As an artist over half of my job is imagining the work I am going to create before I create it. The issue arises from the fact that the creator I am in my head is sometimes in direct conflict with the creative skills I currently have. It is that conflict that I think of often, to the point I even verbalized how hard it was to compete with the artist I am in my head to a friend.

This friend is also an artist and writer and understands my plight. She wrote an excellent blog entry on it as well. (Read it now.)

I believe all artists are familiar with the struggle of competing with ourselves in our heads. We gain skill through practice and sometimes while we can visualize works of art sometimes we can’t bring them into existence. This happens fairly often for me as an artist.

Recently it was in taking an image of my sister to make a work of art to display in her home. I had this completed picture in my head down to size and display and yet no matter how I tried I couldn’t bring it to life. I created some cool artwork but in the digital scope, I just could harness the right elements to make my inner artwork come to life.

Of course this phenomenon has happened on more than one occasion. In fact when I was writing my memoir it took me several attempts to create the cover image that I had dreamed about— literal dream.

After making the first cover I had a better idea about what I wanted the cover to look like and where I wanted to take it. I wanted things more subtle and had always planned to use a self portrait for the cover. Of course at the first mock up I hadn’t yet taken the image that I would eventually put on my book cover.

The second attempt was closer but ultimately still wasn’t living up to the dream of a cover I had. The struggle was creation of the self portrait and unhappiness with how dominating the camera over the pupil was. I needed to do more refining and more self portraits to get to my vision. It would take some time but eventually I created the image that would grace my memoir cover.

So while it is extremely hard to gain the skills to live up to the creator or artist we are in our heads. It can be accomplished though it may not be a fun nor quick process. It took me months to reach a goal of making the art in my head for a huge project a reality, sometimes it can take me years to gain the skills to create something I envision.

Key to becoming the artist in your head is to keep working, practicing and developing your skills.