If you've ever sat in front of a blank digital canvas, or a real one for that matter, and you're afraid to make a mark, then you're not alone. I have a weird thing: I love the sketching process, but I hate detailing too far or painting over my lines because I'm sure I'll never make the execution match the idea.
Failure is another word for experience
George Lucase
George Lucas, the filmmaker behind Star Wars and the recent opener of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, offers a useful way to look at this: it’s less about chasing success than about learning to live with the possibility of getting it wrong.
“Failure is another word for experience” is how Lucas put it in a 2013 interview with the US National Endowment for the Arts. He went further, explaining that creating something new means doing things with a high potential for failure, particularly when nobody has done them before. You try something, it doesn’t work, and you use what you’ve learned to try again.
The Star Wars creator says failure can teach you important lessons
It sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to forget when you’re making art, designing something or trying to find your own style. We see the finished work, the polished portfolio, the film that made it to the screen, but not the weeks, months or years of experiments and failed ideas that got there. LAIKA’s Wildwood production designer, Nelson Lowry, knows that, as he explained in our piece on why making mistakes is part of the creative process.
Lucas also made an important distinction between experimenting for yourself and working for someone else. In the same interview, he talked about making small films he could afford to fail at, without worrying about the financial consequences. When others invest money in your work, he said, it becomes harder to be truly creative if you know you have to please someone.
That pressure will sound familiar to anyone making work for clients, social media or an audience with expectations. It’s tempting to stick with what you know will work, especially on a deadline or when you're trying to satisfy a brief. But if every experiment has to succeed, how do you ever find out what you’re capable of? Stage designer and artist Es Devlin has a similar approach, deliberately pushing into unfamiliar territory because, as she explains in her thoughts on making work without knowing the rules, that’s often where the interesting ideas begin.
George Lucas identifies why wrong ideas can be right
Lucas’s advice isn’t that failure feels good, or that every bad idea is secretly brilliant. It’s that getting something wrong gives you information you didn’t have before. And if you’re stuck trying to make every detail perfect, Salvador Dalí’s rather useful reminder about the impossibility of perfection makes a good companion read.
So the next time a drawing, design or creative project goes sideways, don't bin the whole thing just yet. Have a look at what went wrong. There might be something useful in there.
Explore the Lucas Museum art book
