When inspiration eludes you...

What do you do when inspiration just won't strike?  I've got a lovely 11x14" canvas...and she's on her 3rd transformation!  Or perhaps the 4th?  I lost count!  I was disappointed in image #1.  I left her on my desk thinking perhaps I'd made a mistake.  Maybe she was a masterpiece and I would wake up one morning and see the loveliness and sheer genius and fall madly in love with her and decide that I wouldn't even list her in my etsy shop because I couldn't bear to part with her!  Alas, after pondering the aforementioned image, I just couldn't embrace her.  That's okay, right?  I then decided to cover right over the image with some fabulous heavy textured painted fabric.  Clearly that'll do the job.  But it didn't!!  And it was right about here that I decided that this particular canvas was jinxed!!  Yes!!  She should be put out with the rest of the rubbish.  But some tiny part of me felt sorry for her.  And felt that she could still have life breathed into her.  And thus began the 3rd resurrection.  And as you know, that didn't work out either.

I began to worry that I was experiencing a painting/writer's block.  But I was able to paint other canvases...just not on top of that particular canvas.  She got relegated to a corner in my closet for a few months after I ripped her wording and 3D embellishments off of her face.  And yet that tiny part of me still feels an attachment to her.  I'm invested in her somehow, poor thing. 

Tonight I gesso-ed another base coat on her face again.  And I'm going to take my own advice:  be gentle.  She deserves another makeover.  I'll turn her sideways and wait for inspiration.

Dear reader, share with me what you do when inspiration evades you on one particular project?