Every piece I make goes through a phase where I'm convinced I've ruined it.

It usually arrives around layer four. The first three are easy — a ground of texture paste worked over with a palette knife, a wash of acrylic sinking into the ridges, a second colors pulled across the high points. Those layers feel generous. They're all possibility and no consequence.

Then comes the layer where the composition stops being a mood and starts being a thing that either works or doesn't. And for a while, reliably, it doesn't.

The mess is the method

I used to panic here. I'd try to rescue the piece by tidying it — sanding the texture back, glazing over the parts that jarred, retreating to whatever passage I liked best and building a little fortress around it. It never worked. What I got was a careful, timid surface with a dead centre.

What actually works, I've learned, is going further in. Building the texture up higher than feels reasonable. Letting a color sit next to another color that it has no business sitting next to. Laying gold where the piece hasn't earned it yet.

Mixed media rewards this. That's the whole argument for working this way, really — you're not committed to a single material's logic. Acrylic wants to behave like acrylic: flat, obedient, self-contained. But acrylic over a raised, cracked, knife-dragged ground, with foil catching light in the low places, doesn't want anything in particular. It's waiting to be told. The ugly stage is just the moment before you've told it.

A word about the gold

Foil is the most honest material I work with, because it refuses to be subtle. You can't ease it in. You lay it down and the whole piece reorganises itself around it — suddenly every value relationship you'd settled is up for renegotiation, because nothing else on the panel is competing with metal for the eye.

Which is exactly why I've stopped saving it for the end. Foil applied last is decoration. Foil applied while the piece is still ugly is a decision — it forces the surrounding color to justify itself, and half the time it tells me the passage I'd been protecting was never the point.

It also does something no paint can: it changes as the viewer moves. A piece with foil in it is never finished in a photograph. That's a feature.

What I'm actually doing when it looks like nothing

A few things, mostly unglamorous:

Squinting. Genuinely. Half-closing my eyes until the piece dissolves into three or four shapes of value. If it's confusing at that level, no amount of surface detail will save it.

Turning it upside down. Composition problems hide in familiarity. Rotating the panel makes it a stranger again, and strangers are easier to be honest about.

Raking a light across it. Texture reads differently at every angle, and the piece will hang somewhere I can't control. If the surface only works under one lamp, it doesn't work.

Taking a photo. The camera flattens everything and strips out the texture I'm emotionally attached to. Often the passage I loved was doing nothing, and the one I'd been ignoring was carrying the whole thing.

Why I'm telling you this

Partly because process talk gets sanitised. We show the finished work and the tidy flat-lay of the materials, and we skip the forty minutes of standing in front of something feeling faintly humiliated by it.

But mostly because the ugly stage isn't a detour on the way to the piece. It's where the piece gets made. Everything before it is arranging. Everything after it is refining. The only part where I actually decide anything is the part that feels like failing.

So if you're making things and you're at the point where you're wondering whether to scrape it all back and start again, consider that you might not be lost. You might just be in the middle.

Lay the gold down early. See what it tells you.