Dealing with Second Thoughts and Limitations

I happen to love a lot of quotes by Harvey Dunn, one of the great pioneers of American illustration, and art teacher to quite a few successful Illustrators. One day during a class critique, he said this:

 
"When you get an idea and you sit down to sketch it, right away all the little doubts and second thoughts and limitations that have been hanging around waiting for you to start some positive action, - one may be over in the corner sleeping, others are playing about - well, when they see you get to work with this idea they come and look over your shoulder, one will say, "Oh, no, you can't do that, that's not going to work."  And another will say, "You don't paint enough," and so on.  Say to them, "I'm only playing;  you go on back to your corners."  And, honestly when you do just play with an idea, they do go away and leave you.  They don't want you to work, that's all.  Play around with those little sketches, saying to yourself, "Now, if I were a really first-rate artist, how would I express this idea?"  Then keep playing around till you think, "that's the way I really believe a first class artist might do it!"  When you begin on the drawing itself, still you keep saying, "Now I wonder how would a finished high-grade man paint or draw this?"  "Why, I believe he'd do it 

like this," and first thing you know it's painted!"

Whether it's those little guys in the corner, or the guys with the big guns at the front door, it seems like the obstacles to painting never sleep. As a mother of two little girls, sometimes my demons say, "If you touch that brush, you're a terrible mother! You could be cleaning the house before the girls wake up." Sometimes they say, "It's just not going to happen until your kids are grown up... until you start getting a full night's sleep... until you can afford to buy the right paint... until you have a bigger block of time... until you can start painting from life every day...until you have a studio with good lighting..."  But really, deep down, I know that most of that stuff is never going to happen, and even if it all did, there would be new things- new excuses. 

For me, the hardest part about painting is just STARTING!  Once I get started, it takes freight train brakes and an empty stomach to make me stop. So the key for me is just starting over again, every day.