I’ve written about my self-taught art journey during the pandemic here. I found a bunch of MFA art program syllabuses online and aggregated them together into my own curriculum, then scoured the interwebs for online courses, video lectures, tutorials, books, blogs, anything and everything I could get my hands on to learn composition and the core principles of art making.
You can also download my art study journal here, which is what this handbook, a free download, is based on.
Critiquing Your Own Art
PDF Download
It reads as if after you’ve produced a work of art, you’re supposed to run through the checklist of items for review page after page in this handbook and self-audit how well you did in each of the categories. Yes and no.
It’s funny, whenever I endeavor to unpack something into its parts to analyze, people accuse me of being too analytical at the cost of creativity and intuition.
But if you observe me in the everyday, you’d think me a hypocrite, because in life, I very much operate off intuition rather than pure, cold logic. I go off my feelings way more than I go off rational deduction.
Yet rational analysis is the necessary checks and balances to your supposed intuition. Your intuition can get tainted by bias. So you have to be hyper self-aware and mindful.
While I would be the first to agree that you do not need a checklist to determine and define what is or is not great art, there is some value to deconstructing why we consider certain pieces “great art” and others not.
And if you can deconstruct that, can you then use it as elements to construct “great art”? I don’t know, but why not try? Even if you fail, you’re going to learn valuable lessons from that failure, so I welcome it, don’t you?
If anything, this sort of guided checklist helps you to more likely spot areas for improvement in your craft.
Anyway, that’s how this handbook got started, and you’ll see that the contents are extracted from that art study journal from 2021, which I kept as reference throughout 2020 while I was working on the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot. I converted the content into, well, a bunch of concrete, tangible points for consideration when critiquing your own art.
It’s not like every single one of the points in this handbook will be 100% applicable to you. It’s more about using it as a general reference, to help you navigate self-assessment of your craft.
Here’s the MS Word doc version for those who want to cut and paste around, and change it up to make it personalized:
Critiquing Your Own Art
DOCX Download
The content within this handbook is free for you to use, share, adapt, and build upon in any way that serves you, be that for personal or commercial purposes. Whether you distribute the PDF or DOCX as-is, remix it into your own content, my goal is for this to reach those who will benefit from it. So do whatever you Will with it.
benebell wen 
This will be so fun to explore when (at some point) I get back into my art! Thanks for sharing this process. Art, or the craft of creating art, really does come through so much repeated labor. Process and assessment are so important!
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Dear Benebell, once again, thank you for your generosity, Ed
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Hello Benebell
I didn`t mean to critiquing your art!
Sorry if you get my comment this way. I should keep my opinion to myself. Thank you.
Your Art is beautiful and authentic. I love art ! In a way everything is art the life itself is an art!
Thank you for your Art!
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You need intuition & logic. It’s a balance.
Thank you for sharing your art & your journey. You’ve been a great help to me.
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Thanks for this. Your art is amazing, I don’t have the decks – I would’ve liked to, but when I see your tarot illustrations an admiring “how??” pops into my head because I think I’ve intuitively been able to feel the extensiveness that is your studies behind the illustrations. I really celebrate your efforts they are awesome.
I do need to do some art study myself, more so for drawing/writing oracle bone script. I can hear the Ancients sighing whenever I try it. Even at my very best my proportionality and dimension-direction is off. God loves a trier, but I can’t keep from wincing when I draw them every day.
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How wonderful. So admire your altruistic take on sharing what you have created and what you have discovered and feel might be useful.
Many who have more than enough in blessings gifted through the roots of heaven still feel every aspect of their enlightened journey has to have a monetary return.
谢谢
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Benebell, thank you for generously sharing your research. I met you years ago at the readers studio and have your Holistic Tarot bible. I noticed your thoroughness and energy at the conference and often wonder how you get so much done. I understand you are a lawyer, I assume day job. Would you consider sharing your thoughts and tips on how you stay focused and keep up with your various interests? I think it would be of value to the community.I am an artist and former university art (painting,drawing,sculpture) instructor, mom, tarot reader and collector. Time management and productivity are always on my mind. With thanks, Sylvia Ziemann
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