I am a full time artist, I live a fairly self sufficient life in rural NSW. I am in the process of improving my art skills. There is no substitute for brush miles when it comes to this. I have been told it takes 1000 paintings to make an artist. A painting a day for three years. I don’t want to wait that long so my goal is to paint three paintings a day for a year. I am doing a lot of small painti
ngs 23cm x 30 cm ( around A4 size) which I sell off cheaply on Ebay. It’s not about the money my income comes from commission work, it is about practice painting and a purpose in that practice, is that the work is going somewhere. I chose these sizes because people can go into Kmart and buy a frame for ten bucks or Ikea or whatever. So for under $100 they can have a piece of art on their walls. It’s great for me because I get a lot of practice, I get up speed and accuracy with my brush work colour mixing and compositional skills. And it is going really well for me so I am pleased. I can see the change in my work week to week. Working methods
I have several approaches depending on what I am painting. I am working in both acrylic and oils. I will normally sketch and block in my oil works with acrylic paints. The apply the oil paints over the acrylic underpainting. I don’t use cheap materials other than brushes, but for paints I use atelier interactive acrylic, and Windsor and Newton oils. I think it’s handicapping yourself trying to produce good work with inferior materials. They are fine to see if you are going to go on with it, but once you have decided to paint you need to be using professional grade materials. The stage I am at now is that I like to sectionalise my process, the drawing, the block in, the mids tones, the highlights and details. And get each section as correct as I can before moving on. I think later with more experience these processes will become automatic and blend into each other. Design
If I am painting a landscape or seascape where there is little built content or it’s not the main part of the painting, I sketch my composition in thin paint, Just getting say up to six big shapes in the picture, getting them the right shape, and the right place. All I am thinking about is design and composition at this stage. If it doesn’t work as a design no amount of fiddling later is going to fix it. Once I am happy with the design I move on to block in. Block in
Working from dark to light, I block in the large shapes, concentrating on chroma and value. What I need here is to get an illusion of depth, and volume in the painting. Creating a three dimensional image, on a two dimensional surface. I don’t mind using modern technology to improve my work. I use my phone a lot. For example at this stage I will take a photo of the block in, change it too black and white in my phone, and double check the values. It is much easier to see if they are correct without the distraction of colour. I am about getting the best possible result I can, not about arty concepts. I am sure that in time, I will need to refer to a monochrome of my block in, to check values, less and less. As my brush miles increase, so does my competence, I can feel this happening now. Again if the work is not firing on all cylinders at this stage it is never going to work, and no amount of titivating later is going to fix it. It’s basic like building a house, if the foundation is crook, it will not stand as a successful building. I often think about tradesmen in an artistic way, like a bricklayer who can lay over a thousand bricks per day. Who moves on the scaffolding like a ballet dancer, with rhythm and such skill. When people say to me you are very talented, that is nice, but the truth is, I am no more or less talented that the skilled tradesman, who knows what he’s doing, through a combination of learning practice and natural ability.
