Inspirational journal time!

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So, a little over a week ago when I was working on David Tennant's face, I learned something from my drawing--and not just something like, "Oh, I should've used a 4B pencil there," or, "Crap, I drew his eyes too far apart." I mean I made an actual life connection to my drawings, and I don't think I've ever looked at them like that before. And I'm sure other people more elegant with words have made and shared this connection before, but I thought I'd share my own experience anyway.
I was sketching out the rough proportions of his face, starting with, obviously, the general shape of it. Then I moved on to his eyes, eyebrows, and nose. Now, the nose took me ages to do--I kept erasing it and re-drawing it over and over again, convinced that there was too much of a curve on the outer edge or that I'd drawn it too long or too short or too wide. I didn't realize it then, but the problem wasn't in the nose, but in the eyes. By the time I finished the nose, however, I was starting to realize that there was something wrong. It looked... off. It didn't look horrible, mind; it just looked odd, like the way it does when you draw someone intimately familiar to you, but some aspect of their face is out of proportion. You can tell who it's supposed to be, but... it just doesn't look like them, you know?
Convinced that I could make it right, I soldiered on and moved down to the mouth. At first, it seemed alright, but I wasn't stopping and taking the time to see the big picture. That is to say, I wasn't checking periodically to make sure everything matched up, and by the time I finished drawing the mouth, I was almost ashamed by what I was looking at. After about twenty minutes of staring at it, debating what I should do and determining what exactly had gone wrong, I realized the problem--I'd screwed up the eyes. It wasn't enough to really notice at first unless you were looking very carefully, but since I'd referenced the eyes as I'd drawn the nose and mouth, it was, at that point, beyond fixing. So, I came to the only reasonable conclusion: I had to start over.
Erasing all the work I'd put into it was painful, but I soon realized it needed to be done, and after that, the proportions almost seemed to flow out of my pencil. I was much more careful when I was drawing it the second time, much more aware of where things matched up. It was like God was rewarding me for admitting where I'd gone wrong--and I thank Him dearly still for unbending my pride and showing me my mistakes.
As with most drawings, you could still see the eraser marks where I'd messed up--if the faded pencil marks weren't still there, then the indentations in the paper were. When I started going over it with charcoal, however, it seemed to cover up most of the mistakes. Not all of them could be hidden--if you look carefully enough, you can see the places, even through the charcoal, where I erased and re-drew multiple times--but it was enough to make it look, to the untrained eye, like nothing had gone wrong in the first place. And it all came so quickly and easily after that initial start-over, I could hardly believe it.
Life is like that sometimes. We jump into something without really thinking about it, plunging onward without being aware that we're doing anything wrong. By the time we realize something is off, we're so far in that we can't bear the thought of starting over. We think, "I've put so much work into it already--I can't let all that go to waste." So we keep at it.
Eventually, we make a huge, ridiculous blunder, and that forces us to come to terms with what we've done and the only possible way to fix it: we start over. We try again. We pick up our pieces and rearrange them to fit better. Evidence of our mistakes still remain, imprinted on those we've impacted: words that have hurt them, mental blows to their self-confidence that we can't heal completely. Only in admitting that we're wrong, learning from what we've done wrong, and trying to amend it can we hope to turn that mistake into something beautiful and functional again. And we should be thankful for doing wrong once in a while, no matter how enormously huge a gaffe we've made, because that's what makes us human. That's how we know that there's still room to improve, and that's how we learn.
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