In Praise of the Incompl-

I've been enjoying the live chats with Tim Holtz in the Summer of Creative Chemistry at Online Card Classes. If you're not enrolled - I highly recommend his classes there. His product knowledge is mind-boggling, but he also just has a lot of really great advice about art and creating.

My favorite moment of his most recent live chat was his advice to stop worrying about finishing things when you sit down to be creative.

As you know - I could not agree more. I firmly believe in the philosophy of "creating for the trash" - because it is so liberating. If you simply sit down every day solely to create, and not to create a finished card or a (fill in the blank), you will give yourself the freedom to experiment, to make mistakes, and to learn from them.

The finish is the enemy of the start, in my opinion.

Just play.

This is what I also love about Kathy Racoosin's 30 day coloring challenge (next round starts July 5th) - she just encourages people to take a few moments every day to be creative, because it's good for you. It's not about finishing - it's about starting.

To that end, I'm posting an unfinished project today.

This is an experiment I did when I was designing wedding invitations for my nephew and his bride-to-be. They have a beautiful eggplant color in their service, and so I was trying a few different directions, one of which was a hand-watercolored invitation.

One day I sat down just to experiment with Elegant Eggplant.

I stamped the endlessly beautiful retired Stampin' Up! set - Stipple Rose - that I bought from a friend - in Elegant Eggplant on Fabriano hot press watercolor paper. Then I just used a paintbrush to move the ink around, adding some reinker in places, and adding Old Olive ink to the leaves. Purple is such a great shadow for green, that it didn't matter that the image was stamped in purple - they blended beautifully.

Then I just walked away from it.

I posted the partial progress on Instagram and Facebook and was surprised that people liked it! It looked so unfinished to me.

But Diana Gibbs just loved it, and so I'm sending it to her - just as is, with not even a hint of a finished project about it.

She made me sign it. :)

I enjoyed the process and now a friend will get a little decoration for her studio, so it's a win.

Forgive yourself for not finishing things, so that you can just START things. You'll be glad you did.

Loveyameanitbye.