Mistakes

"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents." -Bob Ross

Painting is easy in some ways.  Canvas, paint brushes, and paint meet and a picture is made.  What happens though when the picture in your mind and the one on the canvas don't match?  Or worse they do and then your brush grabs wrong and the color runs in the wrong way. What do you do?  Do you leave the painting as it is and give up on it?  Do you try and work with the mistake and make a new picture that is similar but incorporates the mistake, makes it beautiful?  Do you work with the mistake and make something new, something unique?

I think you know where this is going.  Mistakes happen in life just like they do in painting. What we do with them determines how we live.  Are we going to spend our lives stressed out and trying to fix so much that we never even get the chance to live?  Conversely, if we just ignore the mistakes and go on as if they never occurred, is that the correct response?  How you go on after a mistake is made often determines the size of the mistake.

Crimson is a big fan of Bob Ross.  Her Shadoe Stones product line is "Happy Trees" in his honor. Mr. Ross was a man who knew how to turn a mistake around on canvas.  Remaining calm is often a large part of the process.  I do not paint in Mr. Ross' style at all. I place emotions on canvas in an almost haphazard way.  Then came the day that I needed to form a picture to correctly carry the emotion I needed. I wanted a sky and a hill with trees. I used a watercolor paint for the first time ever, it was blue for the sky.  Then I went to put light into the sky and boom green.  Well, shit.  Yellow and blue make green.  Acrylic paint is fluid. Watercolors are "WATER" colors for a reason.  Yeah, so now we have a blob of green in the sky...how do we fix it?  Do we accept that the painting isn't going to be what it was supposed to be?  Do we try and make it fit anyway?  How do we fix this mistake? I tried fixing it. Made it worse. I then ran with it. I am uncertain how I feel about the finished product, I am not even certain, yet, that it is finished. Heck, I may use that time honored tradition of painting over. Going to need new paints for that, so it will have to wait.

We can't hit rewind in life. We live with our mistakes small and large.  It is what you do with them that makes life. I try very hard to live with no regrets. Every decision I have made right and wrong has brought me to where I am, and that is a beautiful thing.

The aforementioned painting.  I have done worse...and I have done better, a lot better!

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