We all learn from mistakes . . .

The other day, I read a short post on Instagram from one of the thousands of creative people who give advice to other creative people online. This piece of advice was a common one about the idea of no pre-planning for a sketch or drawing, starting with an indelible ink line and living with the consequences. I have heard this SO many times, each time producing a shudder.

This particular instance was succinct - something like “you must just go directly to ink to learn to live with your mistakes.”

This time, my shudder was a little more seismic.

Should it really be a “goal” to live with your mistakes and not try to avoid them, or correct them if you can’t avoid them? How about we ask an electrician about that. Any electrician who is alive, has learned her trade by avoiding and correcting mistakes.

A mistake in your artwork is not as likely to actually kill you, but should you have to learn to “live with it”? Is there any other “learning” in that approach, or is that it?

Correcting our mistakes is the road to learning everything.

If you kill your houseplant by forgetting to water it, you learn from that, and make sure to water the next one. You may still kill that next one with some other mistake, but it won’t be lack of water. (poor houseplants)

If you turn your batch of cookies into cinders because the oven was too hot, you will turn the temperature down for the second batch.

You get the drift. We try, we screw up, we try again and don’t repeat that particular mistake (usually). After a few rounds of that, we learn how to do something.

I get that the “live with it” advice in the online art world is intended to give permission to the folks who fear making art. So they are constantly being told that there are no mistakes in art, there is no right way, and if you somehow make a mistake, even though there aren’t any mistakes, you need to learn to live with it.

Are you confused yet? Me too.

I differentiate the Online Art World (which I call the OAW) from the Real Life Art World (RLAW) because they are such different places.

Real Life Artists do make mistakes and plenty of them. Making mistakes and correcting them is an integral part of the creative process, in fact. There actually are right ways to do things, and though everyone knows perfection will never be realized, the pursuit of it is what inspires our efforts and our learning.

Every real life artist I know composes to some extent with a pencil. A pencil makes a mark that is NOT indelible, and therein lies REAL permission. Just do it. You can erase it if you don’t like it.

In composition, you want the most pleasing arrangement of things, and that involves moving them around a lot. If you planned your composition with indelible ink lines, your page or canvas would look like an after-cat ball of yarn. You couldn’t live with that. Trust me.

But, composition is not a big topic in the OAW. Neither are any of the other things you might have learned in Real World art school. That allows for any and everyone to be creative and that is a good thing. It also allows for anyone to be a “teacher” and the jury is still out on that one.

Be all that as it may, my argument is about the constant denigration of centuries old truisms about art because the denigrators do not know about them, or want to take the time to learn about them.

We are all racing the clock in the OAW, it seems.

The worst message is that pencils and erasers are crutches that trap you into re-doing things (wasting time) and you should be embarrassed to need to use them. Often, you hear people actually apologizing for having used a pencil in their artwork.

The true message is that pencils are Permission Sticks and erasers are Undo Keys, and together, they are critical tools in the creative process, and should alleviate all fear of making a mark on a page.

They allow us to make our mistakes, correct our mistakes, and make some more. Rinse and repeat. And we learn thereby, to be better art makers.

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