A Creature Rants About Learning Art in 2025

“Should I Learn Art in 2025?” YESSS, OH MY DOG.

What RIGHT does a funny talking animal have to tell ME I should learn to draw? To make music? To pursue my writing passions? Why do art when AI is taking over? Why try when the world is terrible? When I’m too stressed out, too busy? When I just don’t have the mental capacity for it right now?

For all of those reasons, baybee. Art is your escape from the terrible world. It’s your safe space to express yourself, to relieve stress, to find your calm and fulfillment in a way nothing else can. Counter-intuitively, it can help GIVE you that mental capacity and help you understand yourself more. AI? Well, I’ll rant on that in just a bit.

My name’s Kanjon and I’ve made a whole heckin channel about this. It’s mostly about art, but honestly for a lot of it you can swap in “making music”, “writing stories”, even “CAD”. Anything creative that you’ve ever been remotely curious about that you’ve wanted to try. On this channel you’ll find quick art tips, deeper motivational thoughts, advice Q&As, even a course on digital art. Today actually marks TWO years since I started making these videos, and it’s gone from short art tips to thoughtful full videos since then. I’m flattered by the response from everyone and love hearing how people have found their own motivation in picking their art skills up. Please, keep sharing your progress!

YouTube even sent me this neat thing last week, though… heck, where is it…. BWAHHH oh my–

Don’t get weirded out by the art fox talking to you. Despite my appearance, my channel isn’t actually about furries. The foundations of learning to draw really start with the familiar, and that’s actually things like humans! I think adapting human characteristics and actions onto animals is such a cool way to express yourself – it’s really just creativity to the max – but I know a lot of folks just wanna draw nice things they see, or their friends, or fanart. That’s all just as relevant.

I wanna share some cold hard facts about learning to draw. These are things that sound obvious in hindsight, but if you’ve never thought about practicing art before, you’d never have realized. I think you’ll find these interesting – let’s take a look.

Hard Fact: Nobody is born an “art person”

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Natural talent for art really isn’t a thing. Or at least, it’s extremely rare. 99% of people who are good at any creative skill are good because they practiced it. Hours and hours of practice into a skill, not a natural talent. It’s something anyone, including YOU, can start practicing.

There’s some saying out there about practicing something for 10,000 hours to really become an expert, true for a lot of things, but in art? You don’t have to commit tons of time to see real progress you can be happy with. And you can go way past 10,000 hours and still improve. It’s actually one of those rare things that you can learn infinitely, your whole life, at any age. There’s basically no skill ceiling, no perfection, no end to art. I think that’s the coolest thing! You can reach plenty of points where you feel satisfied with your work, and yet each year, each month, get even better! I probably am not allowed to call myself a beginner anymore, but I still feel like one, and I kinda think that’s a good thing. A beginner mindset keeps me open to learning and improving.

I made this mistake before: I originally thought that there were “creative people” that did this whole art thing, and then also… everyone else. I grew up feeling like maybe math and logic was “me”, figured art just wasn’t my thing, and never looked into it. But a few years back something caught my eye, I learned that art is a skill, that I can learn it, and… my life has changed so much since then. I’ve also learned…

Hard Fact: There are no magic secrets

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Art doesn’t have hidden tricks to learning it. People have popularized the idea to “just draw” to practice, and that’s… just mysterious terrible advice. Yeah you do have to DRAW to improve, but as a beginner WHAT are you SUPPOSED to be drawing? How do you start? How do you even put the right first lines down onto the page?

There are answers to all of this! There are courses and strategies that start from how you draw lines, how you move your arm, even! Things you can pick up and practice quickly, and keep building on. You learn construction, learn how to start applying perspective, shading, anatomy, gesture, motion – there are all very specific assignments you can do if you want! But you also can and should draw for fun on the side: after all, that’s what we’re here for. Drawing for fun and drawing to improve, the practice of studying, is the key mixture to building and keeping an art habit you can enjoy.

This is what an art school will teach you. The what to practice. But you don’t need an art course or specific tutor to get started: there are tons of resources online with the same kinds of lessons. That’s how I got my start. I’ve got a few recommendations on my website and channel too. If you like art school, more power to you! But if you think you missed your chance because you didn’t take art classes, you couldn’t be more wrong. You can learn the same stuff, build the same skills, and have plenty of fun along the way.

