My son loves a series of art tutorials on YouTube. With friendly narration and a close shot of a page of paper, he is taken step-by-step through the drawing of some creature, or character, or scene.
At first, I was turned off by the whole idea – I’d rather see him creating than copying, I thought.
But then I remembered Austin Kleon’s mantra: steal like an artist.
A budding artist doesn’t need to create whole cloth from their imagination; she needs to fill her mind with the moves of her art, so she can call upon them to create. Only with thousands of repetitions and variations will she build the vocabulary of her art and be ready to create something original.
These art tutorials are a way for my son to build that vocabulary. In just the same way, a budding musician should take advantage of guitar, piano, violin tutorials to build a vocabulary of basic musicality.