On Making Mistakes
Journal Entry Wednesday, August 10, 2022
Related to drawing…
There are various kinds of mistakes a person can make in a drawing depending on the kind of drawing a person is making. Most of these mistakes happen in the forethought or lack of forethought before the first mark is placed on the paper. A lot of times it is a miscalculation of how your image is going to fit on the paper. For instance, if you are making a portrait and at a certain point you run into the problem that from the nose up is going to run off of the top of the sheet. That’s a mistake. But maybe you decide: ‘I am just going to glue more paper to the top to accommodate the missing space.’ That’s one solution and maybe you like it. It might lead you to some new ideas.
Mistakes are opportunities to be creative, to come up with solutions to unanticipated problems. I don’t see mistakes as something to worry about. Still, if you are doing an ink drawing and you spill your bottle of ink on the sheet, maybe you just have to throw it away and that is ok too. If it is something you have 30 hours of work into, then that will be painful but the best thing about mistakes is that you learn something about yourself or your process that will cause you to make the needed improvements in the future. It is part of the process. That’s how you get good at it.
Research and development include mistakes and learning how to fix them or how to not make them to begin with. This takes continuous practice. To achieve self mastery it is not the years, its the hours. Get your hours in.