Building Artistic Integrity

Hey friend!!

In last week’s newsletter we chatted about that Final Quarter Panic that tends to creep up on us around this time of the year. Now I know I said I was cutting back on the frequency of these newsletters, but I decided to alternate Newsletter Week with YouTube Video Week. Since I put out a video last week, well… here we are with another newsletter. 😂

Anyhoo, I wanted to share with you something that I learned this past week while painting the illustration for my Cottage theme. I reached a point where I could call the painting finished. Every inch of the paper was covered in paint, it more or less told the story I wanted to tell with it, and for all intents and purposes it looked good. But it didn’t look the way I wanted it to look. The values weren’t to my liking, the lighting was a bit “off”, and the plants looked pretty lifeless. And the things that weren’t to my liking were NOT easy fixes. In fact, I would have to repaint pretty much the entire illustration to fix those problems. So I had a choice to make. I could spend many more hours repainting to bring it up to my liking. Or, I could leave it the way it was; after all it was still objectively a decent painting. No one looking at it would know that it wasn’t the painting I had in mind.

But I knew.

Which brought the question to mind “who am I when no one else is watching?” Do I work to the best of my ability to achieve my goals even when the goal isn’t something anyone else can see? I could put down the painting, call it finished, and no one would know I wasn’t happy with it. But that isn’t the artist I want to be. I had a vision in mind for this illustration, and I wanted to bring that vision to life. This meant I needed to suck it up, and be an artist with integrity.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of integrity is: “A firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values.” Sometimes paintings don’t work out. For whatever reason, you can’t figure out what’s wrong with it, and you simply need to move on to the next one. But I did know what was wrong with this one, and I knew how to fix it. Choosing the path of integrity sometimes means choosing the hard path. It means sticking with the vision you had in mind even when it’s not easy. It means trusting your artistic gut. So, I chose the hard path. I brought out my paints again and spent several more hours repainting the problem areas. And I’m so, so glad I did. The illustration came to life the way I envisioned it! I’ll be honest, I don’t always choose the path of integrity. In fact, more often than not I squeak by with a sub-par painting. But if I want to be a better artist, I have to keep going even when it’s uncomfy. Now, no painting is perfect and no artist is perfect. There will always be things you can change or fix in a piece. My goal wasn’t creating a perfect painting; it was to create this painting.

There’s a phrase that came to mind during this painting: “how you do one thing is how you do everything.” I want to be an Artist of Integrity. And that means making those hard choices. The choice to restart an illustration from scratch, or repaint a part you’ve worked on for hours. Integrity is not innate; it’s built. Every time we make the harder choice, we build up that integrity a little bit more. I hope it will inspire me to choose integrity the next time a problem like this comes up.

Anyhoo, here’s the finished illustration!

I decided to paint Bits’ cottage in the Meraki Meadow, incorporating many different plants, and botanist paraphernalia. I learned SO MUCH with this one, and I had a great time painting it.

I also wanted to share with you a painting from one of my favorite artists, Kazuo Oga. He painted so many of the enchanting backgrounds from many Studio Ghibli movies (like this one from The Secret World of Arrietty”. His artwork is SO inspiring to me, and I hope it inspires you today, too

Thank you so much for reading my newsletter! I’d love to hear what project YOU’RE working on (creative or otherwise), so feel free to respond to this email. I’d love to be virtual pen pals with you. 😊