I'm terrified of doing a bad painting. I'm terrified of not being as good as I thought/wanted to be.

I'm always trying to analyse my way of working, looking for ways I can improve, seeing whether what I'm painting is making a difference in my overall quality etc. Something I've found more and more is that my painting improves when I make original pieces and not studies.

I've done so many 'studies' for years, simply because they looked nicer than what I could paint for myself, but its gotten to the point where I can't really do them any better right now (granted there is always room for improvement but at my level they've kinda all stayed the same quality).

When I finally decided to actually do some original pieces (so I could stop using the excuse 'I can't put studies in my portfolio' when it came to creating my portfolio) I fell into a dip in terms of the way I viewed my work; I went into another 'omg what on earth will I do if I'm not good enough at art' self-pitying sulk. I have these relatively often, mostly after I've done an original piece and its not good enough.

BUT! The best way for me to improve right now is to do original paintings, and I need to get over my fear of doing bad paintings and just do more. It takes a lot of bad paintings to get to the good ones and that's just something I've got to accept - although I've known this for years.

So here we have it, my commitment to doing more bad paintings! Starting with this one of Bastet. I didn't do any design work, I just told myself to indulge in some guilty pleasure painting for the sake of painting something original but it worked!