Getting Good With Making Mistakes In Your Sketchbook...And Beyond.
Let's Celebrate No Eraser Drawing
In the not-too-distant past, I would have found the idea of drawing in my precious sketchbook without an eraser completely debilitating. What if I make a mistake and I hate it? WHAT THEN??
It’s no easy feat to hush that fear up, but our sweet lil’ creative voices are patiently waiting behind that. And so many fun things happened when I started trusting myself enough to let my sketchbook become a freer place.
Here are a few things that helped me do that:
Let’s Give this a Try!
Figuring out ways to relax and truly enjoy the experience of sketching has been one of the quickest ways I’ve found progress. I can feel it in my body when I’m approaching my drawing time with high expectations. I'm tense and serious, subconsciously thinking "Now, it's time to make something PRISTINE AND BEAUTIFUL...OK???" As you can imagine, that never works out well. Instead, I started saying to myself, “Let’s just give this a try.” It releases the pressure and lowers the judgment, opening me up to anything, mistakes and all, that happen on the page.
“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”
Chinese Proverb
Start Where You Are
I make way too many mistakes to consider myself a perfectionist, but I very much understand the feeling of defeat when our expectations of ourselves don’t match our output. And in my experience, there’s nothing that halts my progress and creativity more than thinking that I should be further along than I am.
“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”
Mark Twain
These kind of thoughts usually happen when I’ve been looking at other people’s incredible “you’re never going to be as good as them” work. It’s all too easy to find myself here, but job one is to put the phone down! And shift my focus to how much progress I’ve made in the past month, 6 months, 3 years.
My work and my mindset are nearly unrecognizable to the person I was a few years ago. How fun is that? I find that I’m capable of so much more growth when I’m able to release the paralyzing comparing and fear of making mistakes and just let myself be as I am right now, right here. Flawed and creating without an eraser anyway.
Leave Space For Your “Derp Magic”
I started having more fun in my sketchbook when I decided that maybe there was something good, even desirable, about my so-called mistakes. My own “Derp Magic” as
puts it. I started shifting my overly critical eye from seeing my scratchy lines as unsure to thinking of them as full of energy. I went from labeling my unplanned spreads as messy to loving how spontaneous and fun all that overlapping looks. If you’re immediately erasing every perceived mistake, you’ll never get the chance to find the “Derp Magic” that makes your mark-making yours!“Mistakes are the portals to discovery.”
James Joyce
Trust Your Hands
Every time I opt to draw without an eraser I’m reinforcing trust in myself and my hands. For years and years, I only created digitally. I would zoom WAY in and obsess over teeny details that didn’t matter at all, I would use the same brushes everyone else used, and my neck was wrecked from bending over a screen for hours on end. I ended up totally burned out, hating the work I was making. I craved a process that felt more natural to me, a process I could love.
It was a transition y’all…the urge to command z when you’re first coming back to work by hand is REAL. But, after a rocky adjustment period, I realized I was actually so much less critical of everything I was making outside the computer. I started feeling more connected to my body and my creative voice. And perhaps the best part…I wanted to create more often because I was enjoying it.
“Try Again. Fail again. Fail Better.” - Samuel Beckett
We’re all here for a little while, learning, screwing up, growing, and repeating that over and over until the very end. So why are mistakes so hard to accept? We didn’t come into this world fearing failure, but along the way we started believing that it makes us less lovable.
The bull-nanny thing is that there is only one way to grow- and that’s by making mistakes, a lot of them. So toss that eraser away and give yourself the opportunity to do just that! Lean into the discomfort and watch your confidence and creativity grow <3
Are you hesitant to draw without an eraser? Let me know if you have any questions about it!
Much Love,
Cait
I love your sketches! It’s very liberating reducing expectations of how a drawing is going to look! I like wonky, not quite right sketches- they have way more character ☺️
I got to say that I love my eraser 😂 but I embrace all my mistakes too!! I think social media is guilty of this pressure artists feel about their sketchbooks. All masters had sketchbooks too with rough sketches, studies, planning, sketchbooks were made for that... to study, to learn, improve and of course they will have a lot of mistakes, but masters never shown their sketchbooks to the world (usually the world only have seen those in museums many years after their death!) but now the "world" thinks a sketchbook must be immaculate for pictures 🤪 luckily I think a lot of artists are beginning to change this mindset and recover the real meaning of having a sketchbook practice! Great post Cait and sorry for the long comment 💕