The Art of Screwing Up
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
~Scott Adams
I screwed up one of the pieces I was doing yesterday. I had originally achieved the affect when prepping a rainbow-colored butterfly on a scrap piece of paper, and Gypsy and I both loved how it looked. My goal was to recreate that same butterfly above a sea of little black butterflies. The black butterflies came out great. The rainbow butterfly looked like trash. I tried to fix it. It looked worse. I wasn’t pleased, and said as much.
“You would just tell me that’s art,” said Gypsy.
She’s right - she’s been out in the garage tinkering along with me for the past two nights. Every time she complained about something being crooked or not the way she imagined it to be, my response was always, “That’s art!” and an encouragement to keep at it. The Hippie made a great analogy for her - one that a fellow writer would understand. Just as the written word is the tool you use to tell the story in your head, the pens and brushes and glue and glitter are the things you use to translate what you’ve got in your head. At first it’s rarely (if ever) the same thing. You just have to work at it. Just like writing. Gypsy frowned at us, but she kept at it, and I was glad to have the company.
But I was not happy about this piece, and I wanted to do something about it before that globulous layer of crap dried forever. I had seen some words on another piece of scrapbook paper, and I ferreted them out. “There lived a beautiful princess,” the words said, and I grabbed my scissors to cut them out. It seemed a bit tougher than usual, and when I snipped the last corner of the strip I realized why - it had been stuck to the page behind it. I had snipped the exact same similar strip out of the page behind it, a dark wine-colored print.
“Hmm,” my brain thought, and as I clipped the words into pieces, so did I clip the strip of wine-colored paper.I wiped off the offending glitter and pasted my new pieces right over it. I was so happy with the result I immediately did two more pieces in a similar vein.
“Look,” I said to Gypsy, showing off the finished piece. “That’s art.”
She stuck her tongue out at me.
For the rest of the gallery of artwork I’ve completed this month, click here and just arrow forward. I’m adding new pieces every day until Mo*Con! (And then I’ll remind myself how to do that Etsy shop…)
Originally published at AletheaKontis.com. You can comment here or there.