Zentangled Mandala - Pushing Through Mistakes

This little mandala didn't turn out the way that I was expecting. The solid black lines were not supposed to be solid black lines. You can see that by the way that I started off the drawing. As I was going over the penciled lines with my pen, I made a mistake which caused me to have to make the lines solid. I remember being really disappointed by having to change this vision of what I was planning.

When I make mistakes like this, I tend to start over again, but this time I decided to keep going. I will say that the disappointment did cause me to choose more simple patterns than what I was planning. Apparently when I make a mistake, I let it effect me a little more than I should.

Over the years, I have learned to work around the mistakes that I make in a drawing, but I must admit that there's still a part of me that gets annoyed by my own mistakes. What's funny about that is most of the time, no one other than myself would even know that a mistake was made.

This is something that I try to impress upon my students. Even when you think there's a mistake beyond repair, keep going. There's a great possibility that the mistake will not be noticeable once you finish the piece.