What Can I Make From This Mistake?

I’ve been dealing with a lot of mistakes & problems lately. Some are smaller & some are larger, but all of them are purely my own, & they are starting to affect my art. This is how I work with them, instead of letting them stall my progress completely.

Step 1: Identify the Problem(s)

Ever notice how one small mistake can grow & combine with other small mistakes into huge issues? Like a trickle to a flood, a snowball to an avalanche, that moment where one line of dominoes splits into a dozen different directions at once… Something simple becomes simply unmanageable. My problems were all too common: exhaustion & an overloaded schedule.

Thinking about stress is stressful. Please enjoy these fluffy clouds

Step 2: Identify The Cause(s)

Knowing what the problem is can help you manage it, but knowing why the problem is can help you solve it. My causes could be neatly split into two categories. First: I was jet lagged, which threw my insomnia completely out of whack, & I hurt my knee so moving around was (literally) a pain. I made the mistake of thinking all that would be over quickly & did not pad my schedule accordingly. Second: my schedule was already overloaded, & getting worse as I fell further behind.I’m trying to follow the prompts & do all 31 days of Mermay as well as the 4 weeks of Hippy Sheep Fest, which means 1-2 deadlines per day every day of the month. I made the mistake of planning too much for an average month, & I was starting May thousands of miles away from my home. I also planned on starting an online shop through a POD company to sell my watercolors on stickers, stationary, etc. I had done a fair amount of research, & decided on a company. I was a week away from opening a shop, & that company announced they were changing their entire business model to take more money from artists, designed in a way that hits new artists hardest. I have to pick a new company, but I didn’t keep my notes on the others, so my to-do list just got a lot longer. I made the mistakes of not bothering to pick a back up, & absentmindedly throwing out my notes.

Whew! That was a lot. Please enjoy this pretty flower

Step 3: Identify the Solution(s)

Some causes just needed time to resolve: jet lag & my insomnia will both respond to a regular sleep schedule, hopefully soon. My knee needs rest & careful stretching. My other problem could be solved with time, too: if I could add 6 or 8 hours to each day that’d be perfect! Since I can’t, I need alternative solutions to alleviate these problems now & avoid them in the future.

I use these 3 questions to find those solutions:

What Can I Learn?

How to better estimate the time individual pieces will take me. I based my expected drawing time on how long I spent per day doing each of the 31 days last Inktober, without taking into account how different my drawings are now. MondayThe15th For example, this drawing took longer than all the all the Inktober ones I linked to above Clearly, I need to start setting a timer to get a better idea of how much time I am actually spending on each piece!

What Can I Do?

Art smarter, not harder! We are 2 weeks in MerMay so I have 2 weeks’ worth of marine life photos ready to use for reference, as well as my own work. I’ve also been working mostly in Krita instead of watercolors, which means I can reuse the parts of my own drawings that I like best. For example, this is my favorite mermaid I’ve drawn: UpsideDown So I used that layer in my Friday the 13th parody poster (above) & saved the time I would have spent drawing another silhouette.

Who Can I Ask For Help?

Why, you lovely people, of course! Do you use a POD to sell &/or buy art? Which one? Why do you like it? Why do you dislike it? Let me know!

Karin Wanderer Learns