been working on the same 30x40 panel for a week now, big flat green field with an arm cutting through it, and the elbow has been sitting wrong since day one. it read as a blob. so i did what any reasonable person does and spent three hours glazing, sanding, glazing, sanding, until the arm had this nice soft rounded edge.

it's correct now. and it's dead.

the rest of the painting is all hard edges, no blending, paint applied like a screen print. and i just spent a whole evening rendering one limb into a smooth airbrushed tube because i was scared of the shape being wrong. the fix wasn't the problem. me reaching for a blur instead of just repainting the actual silhouette is the problem.

i know the answer is scrape it back and redraw the arm as a flat shape. i'm just posting this so i have to do it instead of staring at it and telling myself it's fine.

if you've got a piece where the "improvement" quietly killed the thing, i'd genuinely like to hear it, mostly so i stop feeling like the only person who does this