As an artist, you will find yourself mingling among the artistic crowd most of the time. You will be hanging around with them, engaging in dialogues and coffee tablet talks, attending shows and performances and many more. In fact, during your free time, if you are not painting or sculpting, you will probably be reading about art through magazines or other media. In the current environment, you will be exposed to a wide library of resources where you can read and learn new and contemporary techniques, contact other artists and others.
While this is considered to be good practice as you are keeping yourself abreast of the current developments in the art scene both locally and globally, you should also be conducting some research on other matters apart from the usual art-related stuff. So what is it that you should learn and develop instead of those that you already know?
Language
It is given and assume that when it comes to art related language and jargons, you can be regarded as an expert because you have been dwelling in these languages for many years. When you are talking with artists, chances are you have no problem interacting using even the most difficult to understand words because they know what you are talking about. If you practice the same type of languages with the so-called commoner, you might just come about as pretentious and superficial. You must know how to talk to other people who are looking at your art so that they can understand which direction you are coming from. After all, they might be future potential buyers although they might not buy your art immediately.
Learning
Regardless of whether you are an established or new artist, you will not have learnt everything. As with any other discipline and life, learning is constant and it goes on for the rest of your life. As an artist, you might be an expert in oil painting but while you might have mastered a specific part of this technique, there are still countless facets of oil painting that you have yet to master or even come across. You need to find out more ways and methods in oil painting and this is where you can continue to develop. If you think that you have mastered a specific technique and that there are no more rooms for further improvements, you can always move on to other new techniques like watercolour or acrylic. The learning process never ends.
Leverage
If you have been working on your art for some time and have established your body of work and art career in the scene, you will now have to try and leverage on your reputation. You must now look at new avenues and methods where you can try and build on your current name and explore new opportunities. This does not necessarily mean that you have to go out and start selling directly to collectors as riding on your leverage would mean improving your name and to spread more awareness about your body of work to the masses.