🎨 Can You Really Track Artistic Growth?
🎨 Becoming Your Own Art Academy Graduate Without the Tuition
“Everything is trackable.”
That sentence came from Ali Abdaal on a podcast, said with total confidence. And it stayed with me longer than I expected.
Because I wasn’t sure I agreed.
If you are training for a marathon or running a business, tracking makes sense. Distance, time, revenue, growth. Those are clean numbers.
But what about something quieter and harder to pin down, like becoming a better artist?
What if your goal is not a diploma, but something closer to this:
Learning to think, see, and work like an art academy graduate.
Not the certificate. The depth. The discipline. The visual judgment. The ability to notice what is off and know how to respond.
That kind of growth does not show up neatly in metrics. But that does not mean it leaves no trace.
🎯 Why Artistic Progress Feels Hard to Measure
Art does not move in a straight line.
Sometimes the work looks worse before it looks better. Sometimes a painting fails because you finally pushed past what felt safe. Sometimes improvement shows up as discomfort, not polish.
Growth might look like:
A study that falls apart but teaches you what not to repeat
A color choice that feels risky but opens something new
A sketch that captures movement even if the proportions are off
From the outside, it can look messy. From the inside, it is often a sign that something is shifting.
So yes, artistic progress is harder to track. But it is not untrackable.
You just have to change what you are paying attention to.
🧭 Becoming Your Own Art School, One Session at a Time
1. Define a Personal Curriculum
Traditional art academies cycle through a range of foundations. You can do the same, without copying their structure exactly.
Think in broad areas rather than rigid rules:
Drawing fundamentals: anatomy, gesture, perspective
Color and painting: value, limited palettes, mixing
Composition and design: rhythm, focal points, negative space
Master studies: copying, analyzing, translating
Media exploration: watercolor, gouache, oils, mixed media
Personal voice: themes, series, recurring questions
You do not need to touch everything every week. Balance shows up over months, not days.
2. Set Small, Specific Experiments
Vague goals like “paint more” rarely lead anywhere useful.
Try framing goals as short experiments instead:
Ten gesture drawings a day for two weeks
Three master studies using a limited watercolor palette
One painting built entirely around secondary colors
A small series completed within a month
Specific does not mean rigid. It just gives your attention somewhere to land.
3. Track the Process, Not the Results
You do not need a complicated system. A notebook, a spreadsheet, or a few index cards is enough.
What matters is recording what you worked on and what you noticed.
A simple format might include:
Date
Focus area
What you practiced
Time spent
A brief reflection
Not what was good or bad. Just what shifted.
Over time, patterns appear. Avoidance becomes visible. Confidence quietly builds.
4. Reflect Instead of Critique
Once a week or once a month, pause and ask:
What did I explore?
What frustrated me?
What did I avoid?
What would I not have attempted a month ago?
This kind of reflection replaces external critique with self-awareness. It trains judgment, which is one of the hardest skills to develop as an artist.
5. Create Your Own Milestones
You do not need exams, but you do need moments of consolidation.
Milestones might look like:
A self-portrait from imagination
A small, cohesive series
A master study reinterpreted in your own language
Submitting work to a juried show
Teaching a technique to someone else
These moments test integration, not perfection.
✨ The Takeaway
Maybe everything can be tracked. But with art, tracking is less about numbers and more about attention.
It is about noticing what you are drawn to, where you hesitate, and how your decisions change over time.
Art does not live in spreadsheets.
But growth leaves traces.
You just have to learn how to see them.
