Okay so FULL TRANSPARENCY here, I'm gonna show you a video of me completely bombing the mandala section of my latest tiny painting, "Orange Glow".  I kind of like sharing a video of me messing up because it shows my imperfections as an artist and kind of brings it all back to earth if you get what I mean.  

I think that sometimes artists can get put up above into some kind of.... I don't want to say pedestal, but some kind of unreachable or unattainable thing because they might only show the finished result of hours and hours of work, or the accumulation of years and years of practice, and it can make them appear like this perfect almost beyond human thing.  

What people aren't seeing a lot of the time is all the messy details, fuck ups, redos, "happy accidents", and the swearing.....there's lots of swearing XD

So I like showing this side of art making, because artists are just messy humans too.  Sometimes these mess ups bring great lessons and insights into the process that I may have not thought of before the mess up.  They say that failure is the best road to success, after all.

So what happened here is that I got real carried away with the details of the designs.  I plan out all my designs in photoshop first, and it's a lot easier to get details on a computer.  I also started doing these mandala sunset designs on larger canvases, so I underestimated what it would be like to transition to a tiny 5x7" panel.

I was unable to achieve that level of detail on a tiny panel with a big clunky palette knife, even with my smallest knife.  It became overly complex for such a small area, and so I had to wipe out most of the mandala and redo it in a simpler way.  As my friend would always say, "Keep It Simple, Stupid!".  I always tend to get carried away with complexity, and simplifying is really the way to go for small canvases.  

So, without further ado, enjoy the video!