I did this one today and don’t particularly care for the end product. I worked on it most of the afternoon and just couldn’t get what I wanted. This is something I am learning to live with. They don’t all turn out great and that’s ok. No one makes something fantastic every time. What matters is you tried to engage your muse and tried to make something that means something to you. Creativity is just like a muscle. It has to be worked repeatedly before it can do the heavy lifting.
This is something I have been working on but it’s tough. My attitude for a long time was that I needed to be inspired to try to create (mistake number 1). Then when I got inspired and tried to create, I would fail, because the only time I was trying was when I got inspired. And the failing made me reluctant to try again. And this my friends, is the cycle of how NOT to get good at anything! No practice means you don’t get better which depresses you which means you don’t get inspired which means you don’t practice… You get the picture. I have had to work very hard to learn to like the process more than the product. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I LOVE the product. But I am trying to not hate the whole process when it doesn’t go exactly the way I envisioned.
Dont worry about failing. In art, there is nothing wrong with failing. You always learn something from failure. What you don’t learn from is not trying to create. I try many days and fail to achieve what I want and those images don’t end up here, but every once in a while, I think I need to throw a failure out to remind myself that it is the process that I am attached to, not the product.
There’s a quote from Ray Bradbury: “Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, ‘Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today.’ It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad — you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, ‘I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.” I think that summarizes it nicely!
So with that, what ever your art is, go out and do it, make it or whatever, and enjoy the process!