Let’s switch gears a bit and take a look at our work habits.
No matter our painting style or personality, there are ways to make our painting process move along more smoothly. One thing I’ve noticed about emerging painters is the tendency to find a photograph and start painting. If you watch seasoned painters work from their initial idea to the finished piece, you’ll notice that they never do this. It is always wise to get to know a subject before committing it to paint.
Call them scribbles, gesture drawings, concept drawings, preliminary sketches--the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that we engage with the subject we’ve chosen before we begin to paint it, and that we explore a few composing options as we become acquainted with it. It is surprising what we see once we make the first quick sketch.
Here is the first of a set of my idea studies of some cows and, after revising the idea with several additional studies, a little painting that followed.
Notice how the idea started and where it ended.
I do identify with Dianne’s suggestions.We here in New Hampshire witness the rolling out of the growing season slow and steady. First are the daffodils with their gray backgrounds and next many wild flowers and then lilacs some too against the gray barns and e
merging yellow-green foliage. Next event in the neighborhoods, sometimes in old graveyards are wild lady slippers. In order to paint them as all the other lovely flowers, I need to study how they “are”. How do they come up and where and why there. Mr. Google helps with the why there but the emerging and odd lovely blossom is for me to explore with a pencil, sketch book and quiet, serene “time” with the plant. I have sketched and learned but now how to take the sketch into the next step? Watercolor or oil? I have chosen watercolor to express the fragile transparent nature of the plant . I will only work with a 5x8” to give just enough detail to say: Look here is another precious design from creation. I am in Awe.
I also appreciate the position of the cows in the painting. They clearly invite the viewer directly into the space. I enjoy the way that the violet hue sprinkled throughout the shadows adds spark to the figures.