18 Nov 2019, 18:59

@Aleksey I get that a lot from my high school students. They get paralyzed by the prospect of messing up. I try to teach them to embrace the mistakes and go with whatever happens. I do that by doing a lot of messy mixed media assignments that force them to loosen up. Also, I let them know if they just can't live with the flaw then just start over.

It's a hard lesson to learn. For me, it was the frustration that I could not draw realism perfectly that paralyzed me into not drawing for fifteen years. I walked away from art feeling like a failure. It wasn't until as an adult an art teacher told me that if she wanted a perfect likeness of an object, she'd just take a photo. I realized then that all the mess-ups and flaws are what make art unique and give it that character that now photographers are trying to replicate with Photoshop. Funny, huh?