Mistakes Into Art

Losing my ability to draw & the blessing that came with it

This is a drawing of a rose I did using pen.

Some years back, I pushed myself too hard & injured my hand. For years it was too painful to do most art. & with that, my hand developed a bad shake that prevented me from having the control needed to do fine details like I normally did. I stopped doing most visual art throughout that time. That was hard for me. Even holding my camera for photography became painful. I was upset with myself because I knew if I hadn't been so careless with myself, I wouldn't have been in that situation. I ended up sometimes needing help to do just basic things, so this made me feel like a burden & very useless.

& as someone who was best known for her ability in art, that was regularly praised for that ability, I felt like I lost part of my identity & worth - I lost what I was good at, what "made me stand out" & feel of value.

For a long time I prayed & many times begged God for it to heal without feeling any positive changes happen. It eventually did heal after an interesting experience with a friend whom I’d consider a mentor, which is a whole other story that I can share another time.

But funny enough, it happened after I stopped begging God for it. When I had came to not only accept the situation, but recognized how much it actually ended up being a blessing.

I learned a lot during that time, I would say more than any time before that. Lessons that I would not trade for anything in the world, & for that reason, I would not go back & prevent the situation from happening even if I could.

I was forced into a position to look at things that I didn't want to look at & things that I was usually too busy to look at. I had to learn how to rely on others & stop trying to do everything on my own. Being too dependent on others is unhealthy & dangerous, but striving too hard to be independent & to rely on only yourself is equally unhealthy, & not enough people talk about that. I had a very hard time letting myself rely on the help of others.

I learned the hard way the importance of taking care of yourself & not just simply treating yourself as a work horse. & had faced what caused me to treat myself in that way in the first place. & I learned the importance of being patient with myself & allowing myself to make mistakes. That doesn't mean not trying to fix them, but rather being able to own up to them without feeling defeated or feeling that mistakes you make take away from your worth in any way (which those type of feelings are often exactly what push us to not owning up to our mistakes, & therefore, not being able to fix them).

After I realized my hand was healed, one of the first things I wanted to do was draw again. It had been years. I wanted to do something with strong contrasts of highlights & shadows. A rose ended up coming to mind. I had wanted to do the piece in pen, & there was a nice writing pen I had gotten from a church in my travels earlier that year, so I used that.

This rose was the first piece I did after being able to properly use my hands again.

& I'm glad it was done in pen. Pen was always one of my favorite mediums to do art in, & one of the main reasons was because, it is one of the most challenging. You do not have an easy way to blend for gradients & you do not have multiple shades to create lights & darks, but rather you use your canvas & the one color you have together to make your gradients of light & dark. Most of all though, there is no eraser, any mistake you make becomes part of your piece - in order to finish your piece well, you have to creatively find ways to incorporate whatever mistakes you make into your finished work in such a way that it is not obvious a mistake was made.

& that fact is what I find most beautiful about pen art & what I find to be very fitting for the occasion that it was - coming out of that period of everything I had learned from my mistake.

You could say one of the most important things I learned in that time was the incorporation of my mistakes into part of my life artwork.