The Paradox of Trying to Draw Well

Okay, first of all, I want to say that I am far, far from a good artist so you shouldn’t take anything I write here as serious art advice. I’m just writing down my personal experience, which I hope you will find interesting.

Here’s the problem.

I have the most fun drawing when I’m not trying to draw well. Recently, I’ve noticed that I draw well when I’m having the most fun. So… I draw well only when I’m not trying to draw well?

Okay, let’s break this down. The expectations that I place upon myself generally make me focus more on the individual marks and less on what I’m trying to communicate in the actual piece. Naturally, scrutinising each individual mark is incredibly exhausting.

A lot of this manifests as a phenomenon that I’ve heard many people call the “fear of the blank canvas”. A paralysing fear that prevents one from even starting a piece at all, due to the fear that one wrong stroke could mess up the entire piece and result in a lot of wasted time.

Don’t be afraid to try even if you don’t think it’s going to be perfect […] you should still do it. It’s okay to make something that isn’t the best, not every piece of work you make is going to be the best. You should just keep doing it!

~ OMOCAT, during a livestream

This, of course, is a topic that many other artists talk about. The spectre of perfectionism and the constant rising tide of self expectations. They’re actively harmful, they impede your creative process.

In fact, these expectations have a double effect on me - they make it way, way easier for me to second-guess the marks I make, which isn’t just exhausting for me, it’s actively harmful for the piece.

That’s why I generally have more fun when I don’t care about the quality of my work. And, paradoxically, why the quality of my work is generally better when I start drawing without caring about the end result.

Well, now that I know this, surely all I need to do is to eliminate any sort of self-expectation from my art.

Well, that’s really hard. And I mean, really hard.

I have no perfect solution to this. Judging by what other artists say, I don’t even think a perfect solution exists. All I can really do is to keep going, keep hammering away at my sketchbook or drawing tablet, drawing what I like, not worrying about whether the work I produce is actually good or not.

Obviously I should care about the mistakes I make at least some of the time, in order to improve. I like to see it this way. There are times that I set aside to improve my art skills and times that I set aside to just have fun. I want to make sure that these times never blur into each other.

It must be said that these problems don’t just happen in art; they happen to projects in general, like writing blogs. There’s a noticeable amount of second-guessing I encounter when typing up a post, in fear of my writing being too unclear. Interestingly, pen can help with this too. Just like how drawing in pen to avoids the temptation to undo your strokes, writing in pen avoids the temptation to undo your words.

In any case, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Despite all of these psychological barriers that prevent us from performing at our best, some of us are still capable of producing stunning art pieces.

I think that’s amazing.