It starts fun with a rush of inspiration but soon enough you’re in the ugly phase and the confidence of beginning is all used up. At this point you don’t know know if it’s going to be a successful painting and you wonder if more effort on it will just be wasted time.
This is where you get stuck.
If you give in to the fear that all this effort will come to nothing, you’ll stop working on it. You’ll ignore the picture. You’ll work on something else. You’ll distract yourself.
The important thing is to keep going.
You do that by trusting the process and believing that all the effort will be worth it in the end. Perhaps the picture won’t be successful, but that’s fine. You’ll be a better artist for finishing it. Time well spent.
Almost every successful painting goes through this dip. Don’t give up on it.