Man, do I hate making mistakes – and I make a lot of them. From putting my foot in my mouth, to giving away everything I owned to live permanently in the wilderness (lasted 2 months), to pushing too hard during workouts resulting in injuring myself, to just doing the wrong thing I have innumerable examples of the mistakes I’ve made.
So one of the highlights of the drawing courses I took this year was using pencils. With pencils, mistakes can be erased.
When I painted and made mistakes, I would either live with them, fix them or paint over them. Bob Ross, my original online instructor, called mistakes “Happy Accidents”. He would change the painting to accommodate any errors while smiling the entire time.
When I make mistakes – I’m usually not smiling. More often, I want to bang my head against the wall and curse myself for being an idiot who caused my own misfortune.
Usually.
But not always.
Sometimes, I know I’m going to make mistakes. Whenever I am learning something new, I expect to make mistakes. Those mistakes have lower consequences and are easy to accept.
In my most recent artistic endeavor, I’m doing Urban Sketching. The instructors I follow sketch in permanent ink and then paint with watercolors. Since I’m learning from scratch, I decided to sketch in pencil, then retrace in permanent ink and finally paint with watercolors.
This has gone well. I am able to erase and adjust when I make a mistake.
Until this week when one of the instructors explained why he prefers to start with ink. He said that mistakes will happen and that you just continue drawing and incorporate the mistake into your sketch. He teaches a “loose” style that’s somewhat impressionistic. Often he says you don’t need to draw the entire image, just enough to suggest the image and let the viewers mind fill in the blanks.
And so I put my pencil away and began sketching in ink. Sometimes, I screw up the perspective and draw the lines angling up instead of down. Or I put a window in the wrong place. Or the figure I drew looks like a Zombie from the walking dead. Or the shadows are on the wrong side.
It turns out that I’m not the only one who does this. My instructor makes mistakes too – and he’s a pro.
Other times, my mistakes become random squiggles that add character and depth to the sketch.
Either way, it’s been a satisfying journey so far.
