The Creative Perfectionist Gap

Does creative perfectionism show up the moment you start learning something new?

In almost every session, and even in one-off workshops, I will see someone halfway through a wash, brush loaded, then stop. They look at the paper, then at the reference in front of them, then back at the paper, and something in their face closes over or they will say, “That’s not right” or “I’m not getting this right”. It mostly happens when learning the wet-on-wet watercolour technique of glazing; it’s when what they are learning gets more challenging and the perfectionism creeps in.

People often arrive in class with old stories about not being creative or good at art, but also with a curious desire to give it a try. When this happens, it’s a reminder that the way I teach watercolour is not just about skill; more importantly, it’s how you feel when you are painting and dampening down the negative thoughts running through your mind.

Watercolour blends out the negative thoughts in your mind.

Because your brain isn’t waiting passively for information and then reacting, it constantly predicts what’s about to happen and then checks the prediction against what actually happens. Neuroscientists call the difference between the two a prediction error (1). I know prediction error sounds like a flaw in the system, and it kinda is, but rather than think of it as a flaw or mishap, think of it like a constant loop of prediction, comparison, adjustment.

When you sit down to paint, with brush in hand, moving across the paper, it’s a dance. You’re holding a prediction in your head of how this is going to look, built from the reference in front of you, the flower, herb, the object, landscape, every reference photo you’ve studied, every finished piece you’ve admired, every idea you have about what “good” watercolour or “good art” looks like. Then you make a mark your brain compares that mark to the prediction, it tries to make sense of what it sees against what it thinks it sees.

When you are developing a new or complex skill, the two often don’t match and that’s a prediction error. At this point, it’s typical to jump to the conclusion it’s evidence you lack talent, rather than a measurable event in your nervous system.

The perfection and prediction error gap

When this happens, perfectionism enters the conversation you are having in your head. First, let’s establish that not all perfectionism is the same under a mismatch like this. Researchers distinguish between two dimensions: one being personal standards, which is about setting a high bar for yourself, and two being evaluative concern, which is about fearing judgement and treating any error as evidence of failure (2).

You can see the difference play out in how people respond to their own mistakes. People high in evaluative concern, the fear-and-judgement flavour, showed less of the neural response that normally follows an error, and less of the behavioural adjustment that comes after. In plain terms, this kind of perfectionism doesn’t process the mismatch and learn from it. It gets stuck circling the error itself, worrying about what it means, having less capacity to close the gap. People high in personal standards, the bar-setting flavour, tend to use the error instead. It sharpens and improves their next attempt.

I see this play out in our classes all the time. One student sees a wobbly wash and thinks, “I need to understand wet-on-wet better.” Another sees the same wobbly wash and thinks, “I’m stuffing this up.” Same prediction error. Completely different relationship to it.

A skills gap, not a talent gap

If you take away one thing from learning watercolour, it’s this: when your hand can’t yet produce what your eye and your imagination already know, that mismatch is a skills gap. It’s what happens on the way to becoming skilled, not proof you’re on the wrong path. Importantly, it is not a reflection of your talent.

Artists and researchers who study aesthetics have argued that a certain amount of mismatch is what makes a piece of work compelling in the first place. Great artists deliberately build up a viewer’s expectations, then break them, because the pleasure isn’t in the smooth confirmation of what we predicted. It’s in the effort of resolving the gap, the small “aha” of the pattern finally clicking into place. That click, the aha moment itself, is your brain registering a bigger-than-expected update to its model of the world (3). The bigger the mismatch you close, the more rewarding it feels.

Which means the very thing that makes early watercolour so uncomfortable, that persistent gap between what you meant and what you made, is also the exact process that will eventually make it feel so good. That, in essence, is what I’m leading you toward every time you sit down to paint.

Closing the gap

Every hour you spend building a skill narrows the prediction error. Your brain gets better data about how paint actually behaves: how much water is too much, how a colour dries shades lighter than it looks wet. In class I call this your painter’s intuition, or your third eye. The gap between the painting in your head and the one on the page gets smaller, because you’ve given your nervous system more accurate information to predict from. (This is also why I remind our painters to breathe, it supports your nervous system while you learn to paint).

In class I call this your painter’s intuition, or your third eye.

It is exactly what I mean when I talk about botanical watercolour as a place to practice flow state. Flow doesn’t happen when everything is easy, when your skill and the challenge in front of you sit close enough in size you’re fully absorbed in closing the gap, rather than standing outside yourself judging it.

The real skill being built in a watercolour class was never really about producing a flawless painting, although we do that too! It’s learning to stay with the mismatch, tolerate the discomfort of not-yet-knowing, and keep your hand moving anyway. That’s a skill you can carry into every part of your life where the picture in your head doesn’t yet match the one in front of you. Researchers have linked exactly this kind of tolerance for uncertainty to lower stress, and it shows up in the work on anxiety and low mood too. Learning to stay present with a mismatch, rather than fleeing it or being flattened by it, is protective.

So next time your brush hits the paper, or you are learning a new creative skill and it isn’t what you pictured, try naming it for what it actually is. Not failure. Not proof. Just information, doing exactly what it’s meant to do to transform your learning.

Be well & creative, queen!
Amanda ♥

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1. den Ouden, H. E. M., Kok, P., & de Lange, F. P. (2012). How prediction errors shape perception, attention, and motivation. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 548.
2. Mattes, A., Mück, M., & Stahl, J. (2023). Perfectionism-related variations in error processing in a task with increased response selection complexity. Personality Neuroscience, 5, e12.
3. Becker, M., & Cabeza, R. (2024). Prediction error minimization as a common computational principle for curiosity and creativity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 47.
4. Van de Cruys, S., & Wagemans, J. (2011). Putting reward in art: A tentative prediction error account of visual art. i-Perception, 2, 1035–1062.

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