A Memory Of Ice Skating...

Sep 01, 2024

Hi friend,

In previous posts I have mentioned that I am part of the SCBWI MT region Sparks Co-working sessions. If you are curious about these sessions you can learn more here. Today I want to chat about what happens when a painting fails and you have to pivot mid project and you are a recovering perfectionist.

The prompt for December’s Sparks session was “A memory of ice skating…”

My concept was to have a young girl suffering from the terrible heat of the summer, remembering a cooler time the previous season. I wanted to try to make this into a mock book cover.

At the time I was watching a lot of Sophie McPike videos and I loved the way she was painting with acryla-gouache, a medium I had never tried before. Sophie uses it on claybord- a surface I WAS familiar with. Back in college I used to paint these more realistic paintings using liquid watercolor on claybord:

Looking at your old work is so painful!

But I had never tried to create a painting in the way Sophie McPike does- allowing the background to peek through the layers. So I wanted to give it a try.

If you aren’t familiar, acryla-gouache is meant to be the best of both worlds between acrylics and gouache. It is more opaque than regular gouache and doesn’t lift up once it dries. Personally, I found it was basically just acting like acrylic paint, which I have never enjoyed painting with. I probably need more practice before I am converted. In any case, this was as far as I got before I decided to start over.

I found that the paint dried impossibly fast on my palette and I was using WAY more than I was comfortable with, considering that I had spent a little over $30 for my set of Holbein tubes. I felt like I kept getting stuck trying to make the lines crisp, but the paint would bead up into my brush and not spread nicely. After years and years of working as a watercolor painter, I found this too frustrating to handle. And then, in the vulnerable moment, the critical inner voice of my perfectionism rose up in me and began the old tirade of “not good enough,” that always used to paralyze me in the past. When I am on a deadline, it seems to exacerbate the panic I feel when I get stuck in this loop and this instance was no exception.

Thankfully, I’ve been reading some really great books and watching videos on the topic of perfectionism which has helped me break the pattern when I recognize it happening. I’ll leave a list of those books down below, if this is something that is a sticking point for you too.

In any case, despite my inner battle, my stubborn streak compelled me to start over again using watercolor.

This was as far as I got before frustration again rose up in me. The buildings were driving me crazy. Something about them just seemed off to me. The characters in the background also looked terrible to me. Now, months removed, I honestly think that I could have just continued working on it and it would have been fine. But when you get in a painting funk, your thinking isn’t clear and objective. So to make myself feel better, I decided to scan this painting into my computer and finish it in Adobe Fresco.

Here’s a quick time lapse of the sketch phase and the final digital paint layers (no sound):

Once it was finished in Fresco, despite feeling defeated and less than enthusiastic about the final result, I decided to slap some type on it and call it good.

There are parts that I do like- mainly the child throwing the temper tantrum in the background and the pigeons eating the fries, but there is a lot I would do differently. But that is the process of art- right? You make something and you learn from it. Even though the perfectionist in me wants to reject it, I know that there was still something to be gained from the process.

Thanks as always for reading!

If you struggle with perfectionism here are some really great resources that might help:

The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self Sabotage into Self Mastery by Brianna Wiest

Self-Sabotage: Recognize And Eliminate It With Shadow Work by Heidi Priebe

Your Head is a Houseboat by Campbell Walker

The Confidence Gap by Russ Harris

The Perfectionism Workbook by Taylor Newendorp

The CBT Workbook for Perfectionism by Sharon Martin

My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor

Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach

Radical Compassion by Tara Brach

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice by Robert & Lisa Firestone