Drawing Three Finished - Return to Drawing Two

Here is a detail of drawing three which is 80% finished. Now I have returned to drawing two for a while to work on the face and specifically the eye.

I mentioned in my last post that I did this out of a fault: perfectionism. Why is this a faulty? I just wanted to get it right! Julia Cameron talks about this in the The Artist's Way. On perfectionism she says, "It is a loop - an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the detail of what you are painting and to lose sight of the whole." Getting mired in the details is one of the weights faced by artists and me personally. If not identified and stopped it derails me in painting series and other areas of life. I've seen perfectionism cause students to fail out of school. They can't stop and turn the project in!


So, I allotted myself only so long this morning to redo the face on drawing two. Then I will move on. "A paintings is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places, " said Paul Gardner.


The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, is one of my favorite books. After reading if the first time I made a plan to become a professional artist in three years. One year later, I launched in the world as a full time artist. The book is very powerful. Be careful if you read it!