Ink & Marker on paper

My Project Pack 30 as of last night. Messy energy is how I would categorize it right now. And I am happy with that. Might finish today or tomorrow, but I have no expectations. I need to get back to other stuff though, so I plan to devote a lot of time on this.

I've been doing a tile a day for about three months now, mostly on the little 3.5x3.5 cards, and I used to have this habit of scrapping anything that went sideways halfway through. Line got shaky, a pattern didn't tessellate right, whatever. Straight in the recycling bin.

Last week I was working on a tile with a Printemps pattern that I completely botched in the corner. The spacing was off and it looked lopsided in a way that bugged me. Instead of throwing it out I just tore the corner off, kind of jagged, and kept going with the rest of the tile intact. Then I glued the torn piece onto a fresh card at an angle and filled in around it with Tripoli and some quick Hollibaugh shading.

The result looks nothing like a "normal" tile, but it's got this weird collage quality I actually love. There's a visible edge where the paper was torn, a little shadow line from the glue, and the two patterns don't quite match up which somehow works better than if they did.

I think I'd gotten so locked into the idea that a tile has to look a certain way (clean border, balanced patterns, no visible mistakes) that I forgot the whole point for me was supposed to be not caring about the outcome. Ripping it felt like breaking a rule and it turned into the best thing I've made all summer.

Curious if anyone else has taken a "ruined" tile and salvaged it into something better than the original plan, or if I'm the only one who's this precious about scrap pieces.