With empathy, I wish to say I hate to burst your bubble, but your brand of perfectionism is (fortunately?) not unique. It’s shared by me and so many millions on this planet. We cannot blame ourselves for this condition either as it is often not self-inflicted. Somewhere, some time in our early development, we were criticized for our imperfect drawing skills or so we perceived, and that consciously or unconsciously impacted us negatively. Our individual personalities and sensibilities, of course, are what makes our take on or degree of imperfection unique.
So what am I getting at?
Think of yourself as an artist already. I believe all seasoned artists are inherently perfectionist and always think of their works as incomplete, not imperfect, but will stop at some point in trying to perfect it because it’s practically impossible. What is perfection? To me, a drawing by someone else will look complete and perfect because I didn’t create it and therefore do not know what complete image was intended or envisioned. So your work, for example, would be perfect to me. To the creator, it will most always be a working progress.
There is no grand master to tell us where we are on our artistic journey. Even a grand master is continually learning. False masters or experts think they know everything.
The first step is to remind ourselves to be truly humble and start our journey as creators as if we are young toddlers learning how to crawl, then stand, and gradually become able to walk.
If you think of our budding or interrupted drawing skills in that light, what is the sense of embarrassment in that? Imperfection becomes nonsense, right?
A toddler doesn’t want to wait till the New Year to start crawling or walking. Nor should we wait to pick up that HB pencil or tablet stylus. To steal from Nike, “Just do it.”
Don’t wait till 2023.