Mistakes in Art

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Do people make mistakes? Or I just make mistakes & have to keep erasing, I'm not sure, I never went to art school.

Of course people make mistakes in art.

Many times, artists have techniques which enable them to cover their mistakes.

No piece of work is ever finished. Therefore no work is perfect, therefore all work has imperfections.

The 'mistakes' are often where the best art comes from - things which the artist did not intend, yet came out beautiful anyway, and inspire a new direction to take the creativity. I've found that looking back at previous work that I once thought had failed is one of the best things to do if I feel my art or music has become stagnant or boring to me.

Speaking as one whose art is writing fiction, I can tell you that I'm constantly rewriting, or tossing out stuff that I think is no good. Same with any other art.

Jackson Pollock said something to the extent of: "I deny the mistake." That is, if something went wrong, it was simply incorporated into the piece he was working on.

Was an art student for a couple of years. You just paint over that section with white paint. When the white dries you continue with the painting.

Modern technicians (sometimes as parts of doing restoration work) X Ray the works of the old masters. And they find ghost images of underneath the familiar master pieces . False starts that the artist made before he went ahead with the finished composition.

Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus.

I don't use heavy pencils when drawing, so it's easier to erase. I also use special erasers that leave no marks. I don't use a lot of pressure on a pencil.

With paint, I just paint over whatever mistake I've made. I don't use white paint for this.

With charcoal, it can often be blended away or removed with a kneadable eraser.

With clay, it just needs to be reshaped and not allowed to dry before it's ready for the first firing.

When I am writing, I am constantly rephrasing, rewording, and rearranging my words, so usually i am eventually able to edit out "mistakes" (as long as I am typing on a computer)... but when i am drawing, my style is such that I do it somewhat autonomously and self-referentially... so that every single line or dot is "a controlled accident." The way I like to put it is that I am just trying to render a crude approximation of the patterns and synesthesias I see in my mind's eye as i am moving my hand. i never know what is going to happen when I start to draw. So mistakes can just be transformed into something very easily. I will say that sometimes I will have drawn something really nice, and I might see the opportunity to make some "swoosh" that would fit...and it doesn't come out right... and that can upset me slightly... and I will always see that part and be dissatisfied with it, because I know what was intended. This can leead to me beecoming shy about starting up on a project from the previous night let alone weeks/moths years ago... I am afraid I will "ruin it." I've heard it said that "great works of art are never finished, they are merely abandoned." This applies to all forms of art.

Oh... and this is why i have a hard time with objective art, hand-writing, spontaneous story telling (spontaneity in speech in general), and writing linearly (without being able to easily edit your thoughts) in pencil/pen. As soon as i have said someething i will have thoguht of a better way i could have said it, etc...

I've had a memory on the edge of recall ever since this thread started - a quotation that I couldn't quite reach.

Got it now. Way back in the seventies, the musician Brian Eno, aided by Peter Schmidt, made a set of cards called the "Oblique Strategies". The idea was, that whenever the flow of ideas in the studio grinds to a halt, you pick a card, and do what it says. But the suggestions are really oblique - they're not direct instructions, you have to employ lateral thinking to apply them.
And my favourite was always this one...

"Honour thy error as a hidden intention."

Link to an on-line random Oblique Strategy picker.

Mistakes are pretty common.

Here is a time-lapse digital painting process by someone who is definitely pretty skilled:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSsby9NrWK4
In the first minute of the video (which corresponds to about 20 minutes of real work time) you can see that the artist selected and rotated the head, erased and redrew the breast, changed the skew of the entire figure slightly.... There might've even been more little mistakes; the video goes pretty fast so it's hard to tell.

For visual art, it does seem like artists who are highly skilled make fewer mistakes, but they definitely still make some. As you get more practice, you will get more skilled in both subject matter and media.

It's easier to reverse mistakes in some media than others. Digital art is probably the easiest by a pretty large margin.