Over the last few weeks, I have been working on a new painting for my Crossing Lines series. This time, I was using the colors of fire, red, orange and yellow, as my color pallet and planned to add a silhouette with something representing fire. The background came out wonderful and I’m planning a tutorial showing you how I make the background for my Crossing Lines series. It’s really simple.
However, the silhouette was a disaster. First, I wanted to use a dragon and then when I sketched out a dragon, I realized I had no idea exactly what I was doing and it was way beyond my skill level. Maybe one day.
Then I wanted to use a symbol representing the sun rather than the sun and it looked pretty good on paper, but on canvas, it really didn’t work.
Then I decided to just paint the sun and it went horribly wrong. Oh, so wrong. At this point, I’m just going to get some black gesso and paint the canvas and use it for something else.
Why am I telling you about this abysmal failure? Because it can happen to anyone. Not just you. You hear people all the time talk about how they have a bad drawing or a bad painting, but they never actually show you that bad piece of art. Somehow, you just never believe them. This is me saying, yes, my artwork sometimes comes out terrible. See, it’s awful! I hate it.
I’m also saying that I know what I did wrong. I should have kept the background and done this more like my original Crossing Lines piece with the patterns. And I will recreate this background with that idea in mind. Each of those patterns will be ones that remind me of fire, so probably lots of free-flowing patterns with curves rather than the more squared off or boxy ones I usually like.
What do you think? Do you have a piece of artwork that was a complete failure? What did you learn from it? Did you recreate it and fix your mistakes? Let me know in the comments below!