Being willing to experiment with new or ideas (or at least ideas that are new to me) is a big part of how I
keep producing different works for art rather than just drawing the same thing over and over again. Some
people might side down with a vivid vision in their head of the picture they want to put on paper, and then
just draw. Personally I've found whenever I do that my vision and my result will often look like very very
distant cusions of eachother and my result has never been as good as my vision. I tend to sit down with a
vague idea of what I want to do, maybe a couple of components or techniques I want to use or experiment
with, and when I sit down with a vauge vision my results always look far better than any vision I could
have ever come up in my head first, and the result is that the artwork itself tends to look better by any
meassure than anything I think of first and put on paper second.
There is more than one creative process and not every process works for every artist, of course not every
style works for every artist either. As a rule if you feel like you are fighting yourself to use that
creative process you are doing something wrong. But I digress...
Hearing that artists experiment with ideas that are new and different (at least to the artist) every so often
should surprise no one. What might surprise some people is one of the other ways an artist (or at least I as
an artist) can come up with a whole new idea.
One of the things I was taught as a kid in an art class was how to just go with it when I make a mistake in
my artwork. When I started studying the preforming arts as a preteen this lesson became more important, the
biggist mistake you can make on stage is aknoweldge that you made a mistake at all (which includes correcting
that mistake). The same is true with drawing a picture. Recently I was playing around with a picture I thought
for certain was going to have one look and ended up finding myself thinking I'd have to redo entire chunks of it
because yes I screwed it up, of course when I removed those parts of the picture to redo it that's when I
realized the whole picture worked better without what I was removing at all so I just left it off. By acident
I'd created a whole different picture than orginally planned, something that was outside even my vauge vision
for what I was doing.
That as a matter of fact was a case of my artwork going very right by going very wrong. I've had numerous situations
where the artwork going very wrong was just that, artwork going wrong. Actaully some of my �artwork gone wrong�
wasn't worth trying to salavage but then went one to inspire some of my later artwork. This doesn't just happen to
artists, in any line of work involving creativity a person might come up with an idea or concept that is outside of
what they intended to do originally but it can turn out very easily that the best ideas anyone ever had are the ones
that were stumbled upon.
Some people I am sure are reading this and thinking that everyone of those mistakes means I failed as an artist. Never
mind the fact that if I had failed completely they wouldn't be reading this. Those people aren't wrong, I did fail...I
failed to draw the picture I had originally intended at the time at the time...and then I suceeded in drawing
better than the picture I failed to draw ever would have been. Since last I checked I've got human blood in my veins and it
turns out contrary to what some people have heard by deffinition humans flawed it's only reasonable to assume that a
human being is going to ocaisionally use flawed methods and/or create flawed results in everything they do.
The only reason an artist might think of any of their artwork as mistakes gone very right is because they know what was in
their head when they created it. So when an artist devates from what they intended they tend to see all sorts of flaws in
the artwork that the average person would never notice (and never think to notice). I can tell you as an artist it's very
hard to look at what you might consider a mistake and believe that other people don't see it. The biggist mistake an artist
can make isn't to create something flawed, or even show their flawed work to the general public it's to admit that something
is wrong with the artwork. That isn't always easy, and I have found that the more of a vision I have in advance the harder
it is to accept it when I make a mistake, and the harder it is to take pride in my artwork. That hasn't stopped me from
doing projects where the results on paper had to perfectly match the vision in my head, but I don't do them nearly as
often or do nearly as many of them.
Regaurdless of the process I use to create a give work of art, from initail vision to tangable results, and
every flaw, success, failure, mistake, and minute in between I love every minute, and if I didn't love every minute I spend producing
the artwork I wouldn't be doing it at all.
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