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January 07, 2005

Perfect

Have you ever given up on something because you couldn’t do it perfectly? I know so many people who won’t write, paint, sew and make jewelry simply because they fear their work might not be one hundred percent perfect in their eyes.

So many brilliant creative people are sidelined because they want their work to be brilliant and if it isn’t, they feel like creative failures.

A quick look at nature will show you that most things are not perfect. Have you ever seen a perfectly round stone? Have you ever seen a perfectly straight tree? Have you ever seen a movie where a lion kills a beautiful young buck or a cheetah kills a magnificent old giraffe? In nature nothing is perfectly symmetrical or fair. But for some reason, nature manages its system perfectly.

Very few people have a perfect face or a perfect body and even if they do, time will create imperfections over the years.

It is important to do things as perfectly as you can, but striving for complete perfection will only make you miserable.

I learned a great lesson while illustrating a book for a large publishing company. It was my first book for a major publisher and I was petrified that I was going to make a mistake. So, I tensed up and painted the illustrations as perfectly as I could.

The publisher wasn't happy with my paintings. I was devastated and tried again. This time I worked even harder to do the perfect watercolor illustrations. They still didn't like what I had done.

Finally, they got a colorist to do a sample illustration using my line drawings. They sent me the sample and asked if I minded if someone else did the coloring of my book. I took one look at the sample and thought, "Wow, the style is so nice and lose. Darn, I can do that."

While speaking to my mother on the phone, I doodled with my paints and duplicated the style the colorist had produced without even realizing what I had done. (That picture is shown above.)

It looked really good. I did a few more samples and quickly sent them off to the publisher. Guess what? They loved it.

I realized I was trying too hard to be perfect instead of just painting the way I normally paint. I really suffered and worried about messing up. The stress and pursuit of perfection almost cost me the opportunity of doing my own watercolors with one of the biggest publishers in the world.

Posted by trevor at January 7, 2005 09:35 AM