Some paintings ideas take more planning than others. These steps to better paintings break down the most important aspects to solve one problem at a time. Painting is a juggling act in which many balls have to be kept in the air at the same time. Everyone drops one or more in the course of working and has to pick them up again. Having these preliminaries as a reminder of your original intention and idea really speeds up the correction process. If you’re struggling with, for instance, value, you can go back to your value study and check it against what’s on the canvas.
1. Thumbnails
The purpose of thumbnails is to let you try out many composition ideas quickly to see which one best expresses the idea you have in mind. They should be small, no more than an inch or two in size and only have the largest shapes. You are defining the positive and negative spaces in just one or two values. You are solving the problem of the overall composition.
2. Design/Composition
Once you’ve selected the thumbnail, then it’s time to complete the composition or design. You’re still working with shapes, not detail. There are many formal compositional structures that have been around for centuries. You can choose the one that best fits your thumbnail idea or experiment to come up with a design you like and then see how it might fit one of the traditional compositions. By doing so, you solve the problem of where all the elements of the painting will go and how they will relate to each other.
3. Drawing
The next step is to do a finished drawing, solving all the problems related to that. This is critical because if you don’t and just dive into your painting, then instead of letting loose or focusing on particular details you may end up struggling to correct the drawing. This can lead to overworking the painting.
4. Value
Value is light and dark separate from color or hue. Good paintings always have good values. The eye goes to the point of highest contrast in a painting and that usually controls what the viewer sees first. Value is possibly the most important means of doing that. You are solving the problem of the light and dark pattern of your painting.
5. Color
Glorious color! It’s a big part of why we love to paint. But, getting into a struggle with color can a painting. That’s why doing a color study can be really helpful. Using your value study as a guide, you can translate it into color and repaint as many times as it takes to get it right. Then, when you start your painting, you won’t be trying to figure out what color to mix. Instead, you can focus on cutting loose with your brushwork and making it wonderful.
