Stop trying to make every sketchbook page perfect – here’s what to do instead

I messed up my brand new Moleskine sketchbook the first day I bought it. Drove a pen straight through the page on a terrible drawing of my sleeping cat. He looked like a lumpy potato with ears. The ruined page made me furious for about ten seconds, and then something weird happened. I turned the page and drew the best sketch I had done in weeks. That’s when I realized the biggest lie I was telling myself: that I had to stop trying to make every sketchbook page perfect. Honestly, that pursuit of perfection was the fastest way to kill my creativity and make me avoid drawing altogether. So here’s the messy truth about what you should actually do instead.

The perfection trap that almost made me quit drawing

I used to buy expensive sketchbooks and then leave them on the shelf, untouched. The reason? I was terrified of ruining them. I would plan the perfect drawing for hours, sketch it in pencil lightly, erase it, redraw it, and still feel like a fraud when it was done.

Not gonna lie, it was a miserable way to create. My art journaling practice became a chore, a test I kept failing. The blank pages just stared back at me, accusing me of being a hack.

Look, I learned the hard way that this fear of imperfection is the single biggest drawing mistake you can make. It stops you before you even start. The only way I got over it was by forcing myself to make the ugliest drawings I possibly could. On purpose.

Why ugly drawings are actually your best teacher

Here’s a weird thing I noticed. The drawings I learned the most from were never the pretty ones. They were the wonky gesture sketches and the proportions that went completely off the rails. A perfect page gives you nothing to fix, right? But a disaster? That’s a goldmine of information.

For example, I drew a portrait where the right eye was twice the size of the left. Just a total disaster. But analyzing why it looked so bad taught me more about the planes of the face than any YouTube tutorial ever did. The mistake showed me the structure. It pointed exactly to what I didn’t understand yet.

When you embrace the messy process, you get comfortable with failure. And when you get comfortable with failure, you start taking the kinds of risks that actually lead to breakthroughs in your creativity. A perfect page teaches you nothing. A messy page teaches you everything. Seriously, a bad drawing is a gift to your future self.

Simple exercises to break the ‘perfect page’ habit

Ok so I needed a way to trick my brain out of perfection mode. I found three things that worked, and I still do them today when I feel that tight, anxious feeling creeping back into my hand. These are like emergency brakes for your inner critic.

• The 60-Second Gesture. Set a timer. One minute. Fill a

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