“Well, this didn’t go according to plan.” As I looked at my little one-hour project, eyelashes dotted with specks of paint, I realized I had learned two very important lessons: look at your reference photo very carefully and, if you’re not better at splattering than I am, make sure you keep your glasses on.

Look At Your Reference Photo Carefully.

Now this might not apply to everyone, because some artists are able to just use the photo as a reference, so if something is off, they can just correct it as they sketch or paint. In my case, I can’t draw (yet) so I have to trace my references.

For yesterday’s little project, I decided that in honor of May being Fibromyalgia Awareness Month, I’d paint a purple butterfly. I found a nice photo to trace and figured I’d just use purple in place of the original color.

I traced the butterfly, and it was obvious there was a big difference in the shape/size of the wings between the two sides. I thought, “well, that’s because the butterfly is in flight.” After I had already started painting, I realized something — that photo was probably a photo of a dead butterfly. Yikes! I had seen the shadow underneath it, but hadn’t thought about what that meant as far as the poor thing’s situation. As I looked at it though, I realized that, at a minimum, the poor thing was just lying on something.

There was no way I was going to start over with tracing another one, so I decided to just finish painting it anyway. I mean, it wasn’t a big project I was working on or anything. It was just something simple to get me back to my painting table.

Be Careful When Splattering Paint.

Since this was just a little project that allowed me to play, I decided to add some spatters to it. I’ve done spatters before and didn’t have any problems, so I was surprised to end up with paint in my eyes.

I frequently take my glasses off to paint, particularly when I’m painting details, and I hadn’t put them back on. It wasn’t a problem because I just went and washed out my eyes, but I’ll definitely remember to avoid having my glasses off in the future.

So my two lessons about splattering were to protect my eyes, and to choose a different kind of brush next time.

I’m not really pleased with the result, but I am happy that I was able to enjoy splashing some paint around and learning a couple of things in the process.

Choose a Growth Mindset.

Whenever we’re learning something new, we’re almost certainly going to have some ‘fails.’ I prefer to look at them as lessons instead. We can’t expect things to always turn out just the way we want them to, especially when we first start.

This is where a growth mindset comes in. Rather than looking at our mistakes as failures, we can look at them as a learning experience, an opportunity to grow. A growth mindset tells us it’s okay to make mistakes, that they’re actually learning experiences, that we really can become who we want to be if we’re willing to put in the work.

As I left my office yesterday, I told myself, “If at first you don’t succeed, clean up your painting table and try again tomorrow.”

Mistakes are the price of growth sometimes. Rather than being disappointed because whatever we were working on didn’t turn out well, we can use those mistakes to teach us what we need to know.

I have to confess, though, that sometimes I have a hard time not feeling discouraged when things don’t come out the way I’d hoped. I’d love to be able to have a great finished product every time, but I do look for what I can learn from my mistakes.

How about you? Do you ever struggle with having a growth mindset when things don’t turn out as planned?