This is an example of a pattern I designed about 3 years ago. I was drawing and accidentally splashed water on the stripes - and a lot of work came out of liking that.
But this earlier piece was before I was thinking of getting back into fine art. It was more of an illustrative, design approach.
It's an example of something I think I overworked. I took the original splash and cleaned it up digitally.
Perhaps that was my first mistake? If you clean you take the life out of something. But I quite like the way the balls look like planets.
It just looks incongruous though. Neither hand drawn nor digital. A kind of wrong.
Next I worked on repeating the pattern. I wanted the feeling of space though. The kind of space you feel when you look at the horizon. That is hard to achieve when you have a noticeable repeating pattern. So I tried to repeat quite a large chunk rather than a small square.
It was all a bit of a headache, with a conflict between digital file size and resolution.
In the end I just wished I could cut out the digital element altogether.
But I did have fun making these marbles using a liquify filter in Adobe Photoshop. And at least I experimented, saw the results, and now have the luxury of rejecting them.
When I spend a long time on something, it can be hard to let go of it.
I like pauses in my work. That way I can lose the attachment. I'm looking at allowing 'mistakes' more. Rather than working into a piece, just letting it go and moving on to the next.