The last post I wrote was about being inspired by some art I saw in a shop and how it had made me so excited in anticipation to sketch and paint. I literally had ants in my pants wanting to get stuck in to something on paper. But I didn't have any paper and that held me back and increased the anticipation by a factor of, like a million.
I budgeted to find some paper and while I thought about getting water colour paper, I didn't want to limit myself. The purchase ended up being an A3 book of 20 sheets of 200grms card for multiple media...just not watercolour. I decided I would go for it and not limit myself - the inspiration bug might bite in a different way later on and force me to push my own boundaries.
What to sketch? What to paint? Water colour? Yes, I wanted to mix colours and watch them merge into each other. I ended up deciding on an octopus. It was all about the curves. So I did a rough sketch and within a few hours I had started putting in some colour.
Then the weirdest thing happened. I painted the head and stepped back. I loved the tentacles and suckers, but the head just didn't look right. I didn't like it. Perhaps it was the pinky red and green, I don't know - but it just didn't feel right to me. So I cut it off.
Why keep the top if I know it will always bug me and I'll always be looking at the section I just don't like instead of the section I do. Nope, it had to go.
Just like with any other artistic creation process, I felt that it was perfectly OK to erase what I didn't like. Once I had done that, I was actually far happier with it as a whole. Maybe the whole isn't always worth more than the sum of it's parts. I absolutely know that some people would say "Why didn't you just keep working on it until you liked it?" but that's not how my artistic process works. If it isn't right, I'm not going to be able to miraculously improve it to a point of being merely OK. So just like I am happy to use an eraser to take out portions of pencil sketches that I don't think work, where the proportions aren't right or the angle or perspective... I will happily cut a section out of a painting too. I'm still learning and having the freedom to change the rules when it comes to art is part of my process. Isn't that the beautiful thing about not being restricted in art?
What would you have done in that instance? Would you have kept trying to improve it or would you have done the same as me? Let me know in the comments.
𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒖𝒅𝒍𝒚 𝑨𝑰 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆. 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒈𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒎𝒚 𝒐𝒘𝒏.