steal like an artist

Do the work you want to see done

Saturday, September 8, 2018

Thanks to @misszita for this lettering of the manifesto from chapter 3 of Steal Like An Artist. I like that if you put a comma after the word “done” it would be like a note to myself!

School yourself

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Some advice from the 2018 *Steal Like An Artist* Calendar

It’s back-to-school season. This line from a Frank Bruni op-ed caught my eye: “how a student goes to school matters much, much more than where.”

Here’s what I wrote in the “School Yourself” section of Steal Like An Artist:

School is one thing. Education is another. The two don’t always overlap. Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.

You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else – that’s how you’ll get ahead.

Like the RZA said, “Whether I went to school or not, I would always study.”

Whether you’re going back to school or not, learning is the verb of life, and it’s always time to school yourself.

Roba Como Un Artista

Saturday, May 19, 2018

A group of graphic design students at Serra i Abella in Barcelona, Spain made this video inspired by the 10 points in the Spanish edition of Steal Like An Artist. Bueno!

My kids and I are big fans of Jon Klassen’s hat trilogy. Our current favorite read is Triangle, his book with Mac Barnett. My 5-year-old was thrilled when I told him there’s going to be a sequel called Square, but when I told him it wasn’t out yet, he got so impatient that he decided he’d write his own sequel, Rectangle.

It reminded me of the Bradford Cox story in Steal Like An Artist:

Bradford Cox, a member of the band Deerhunter, says that when he was a kid he didn’t have the Internet, so he had to wait until the official release day to hear his favorite band’s new album. He had a game he would play: He would sit down and record a “fake” version of what he wanted the new album to sound like. Then, when the album came out, he would compare the songs he’d written with the songs on the real album. And what do you know, many of these songs eventually became Deerhunter songs.

When we love a piece of work, we’re desperate for more. We crave sequels. Why not channel that desire into something productive?

I posted the Cox story on Twitter and novelist Austin Grossman said of his book Soon I Will Be Invincible, “I got tired of waiting for a Watchmen sequel so I wrote one.”

Tired of waiting on a sequel? Write your own and see where it goes.

PS. My 2-year-old hasn’t drawn a sequel yet, but he is working on fan art:

Good theft vs. bad theft

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Whenever somebody asks me to draw a line between inspiration and rip-off, I can’t really do much better but send them this chart from Steal Like An Artist. It’s a kind of graphic summary of what T.S. Eliot said in The Sacred Wood (which also serves as an epigraph for the book):

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

In other words, despite the common saying, imitation is not flattery. It’s transformation that is flattery: taking what you’ve stolen and turning it into something new.

I don’t think whether something is good or bad theft is really that complicated. If it feels cheap or wrong to you, it probably is. I advocate an “elevator gut check” for one’s own work: If you met the artist you’re stealing from in a stalled elevator, would they shake your hand or punch you in the face?