On the Artistic Process: Be Unafraid of Imperfection

The Love Trollinger Initiative  LLC (c) 2024. All Rights Reserved.

The artistic process isn't clean, pretty, and perfect; in fact, it's quite the opposite. It's about exploration, trust, and having fun. Wanting perfection is fine (I know, many wouldn’t say that), but wanting to be perfect and being perfect are two different things. Whoever influenced you to be afraid of making mistakes, or exploring and learning, well, I wish they wouldn’t have. These things are the hallmarks of creative practices.

The great Steve Huston once said on a live drawing video that he’s a messy artist who cleans up as he goes. That’s many of us, but somewhere someone said make pretty marks or be neat or be safe or do your best work, and those ideas have their own value, but anything that gets in the way of you exploring your own unique marks in drawing or painting, or expanding your song lyrics, or doing an unusual dance move that represents how you feel/think, is very limiting. And we don’t want you creatively limited. We want you inspired.

Enjoy the drawing video below that demonstrates what we mean:

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