Somewhere here or over on Wet Canvas---I don't remember which---I posted a painting I did but managed to salvage that had goobered up paper. It was a block I had when I had covid and I had taped a border around it but I was still living in the fifth wheel where I didn't have any real good place to store the block so when I started a painting after a year of not painting on it, you'd be surprised what a mess showed up when I did start painting. I was doing a painting for my son's birthday and I didn't want to waste the page of the block, so I just punted. It came out well enough to give to him, but it was just a huge mess when I first started. I definitely empathize with you about this but hang in there and try to salvage it because you may just suprise yourself.
I kind of class the experience under one of my self-made rules----"always paint past the ugly". There always seems to come a point in my painting where I'm just totally convinced it's never, ever going to be any good. But then one time I decided to just paint on the mess some more because I didn't want to have to throw out a precious sheet of paper (that stuff ain't cheap) and I just started painting on it again. The end result was that it didn't turn out anything like what I originally had in mind at all, but ended up being one of my better paintings. So now I just put the "ugly" away and save it for when I lack inspiration for starting something new---good old artist's block we probably all face at times---I pull out the "ugly" and paint more on it. More often than not, it improves plus I'm learned valuable stuff from doing it. Even if it doesn't come out that much better, at least I tried.
