Pretty nice, right? You might call me talented. You might mean that as praise.
Now here's a picture I drew when I was much, much younger. I'm talking middle school. I'm talking around 7th grade, when I first got into Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. I'm talking my talented little adolescent hands picking up a pencil about ten to twelve years ago.
Personally, I'm fond of the screaming girl in the corner.
But does that look like talent to you? Probably not. You'd probably smile and tell me I did a good job. If you yourself were more artistically inclined, you might give me a tip or two, pack me a lunch and a How to Draw book and send me on my way.
I am no stranger to art. Mom signed me up for a bunch of traditional art classes in my youth, where I drew a lot of pastel animals and landscapes, as well as a couple non-pastel animals. When I started getting into anime and cartoons, one of my teachers gave me one of those How to Draw Anime books. You know the kind. One of the early ones by American artists that people all make fun of nowadays for being bad art because they were some of the first of their kind in the American markets. But it started me on my way.
This is not "talent." None of it is. One could argue that having "an eye for it" is talent, but I can tell you with confidence that my 7th grade eye thought that pencil drawing was absolutely good. Maybe someone else has a good eye for color, for arrangement, for whatever you think goes into art. I'm about to blow your mind, though. None of that matters.
The eye can be trained. Even someone with a knack for proportion can't pick up the pencil and draw like Da Vinci without tutelage or hard work. Art is a skill. Whatever your art is--drawing, painting, sculpting, dancing, writing, poetry, music, cake decorating--all of that is skill. Skills are learned, and skills are hard work. To boil it down to talent is to boil down years of dedication to learning a craft into an innate ability. It's like saying a wizard popped out of a womb casting magic missile into the darkness. It's like saying Robin Hood was born with a bow in his hand splitting arrows down the middle. It's like saying George R. R. Martin never wrote a ton of shitty short stories in college before writing A Song of Ice and Fire (more commonly known now as Game of Thrones)
Worst of all, calling it talent implies that if you're not automatically good at it, you never will be. So you get people who are 18, 23, 42 years old and always admired art, always said "All I can draw is a stick figure!" They really believe that they will never be able to make art. This is inherently and 100% not true. No one got to their skill level without dedication and hard work and a little support from family and friends and teachers. Granted, if you start later, you'll probably have to unlearn more things than someone who had started earlier. But it's never too late to train a skill.
After all, as YouTuber and artist Arin Hanson once said, [foul language warning] "You think I came out of the pussy drawing Mozart?"
3/10 eliminate "talented" from your praise vocabulary
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