Before and After

Sometimes I’ll look at a painting and think ‘Wow, that’s pretty good’ only to come back to it a day later and see some horrible mess of colour and shape. While it’s not '“Bad” exactly, it’s certainly not what I had in mind when I set out to create the painting.

Until recently I was working mostly in Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint to create my artwork, all on a monitor and drawn through a tablet. Without the tactile aspect you get with paper and canvas, the importance I gave on each piece was harder to grasp. It was easier to forget about it and move onto something else and in doing that I didn’t have to deal with the mistakes, the '“Failure” and ultimately not progress in my work.

However, working with Gouche of Paper I regained something, I was suddenly able to start a painting, and when it didn’t turn out right I tried again, and when that didn’t work, I tried another time, I was never able to do this before. While I wasn’t completely absent of the inner voice telling me I was no good, I let it pass and a more rational voice broke things down and eventually I got what I wanted from the painting.

This is mostly a post to toot my own horn, but it’s also a good lesson in perseverance. Especially in an age where people online only post they’re most refined pieces (me included) and not all the stepping stones that it took to get there. So if you’re going to take anything away from this post, I hope it’s that you should just keep trying.

Below is a comparison between the first attempt at a painting and the right is the third attempt. (As a side note, if an artist says they’re not happy with something but you think It looks good, it’s because they made the one on the left, but what they wanted was the one on the right.)