Art + Perfectionism = Profound Sadness

[PastryOfApathy]

I can't ever finish anything ever and it's beginning to seriously piss me off. The sketch always looks better, I always end up hating everything I make, and I spend like a month fucking with single pixels just to toss it a month later.

Like, I wish I could just not give a shit and just go with it but no matter  how hard I try it's always the same thing. I make a sketch I like, I end up getting annoyed by something, I spend multiple weeks fucking with the sketch, and I end up spending like months trying to make the "perfect" line art and I end up just hating it and deleting it.

How the fuck do you stop being a horrible perfectionist? I want to actually draw things in less than a month's time. Fuck man.

[Hewge]

I feel like every artist has a "perfectionist" phase. Which is sorta healthy, because it means your skills are reaching a point that you're able to see your flaws a lot more easily. It's just... maybe the 'mechanical' skill hasn't quite caught up.   Aka; You can see your flaws, but you're not quite able to easily fix them yet.

You will learn more by moving onto new things, and trying new stuff. Not by obsessing over the same thing over, and over, and over. As irritating as it may be, I'd recommend trying not to stick onto one drawing for too long. Especially if all it's causing is a lot of stress. There's a difference between getting a bit stressed because you're learning, and stress that is preventing you from improving!

While it's fine to spend time on a drawing; it's also fine to just move on. The tricky part is discerning for yourself when a drawing stops being worth spending time on, and when it's time to just move on to something new.

[Sutekh_the_Steak]

Maybe you're starting to hate the sketch because you're spending so much time with it? Like when you find an album/song you really like and listen to it non-stop for a few days, but then after a while you can't really bear to hear it because you've heard it so many times. But then a few months later you listen to it for the first time in ages and suddenly it's awesome again. I dunno, something like that.

Maybe make a folder and put any sketches you start to hate in there, and then move onto something else. Then go back to the folder after a little while once you've had a break from looking at the sketches in it and decide then if anything there is worth keeping or not, it could turn out you actually do like some of it after all.

 

(I'm not an artist btw so this is possibly not very good advice)

Edited October 26, 2015 by Sutekh_the_Steak

[Tsuujou]

I can't ever finish anything ever and it's beginning to seriously piss me off. The sketch always looks better, I always end up hating everything I make, and I spend like a month fucking with single pixels just to toss it a month later.

This is my exact mindset honestly. I can't stand my shit when I "finish" it. Completed work from me loses fucking everything that was in the sketch. So I try to find some way to keep it sketchy even when I complete it, but I find that it looks even worse. Drawing is just not fucking fun, I swear. :l

[Antumbra]

After you are finished with your art, use your perfectionism to come back to it after a few months/year/whatever to try it again.  You can then see your improvement and see what new ideas you have to tackle it.

Either that or you will hate it more than the first and hate the original one less.

[Kaizy]

I know how you feel. It's hard as hell to break out of that perfectionist mindset with your art. Forcing yourself to just sketch more and focus less on making a finished piece helps sometimes.

[DevilishlyHandsome49]

I recently had this with a lot of my writing. Took a month to get one story done cause I was so hung up on almost every word I used and how I used it. Took almost a month to get it done. I just went along with it, returning to any flaws I saw after I was done the draft. I also had friends look my work over while I did it, trying to see if I was worrying too much over one thing or whether I had a right to worry. I might have thought it was bad, but my friends would reassure me the work was alright and were always honest with their input.

I know I'm not talking about drawing specifically, but I guess the same thing could apply here. You may not like it what you're working on cause you see a minor flaw, but its normal. As one of my friends said, it means you care about your work enough to have the desire to deliver a good product. However, if you ever feel too conscious about, ask a friend (an honest one and truthful one) to look at it for you. To calm you if you're worrying too much or show you how to improve if you have some errors

[Conker]

Writing and drawing are different beasts, but in my case, I force myself to finish. You can fix/edit later. Get it done so you can say it's done. If that means ignoring some flaw, then so be it.

But yeah. Different mediums, so maybe that won't work so well when drawing.

I do get ya though. Sometimes it's hard to work on something when you know parts just aren't working right. In my case, I'm just more stubborn than my novels.

[Mikazuki Marazhu]

I feel sorry for @Hewge who's overly obsessive with perfecting his art.

I just hope he gets more sunlight

[Zeitzbach]

Art is about having fun and expressing what you love + yourself.

So stop trying to make it perfect and just make it good enough to make your dick hard.

[Vallium]

Be like me and make shit art because your lines are all shit and everything is awful, but hey, its a finished piece of shit :V

No but really, if you did that you'd likely still be angry looking at the finished product. There's always something. So pick your battles.

Edited October 26, 2015 by WolfNightV4X1