There's this stigma around art majors that they have it much easier than other majors but that's not true at all. Now I don't know how hard other majors are, but I think its safe to say that art majors have it just as hard. I've just started as an art major and my art classes are already harder than my other class, and before you say "why is it hard you're just coloring" read this article.

I've been at Ball State for about a month now and I've done more for my art classes than I have for my other classes. I've already had four art projects that I've had to do and I'm currently on my fifth one. I have also stayed up twice till 3 am trying to finish two projects. You may be thinking why are you complaining that's normal, but compared to the other classes I haven't had to do anything. I had one quiz in psych and that was just over the syllabus; other than that all I've had to do is show up to class. The projects that I've had to do haven't been extremely hard yet, but they are very time-consuming.

My first real art project was a self-portrait and it took me so long to do it. In total it took me about seven hours to complete it. Granted two of those hours were spent on the first draft of it, but that still means that I had spent five hours on the final draft. Even with all the time that I spent on it, it still wasn't good and I was very disappointed in myself. I ended up getting a B on it which was very, very shocking. However, when my class was grading each other two or three people gave me a C on it. The grade that I got wasn't the point though. My point is that as an artist you can put in a ton of work and still not think it looks good or be proud of it.

The second "big" project that I had to do was for my foundations class. The project was called expansion of the square and we basically just had to cut shapes out and flip them, but there were a lot more rules to it than that. I thought that I did pretty good on the project, however when it was time for the critique I ended up wanting to cry and drop out. Now, this may seem like an exaggeration, but I've never been super confident in my art and this critique proved my point of why. This project had four different ways to do it but we only had to do three of the ways. The way we did the critique was we were split into four different groups and each group had to rank the pieces from best to worst. So, we basically got to compare ourselves to others; which is like the one thing you are never supposed to do. When it came time to actually talking about the pieces everyone pretty much pointed out the things wrong with each piece and didn't really give any feedback on how to fix it. The reason why I left this class wanting to cry and drop out is that all three of my pieces were in the bottom row or in a row of their own because they were so bad.

Art majors don't just have it hard because of the workload, but also because of how it destroys you mentally.