You Are in Control of Your Painting's Success!

    You are in control of your painting's success! Really! How can you go wrong? Well, first of all, remember if you do go wrong, know it, and proceed anyway. Why? Because once you learn to analyse where you went wrong, then finishing is how you learn to improve. How can you know how to go right when you went wrong? To give you the most helpful instruction you can receive, the instruction that can make you the excellent painter you want to be, know this: No amount of practice makes perfect!! You need to practice the "right" things otherwise you are spinning your wheels, stuck, instead of traveling down the road to success. Corny I know, but doing things by rote is the best way to ingrain the procedure that will get you the best results every time you paint. To become proficient at painting and to paint successful paintings every time you paint, you have to be very specific in your decision making process in order to see the results you want. And that's the key. You have to know the specific details of what you want before you can get it.

     On July 31, 2013, I posted the six questions you need to ask and decide in order to produce consistently good paintings Look for it in the archives..Once you decide these six elements of your painting, it puts you in control.

     

      After students receive very specific instructions from me on how to plan their paintings, many students do not realize they are to go through this process every time they paint. Doing thumbnails of each answer to questions one through six is the rote learning process that teaches composition and design, concept and execution, so you can assimilate all the nitty gritty treasures used by seasoned, successful painters. You can understand the theory and instructions I provide as solutions to the questions "What do I do next and how do I paint it?"  Understand what each question, 1-6, means, ask it, answer it, thumbnail it, every time, until it is second nature to guide yourself with it and then and only then will you know when, where, and how to utilize the knowledge which can turn you into a skilled painter. Learning what line, form, values, temperature, color scheme, and chroma are, is necessary to handling the myriad of choices you make with every brush stroke. It helps you visualize, color, mood, where the light goes, what value to choose, what color to mix, and how to create integrity that locks all the elements of your painting together, so everything works in your painting. 

       If you want to be a good painter, why would you waste countless destructive hours instilling bad habits that promise bad results, and unhappiness, all because you want to skip answering these six questions and want to skip doing thumbnails, so you can get to the fun part of painting. What's so fun about unhappiness and disappointment? Do it right and make these six decisions, do the thumbnails, and planning becomes the fuel that drives your enthusiasm into painting harmoniously "in the zone", a euphoric place where you have all the answers to produce a great painting, and you do. Happiness is the process and the resulting painting itself,( which came into being because you were in control.of it's success). So, where's your plan?