Have you ever heard the quote: “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser”? I find it very inspiring cause it speaks to our fear of making mistakes. This fear makes us wait instead of acting boldly, so it leads – nowhere. We may end up not doing the things we want to do, not being who we are, and not fully living our lives.

If you are a beginner artist and feel this fear, you should know you are not alone. I see this fear quite frequently. And I am writing this to help you get rid of it.

The fear of making mistakes likes to emerge when you start drawing or painting. So for a beginner artist, begining a new painting may look like this: she starts by drawing with a pencil and eraser, cause she wants to be sure she can erase every line that doesn’t subject to her will. So she  spends most of her creative time – erasing, not drawing nor painting.

So I recommend something else. 1. Ditch the eraser. It may sound outrageous at first, but it actually isn’t. Lines that accumulate on your drawing are something interesting. (You will be able to use your eraser in a good way again in a couple of months.)

And 2. Ditch the pencil. Start your painting drawing with a brush. If you work with acrylics, you will be able to cover the “wrong marks” many times if you want to do it.

Number 1 is non-negotiable, and number 2 is advised (for a couple of months at least). Cause erasing “mistakes” all the time makes us stay in the same place – at the beginning. If you use the tools that do not allow you to erase mistakes, you will soon realize that “mistakes” are just part of the process. You will learn to see some of them as “valuable lessons in disguise”, some as “lucky accidents”, and some as “parts you reworked”.

Try this out and tell me how it works for you;)