When the Plan Falls Apart
Not every painting follows the plan, and sometimes the mistakes become the most interesting part
of the story.
20 July 2026
Sometimes a painting refuses to become what you imagined.
This canvas began as a bright, colorful experiment, but the more I looked at it, the less it felt like me. It seemed too simple, almost unfinished, and I couldn’t find a direction that excited me.
So I did something I’ve become much more comfortable doing.
I painted over it.
That decision led to another.
And another.
Soon I was scraping through layers of paint to reveal hidden colors beneath. The more I experimented, the more the painting changed, but it still lacked a clear focal point. It became busy rather than intentional.
For a while, I wasn’t sure if I was making it better or simply making it different.
Looking at it from a new orientation sparked another idea. What if the painting itself became the hidden layer?
I experimented with a decorative stencil, imagining an ornate pattern emerging from beneath a darker background. It sounded straightforward.
It wasn’t.
I tried tracing the stencil with a white chalk pencil, but the textured surface made it difficult to capture the details. I experimented with metallic paint and a fine brush, hoping to create precise outlines. That wasn’t successful either. Next, I tried coating the back of the stencil with paint and pressing it directly onto the canvas, but the heavy texture prevented an even transfer.
At that point I decided to use drawing gum through the stencil to protect the design before painting around it.
Except…
I accidentally picked up a bottle of Pebeo gilding glue instead of Pebeo drawing gum.
By the time I realized my mistake, I had already brushed most of it onto the canvas.
There wasn’t much to do except embrace it and see what happened.
After it dried for 15 minutes, I pressed gold leaf onto the glued areas and brushed away the excess. The result wasn’t the crisp decorative pattern I had imagined. Some areas clumped together while others barely transferred at all.
Instead of trying to force it into my original idea, I reached for my palette knife one more time and began scraping.
That final step transformed the gold into something I hadn’t planned at all.
Rather than a perfect stencil, it became a worn impression, almost like traces of an old decorative design slowly emerging through layers of time.
Ironically, one of the biggest lessons from this painting came from a mistake.
Had I picked up the correct bottle, I probably would have ended up with the image I expected.
Instead, a happy accident pushed the painting somewhere I never would have chosen on purpose.
Not every experiment ends where you intend.
Sometimes the most interesting part of creating isn’t following the original plan.
It’s being willing to follow the painting somewhere unexpected.
Archive felt like the right title because this canvas became exactly that: a record of every layer, every scrape, every mistake, every unexpected turn, and every decision that came before.
Archive 33 × 24 cm