Great paintings are layers of mistakes painted over. So are great people.

Finished work hides its own history. Under most paintings there are shapes that did not work, corrections and whole sections abandoned, and none of it is visible in the version people admire. Skill is not the absence of those layers, it is what accumulates from having made them.

Stop comparing your rough middle to somebody else’s finished surface, because you are looking at two different stages. Keep a record of your own drafts if you can, old work, old attempts. Seeing the layers makes the current mess look like part of the process rather than proof of something.