Are You Overthinking Your Art Project? Here are Five Tips to Deal With This.

Since I finished Haunting Melody, I have finished another animation, which was pretty simple, so I was able to get it done in five weeks.

But then the misgivings started setting in…

The thing is, my animation process is normally not that quick. A two-minute animation can literally take me two months or more, but, as previously mentioned, my current animation only took me five weeks.

Is there something I forgot to do?

Am I missing a detail?

Five weeks?? Are you kidding? That’s nothing! I can do better…

And so on and so forth, until I’m grinding my teeth, thereby giving myself a headache to beat the band.

But what if it doesn’t have to be like that?

The truth is that, as artists, we can sometimes be notorious for this spiral of overthinking. We can sometimes get neurotic, and think we’re not doing our best work when the reality is that we are seeking an unrealistic level of perfection. But then how do we know if that’s true of the process behind the art project we are currently working on, whatever it may be?

The process I’m about to share with you will not only enable you to distinguish between actual shortcoming and unreasonable perfectionism, but it will also enable you to improve your work should it need to be improved.

1.) Ask yourself if there’s something specific that is bothering you, and then fix it.

This is the first step. It is simply a matter of identifying the things in your art project that are bothersome to you. If you didn’t draw a line as well as you could have, for example, try erasing it and drawing it again. But for some mediums and applications, this is much easier said than done. Some projects will need to be scrapped and redone in order to fix issues, particularly if it’s in a permanent medium such as ink. Or sometimes, you can fix one thing, but it creates a whole new problem. This brings us to…

2.) If it’s something you can’t change, ask yourself how big a deal it really is.

I’m not advocating laziness here. But what I am saying is, some details are so small that the chances of anyone noticing are slim to none, and that even if someone did notice, they may not think much of it. (Provided that everything else is excellent, of course.)

For this part of the process, I like to do a Google Image Search for images that may contain the flaw in question. This research has the effect of grounding me in the knowledge of what is good enough vs. what isn’t. If some mainstream artists are also doing it this way, then the chances of it being a major blunder are not as high as I might have thought at first.

3.) Ask a friend to look at it.

Sometimes what we really need is the honest opinion of a close friend. The thing to keep in mind is that they need to be willing to give you their honest opinion, irrespective of whether or not they hurt your feelings. Sometimes the truth hurts, and we need to be wiling to accept that, even in our own creative processes.

4.) Take at least one day off.

Again, not advocating laziness. Just a break from all that thinking you’ve been doing. When you can take some time off (and maybe take care of some other things you’ve until now been too busy to do,) it forces you to look at your art project with a fresh pair of eyes, almost as if you’re seeing it for the first time. Then you can look at it more critically, and you may even have flashes of inspiration for how you can improve your project when you come back to it.

As a side note, if you’re really getting burned out, then I would suggest you take a mental health day if you can. More on that here.

5.) If you absolutely must change those little details, then do it.

If, after you’ve come back to your art project with a fresh pair of eyes, you’re still bugged by those little things you think you did wrong, then of course you can change them! Throw away that canvas and start over. And if along the way you create new problems, deal with them. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s your art and you should be proud of it! At least you’ve taken the time to look inside yourself and ask if your art is really flawed or if you’re just being a perfectionist. That’s the hard part. Changing stuff is the easy part, (comparatively speaking).