Art Journaling: Good Enough

I am a perfectionist. 

I admit it. It's one of those things that I try to change about myself, but I can't. I want things perfect. If I can see that something isn't quite right, I can't seem to leave it alone. It drives me crazy. And it gets in the way. Nobody else is going to notice that this shade of red is not quite what i wanted, or that the shape of his lower lip isn't quite round enough. Nobody can tell. Except me. It's not right, dammit, and I have to fix it. 

As I've been told many times, "the perfect is the enemy of the good". It's true. If everything didn't have to be perfect, I would get SO much more done. But is seeking to improve a bad thing? Shouldn't we all try to be better in whatever we're doing? It's a tough question... when is good, good enough?

This particular spread started out ok. Then, and I have no idea why, I went over all the lovely textural bits with oil pastel. Ick... that didn't really work. So what do I do? I figure I can take it off with solvent. Oh, yes, that worked well. The paint just kind of... melted. It turned in to a big puddle of mucky, grey goop. Not knowing what else to do, I just put it away. Went on to do something else.

Now that I'm nearing the end of this book, I'd really like to finish it up. It was time to deal with the mess I'd made (I really should have taken a before photo... it was really and truly ugly). The goo I had before had dried, so I did my journaling in white paint pen over that and then went over that with acrylic. I set a timer and did a quick 10-minute self-portrait using a phone photo. I had to set the timer because I know I could easily spend an hour trying to get a likeness, when that really wasn't what was important. It doesn't look like me, but for 10 minutes, its acceptable.

Almost done my "Advice from the Inside" Visual Journal. Second to last spread! Yay!!

Not too bad a save in the end. The only real issue is that the paint scrapes off the oil/acrylic mix underneath... actually I'm pretty sure the pages will stick together when I close it and I'll lose chunks when I pry it open again, but whatever. It's good enough...which, oddly, was the initial phrase that I started with.