Copying your teacher’s technique isn’t cheating. It’s how every craft has been handed down.

Craft has always moved by imitation. You copy a grip, a brush stroke, a piece of phrasing, and in the copying your body learns a solution somebody spent years finding, which is the whole reason to have a teacher. Insisting on inventing everything yourself is not integrity, it is slow. Your own voice comes later, and it comes out of the material you absorbed.

Pick one person whose technique you admire and copy a specific thing precisely this week. Not their style, one mechanical habit. Say out loud where you got it, and keep it until it stops feeling borrowed.