This past month, I had an art project in my beginners drawing class where we had to recreate an artist’s drawing and we’re graded on how close our drawing is to the original artist’s. At first, I didn’t expect it to be that difficult because I have copied drawings before. However, as I was working on it more and more, it wasn’t turning out the way I would have liked. The lines weren’t looking the same, the shading was off and just everything about it looked wrong. I have always been a perfectionist my whole life, so I knew that I was not going to turn in this drawing until it looked right, until it looked perfect.
However, as I was about to turn in my project and I was finally happy with it, my professor came around and told me that everything I had done was wrong. This was really difficult for me to hear. I had been working on this project for almost three weeks and as far as I could tell, it looked perfect. My professor continued by saying that the reason that it was all wrong was because my picture that I was supposed to be copying was meant to be the opposite of perfect. The artist, Maurice Sendak, had purposely drawn his drawing with broken lines and messy sketches and shading. My professor then sat down at my drawing with a dark pencil and proceeded to break up all of my lines that I had worked so hard to make perfect. He added scribbles and random lines all around. It was really difficult to watch. It got even worse when he then made me sit down and continue adding random dark broken and uneven lines all over my picture.
While in the end, my picture looked much better overall, “messing up” my picture with these random and dark lines all over the place were very hard to draw. The perfectionist inside of me was screaming as I drew lines coming and going in all different directions. However, I think that working on this project helped me understand that not every project or assignment that I work on throughout college is going to be perfect. In fact, most of my projects and assignments may turn out to be completely wrong. Maybe even this one. The point is that while I’m working in classes and on different assignments, I need to not hang onto this idea of being perfect. While I can work my hardest and try my best on my assignments, I can’t hold myself to a certain standard that in the back of my head I know I’ll never reach. In the end, whether it’s perfect or not, as long as it is my hard work, I’m sure to be happy with it.
