too busy trying to create your art instead of enjoying your trip. If you choose poorly when it comes to choosing what kind of art you will do, you will end up with an inferior product that you regret having made. If you choose poorly when it comes to how you will present your art, it may never see the light of day again after your trip is over. And if you choose poorly when selecting where you will store your art<\/p>\n<p>As artists, we can learn a lot from nature. It&#8217;s hard to think of a better muse. It&#8217;s free and you don&#8217;t need an appointment. You can go to it whenever you like. And it&#8217;s always gorgeous and inspiring.<\/p>\n<p>In her book, The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp says that &#8220;for an artist, there is no greater luxury than time.&#8221; But most artists don&#8217;t have much of it because they&#8217;re too busy earning a living at their day jobs. So how are they supposed to find time to be creative?<\/p>\n<p>One of the best ways I know to get more creative time is to get out in nature and work on your art while you&#8217;re taking care of some basic survival needs like nourishment and shelter.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not saying this is easy or that it will happen overnight. If you&#8217;ve never tried it before, it might take weeks or months before you start getting anything good from it. But once you&#8217;ve figured out how to make art in the wilderness, you&#8217;ll have found one of the best ways I know for creating time for yourself in which you can do your own art with very little cost or risk.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never been much of an artist. My sixth grade teacher even told me that I had to choose between art and math; since I wasn&#8217;t very good at either, she suggested that I pick one and dedicate myself to it. This was a significant blow, as both things were equally far from my skill set at the time.<\/p>\n<p>Paints and brushes are expensive, but pencils and papers, paintbrushes and canvases all cost money too. It&#8217;s easy to see how you can run out of cash before you run out of ways to spend it on art supplies. But there are a few ways to make your art materials less expensive or even free, too:<\/p>\n<p>Art stores sell used supplies for a lot less. If you can&#8217;t find anything good here, you can try garage sales, where people sell old supplies for almost nothing.<\/p>\n<p>When you go out on trips with friends, trade art with them! The best artists will want something nice in exchange for their work, but the worst ones will give away their unused paints because they forgot they had them.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t always be trying to draw or paint something specific. Sometimes the most interesting thing is what you stumble across while trying to do something else entirely.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to saving money on materials,<\/p>\n<p>Amateur photographers will have a more difficult time in the field because they have not had time to develop their sense of self. As a result, they will take pictures that are often flattering and devoid of artistic merit. Your camera, as well as your subject, will be secondary.<\/p>\n<p>After you have taken about a hundred pictures, you will begin to see that you can use your camera almost like a pencil; you can compose a picture and make it as realistic or abstract as you desire. If you master this skill, eventually you will be able to use any piece of equipment with ease. Only then can you claim to have made the transition from amateur photographer to artist.<\/p>\n<p>I have been late to the party. I have been late to the party since I was born. I was late to the party when I was a kid. I was late to the party when I was in junior high school. I was late to the party when I became an adult. And it&#8217;s not like this is a new thing for me or something that&#8217;s been going on for awhile, either. It&#8217;s just something that is part of who I am and probably always will be.<\/p>\n<p>This is some background information about myself because it will help you understand where my ideas come from and why they are the way they are.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m extremely busy all the time, but it&#8217;s not even so much about how much work there is for me to do as it is about how much work there is for me to TO DO. When I get out of school, if we&#8217;re talking about work, it&#8217;s not like there wasn&#8217;t enough of it before; now there&#8217;s an even bigger workload than before, and that makes me feel overwhelmed and stressed out all the time, every day, which makes my job performance suffer even more than it did before, which just adds to my workload, which in turn makes me even more stressed out, and so on until everyone involved<\/p>\n<p>The more you think about what makes a picture beautiful the less satisfied you are with your own attempts to create such a picture. If there is an element of luck in what makes a picture beautiful then it would be reasonable to assume that we are all equally capable of creating a beautiful picture and equally unlikely to do so. There would be no point in wishing for the opportunity to create a beautiful picture since, even if we were given that opportunity, we are just as likely to produce an ugly picture as we are to produce a beautiful one.<\/p>\n<p>We know this isn&#8217;t true though because all it takes is one person pointing out that something is wrong with what you have done for you to realise that it&#8217;s not right. You may not even know how to do better but the fact that someone else doesn&#8217;t like it means that it must be wrong.<\/p>\n<p>The only way around this is to accept that some pictures are ugly and some are pretty regardless of the quality of the drawing skills of the artist who created them. If you know anything about art then you will have seen works by artists whose drawing skills leave a lot to be desired but who still manage to produce works of great beauty.<\/p>\n<p>So if art and skill at drawing aren&#8217;t linked then what is? I don&#8217;t know but<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/hBja9FyD6l8?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WB6MXxFvpok?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My name is Robert S. Hawley, I&#8217;m a nature photographer and writer with a National Park Service background. I&#8217;m also the author of two books, including &#8220;Late to the Party: How to Make Beautiful Art in the Wilderness&#8221;. I am here to offer you my tips on how to incorporate art into your trip and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":63135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62646"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62646"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62646\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62647,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62646\/revisions\/62647"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}