Hard Fact: Bad art is the most important

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Bad art is a myth. Yet… what the heck does that mean if you draw something and it still looks ugly? There’s two kinds of drawings you make: the ones you Like and the ones you Learn from. I’m not trying to be all wishy-washy feel-goody here. Sometimes we make art and our own reaction to it is “yikes”. But in that moment of yikes, you’ve learned something. You drew something wrong, you noticed it, and now you know what to practice. Even if you don’t FEEL like you learned anything you automatically did just by SEEING that you didn’t like the result. You’re training your eye. You HAVE to find all of these pieces of wrong art to build up that skill. It’s like an infinite jigsaw puzzle: not every piece is easy and I think we all hate those solid-color parts of the picture, but you gotta put them somewhere. You’re building up your skills at recognizing what is good by doing it wrong. Embrace it. Each mistake makes you better, even if it doesn’t feel good in the moment.

Artists almost never share their mistake drawings, their “yikes” art online. Makes you think that everyone’s better than you doesn’t it? But I promise you it’s there. All artists, even experienced ones, regularly make bad art. Warm-ups, off days, new things to learn, it’ll never be perfect or even good the first try. And here’s a little secret: you don’t have to share or keep your bad drawings. Throw them away! Draw on scrap paper. Let yourself make the bad because you HAVE to make the bad.

Hard Fact: AI means nothing

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It’s been two years since I started this video series, and one year since I’ve last really talked about AI-generated images. My take was that AI “art” is a massive headache, but no matter how good a machine can make a picture, it’s fundamentally impossible for it to actually make art. Art is a creation of human expression. Asking a robot to draw something for you doesn’t give you human expression. Ordering a pizza doesn’t make you a chef. And there’s really no barrier to entry in learning to draw. If you can afford a pencil and piece of paper, you can begin. AI doesn’t make it more accessible, it just makes you dumber and the planet hotter and some billionaire richer.

Think about it. What’s something you already like to do? Something that makes you happy, offline and outside. Do you practice music? Do you like to cook? Read? Crafts? Write stories? What if someone came up to you and said “wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to write the stories?” You’d be confused right? Why would you want to stop doing the thing you LIKE to do? Making it is the fun part! I even encounter this in my video production process. Service providers will be all “wouldn’t it be GREAT if you didn’t have to make videos” and I’m like “the HECK?” I LIKE TO MAKE THEM. I’ve dropped services because of this. I’m not paying for you to ask a chatbot to do things for me. I want the software and services I originally paid for so I can make the things. If you currently make art, they can’t take something you love. Don’t give in.

I think the general craze around all of this since a year ago has even cooled off a bit. You get off the comment section of the internet and talk with people in your community and you’ll still find that most people just don’t care about AI. They’re aware, maybe they’ve tried it, but the interest is just absent, and people have no trouble understanding the difference between a real art piece from a person, and a nothing-burger from a machine. Unfortunately, we’re going to continue to see dumb takes about this from corporations and AI dipshits (let me finish) for a while, but I have faith that most of society is rejecting it. If that just made you feel offended, channel that anger into learning to draw! This is your redemption arc. A willingness to change and improve is an awesome human quality. Be your best self!

No joke, I’ve seen accounts from people who started to take an interest in art initially from AI prompts. They had their fun, but felt that itch to want to try things out themselves, and have taken up learning art skills of their own! Now there’s a happy accident. If you were putting off learning art because of AI, I hope at least a little bit of this video has convinced you to reconsider. Be honest with yourself: if it wasn’t AI, would you have a different excuse? There’s nothing more fulfilling than being able to find your creative self in a way that you 100% control. Maybe you’re even a little excited. If so…

Learn to draw!

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Where do we go from here? My take? Get drawing. Or get writing, composing, sculpting, painting, inventing, cooking – whatever makes you happy and lets you flex your creative expression and build life-long expertise. If I’ve convinced you to learn some art, do look around my channel and website: I’ve got like eight hours of stuff now apparently. I’m going to re-organize some of my channel content to make some tips easier to find over the next week or so. Hopefully by the time you watch this at least some of that is in place (“come on future kanjon, you got this”). I’m also planning on sprinkling in some refreshed videos on where to start; I know what I have previously is a little dated.

If you’ve been watching a while, thanks for sticking with us! I still feel like we’re just getting started. Just found this? Welcome! I’ll teach you to find that passion, and chase it. Come on, let’s go draw.