Finished, Not Perfect.

Artists tend to be perfectionists.

It’s in our nature. We don’t want to just make good work, we want to make great work.

Having that drive can be helpful in some cases. It’s what pushes us to try that extra composition to make the piece stronger; it’s what leads us to erase a sketch that isn’t working and start over because we want the client to have the best illustration we can make; it’s what pushes us to keep learning and improving over the years instead of settling.

Having a little perfectionism can be good. Having a lot of perfectionism is not.

When is your perfectionism not helping you?

Your perfectionism is getting in your way when you find yourself paralyzed. When you know what needs to be done, but you all of a sudden can’t move because the task at hand is too intimidating. Instead of jumping in and figuring things out as you go, you find yourself procrastinating because you can think of a thousand problems to solve and no clear way to solve them.

That is when you need the handy phrase I made the title of this post. “Finished, not perfect.” I’m not sure who first coined it, but I heard it from the phenomenal illustrator, Jake Parker.

Finished, not Perfect

“Finished, not perfect” is a reminder that there is no perfect work. It’s a reminder that the best work you can make is a result of jumping in there and getting some scribbles on the page and some ink on your hands.

When you can put your perfectionism aside and just start, you will find that many of the problems that paralyzed you were actually fixable. And solving those problems will give you the confidence that you can solve them in the next piece as well.

This Website

This portfolio website is my attempt to create a finished site, not a perfect one. For awhile now I have been dragging my feet to get up my work into a site because I wanted the perfect one.

Well, the perfect one can wait.

Will I make tweaks to the website in the future to make it better (or even replace it completely)? There’s a good chance of that. But the site needs to exist to make a better version of it in the future.

What about you?

What is your project that is being blocked by pesky perfectionism? How about this week you take a deep breath, accept that it won’t be perfect, and do the most important step of any creative process…

…start.