Your painting doesn’t need to be perfect
Don’t worry about making your paintings perfect. Make your paintings good enough. Good enough is often still great. A great painting is worthwhile while a perfect painting may be unobtainable.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Often when we strive for perfection we get so wound up on being perfect that we aren’t able to accomplish anything at all.
Consider that trying to achieve perfection isn’t always a good thing. Most of the time you don’t need perfect results. If you try to make your painting perfect, you will spend so much time on it, trying to perfect every spot, throwing out paintings that aren’t perfect and trying again. Maybe you’ll finally get that perfect painting, but maybe you never will. You could have spent far less time and had a painting that was good enough, that was great. You could take satisfaction in producing a great, but imperfect, painting or you could be frustrated and disheartened because you couldn’t accomplish unrealistic ideas of perfection. That’s why perfection isn’t good. All that extra time trying to get from great to perfect is just not efficient and productive when great is, well, great.
Plus, perfection isn’t the point of art. Art is about creating a representation of something we see or imagine, but isn’t meant to be exact.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t try to constantly improve your painting skills or spend a lot of time on painting. If you want spend a lot of hours on a painting, you want to take time to do something very detailed, and you want to try a painting again and again to improve, that’s perfectly ok. I’m just asking that you make a conscious decision to do those things, rather than getting caught up in trying to make your painting perfect because you can’t see that you have a really great painting in front of you.
As artists, we tend to see all of the mistakes in our work. It’s only natural, because we’ve been staring at our work for so long and we know the mistakes that are there because we made them. We are acutely aware of how imperfect our paintings are. Unfortunately by focusing on how our paintings aren’t perfect we also tend to overlook how much is right with our paintings. Your painting maybe isn’t perfect, but it’s not meant to be. And it’s probably still a great painting.
Don’t think of the imperfections in your art as something that makes your art less worthwhile. These imperfections are what make each piece of art unique. Often we only see them as mistakes that make our art not perfect, but instead think of what these imperfections add to your art. Watercolor lends itself to many imperfections. Watercolor is often not perfect. But that is what makes watercolor special. That’s what adds to the art.
The next time you are unhappy with a painting, put it away for a while. Come back to it the next day. When you come back to it, look at what is good about the painting. Your painting may not be perfect, but I bet it’s pretty great.
All of the paintings in this post are paintings of mine that I think are great. But none of them are perfect. Each has imperfections that you may not notice, but I can see. If I had waited for perfection, I would have a website with no paintings and I wouldn’t have sold a single painting or print. Don’t let perfection hold you back.