🎨 Turning mistakes into bugs 🎨

The other day, I took a museum tour. During this tour, the guide stopped us in front of a glass case and pointed to some fine porcelain china plates. “See that fruit fly right above the painted fruits on the plate? Well that there was a mistake that the artist made, and to correct it, he just turned his mistake into a fruit fly. Overtime, people liked to collect fine china that had fruit flies, because they just thought it was part of the piece. It was what made each piece unique and different. In reality, the fruit fly only ever existed because of a mistake.

Looking at this piece of artwork, really allowed me to reflect on my own life. There have been many times in my life where I made a big mistake. I could either cry about it, or just take the mess I created and transform it into something else. That’s the thing about being creative. Life is not just black and white. There is not just one solution to a problem, rather it’s about how you decide to look at life.

Last year, I published a coloring book called Life of the Wild. While, I’ve never told anyone what prompted me to create the book, I decided I wanted to share it with my Steemit community.

*The cool thing about this book was I drew it with ink without full pencil outlines. If I made a mistake, I would just turn them into flowers or incorporate it somehow.

I had been dating a guy, that totally broke my heart. When we broke up, I was devastated and at a loss. For some reason I couldn’t shake the hurt, and I was just so sad. Oneday, my girlfriend took me shopping, and bought me a coloring book for adults. This was the first time, I had ever seen such a book. She told me to go home and color it, because it just might make me feel better. So, I did. I colored one page, then another, and then I started to really look at the designs. As I sat flipping through the book, I thought to myself, “I could make this.” I had spent so much negative energy grieving over a guy that probably didn’t even deserve it, I stopped focusing on myself. In that moment, I knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to publish my own coloring book. I gave myself a year, and I got working. At first the drawings were a way to distract myself, but soon it became much more than that. It became my pride and joy to work on this book. It became my new obsession. Last November, I published my first coloring book with 37 unique hand drawn illustrations, and it felt so good!

While, I wouldn’t say it was a mistake dating the heartbreaker, it could have become a huge mistake if I just continued to wallow in my misery. I could have wasted so much energy on something that would not have benefited me. Instead, I chose to “paint bugs” and well, make a coloring book!

So when you feel like you’ve made a big mistake, I hope you think of this story and I hope it gives you motivation to turn your mistakes into bugs!

*Drawings from my book

---

Love,
Karen