Working with Artists
If you have ever tried to offer feedback to artist on their work and things went badly, you probably ended up wondering, “is the artist oversensitive, or am I just a jerk?” Perhaps the problem was largely one of language. It’s pretty well understood that most artists are probably going to be lost in a swirling mass of programming terms when trying to talk to a coder, but have you ever considered that art has its own vocabulary? Terms like value, hue, warm, cool and saturation all target very specific features of a piece of art. People not familiar with these specific art terms are going to throw around all sorts of words that are ambiguous, or even worse, actually imply an art definition which is not what they mean at all. As my goal here is to try and offer some workarounds for those untrained in the arts, my solution is not simply for you to go out and start reading art lexicons. You will pick the language eventually, but meanwhile, there are some very important things you can be aware of that will help this process that artists call a critique.