How to Critique Your Own Work Part Two: Ask Yourself 6 Questions

 There are six questions you should ask yourself before starting any painting. They are the same 6 questions you should ask yourself during a critique. The six questions are:  

1. What's my Line?
2. What's my Form, (puzzle pieces)?
3. What are my Values?
4. What's my Chroma?
5. What's My Temperature?
6. What's my Color Scheme?

Oh and we could add, a seventh... "What's my Light Source?" But let's stick to 6 as a checklist. "What's my light source" is a given, however, it is important to check it frequently in relationship to direction and degree of light as it varies throughout your painting.  More on light soon. 

 

1.  What's my line means Composition noted by simple point to point line. The line can be straight, lax and drooping, arched, spiraling, C shaped, S shaped, etc. 
 When deciding your answer, you are to think of line as direction when you ask yourself "What's my line". What are the paths you want the eye to travel through your painting. Do thumbnails using 3-5 lines representing the movement you want to create in your painting. This is an elementary line composition that shows (1) entry into your painting, (2) direction and movement through your painting,(3) exit from your painting and re-entry back on and through your painting. [this is where you cut the exit off at the pass and move the eyes of your audience back on the canvas]. I call (3) the redirect.

Instruction: Ask yourself "What's my line" and reduce composition down to simple lines. Put it in a thumbnail. Do at least 2 designs, three is better. Then pick one. Stick to it when you paint.

2. "What's my form" means an item or groups of things in your painting, that makes up a shape in your painting. All the shapes (a group of one or more forms is a shape) in your painting should be represented in your brain and on paper as interlocking puzzle pieces.  Designing your painting by grouping forms and locking them together gives your paintings strength and integrity of design. It is what holds your painting together and keeps it from being boring.  

Painting Instruction 2: Ask yourself What's my form ? Do a thumbnail of puzzle pieces to represent your painting's form. Suggestion: Make your negative space (the air, or empty space) a puzzle piece. Design your negative puzzle piece so it locks  it locks into the positive space puzzle pieces (the objects in your painting). Connect your shadows to form another one or two puzzle pieces etc. Group volume together, people, trees, things to make a larger shape and lock it in place with everything surrounding it, all puzzle pieces.Think of Leonardo's Last Supper. See the puzzle pieces! See the groups of threes. See how the design locks together so beautifully.

Leonardo Di Vinci's Last Supper, restored

Get the feeling of volume and negative space. See how the painting locks together, first through the figure groupings, next through the blues, then the reds, the greens, even the fleshes direct and connect, just as the hair does in places. The ceiling and walls snap into place too.

(Painting Instruction 2 continued: Ask yourself, "What's my form ?")  Now do 1-3 thumbnails of your painting as an interlocking puzzle to show how you group your form before you paint. Choose one plan and stick to it. If you like, after marking your puzzle pieces and showing them locked together, you may lightly describe objects within the puzzle pieces as reference. Do not lose the puzzle pieces in your thumbnail, or your painting, when you do this. Draw the outline around the outside edge of the grouping and that is one puzzle piece. 

Note: If you are having a hard time looking at a group of 3-dimensional objects and just can't see the puzzle pieces or how to group objects, close one eye. You will now flatten out your view and see two-dimensionally.Grouping will appear to you more easily and you can make fine relationship decisions. Kern these items you see together more closely or further apart, or edit something out all together, to make a grouping into a form (puzzle piece). ("Kern" is a printing term, where you budge certain letters together or move them apart for emphasis and design when setting type. I always think of "corn" for "kern" and the kernels all jammed together in neat little rows on the cob, then what it looks like on a  looser, less densely packed cob of corn, or what it looks like if I remove a few kernels  to remember to  the word "kern". Today, some computer programs have "kerning" keys in them for publishing and design. Almost all word programs have kerning when you hit the "justify" tab to stretch your type flush on the left and flush on the right borders at the same time. It squashes letters together and arranges spaces to look good in a column of type. Visuals in a layout can be moved in the same manner for superior eye appeal groupings to make your puzzle pieces.)

3. "What are my values" means if I was looking at my subject matter as a black and white photograph what would it look like? Yes, every color has a corresponding value. For instance many vivid reds, red deeps, and crimson colors photograph black, as does ultramarine blue. And yes, different colors can have the same value. That is why you can group values. (It's really grouping the same degrees of reflected light together.) Right now, your eyes could be telling you you see a hundred, a thousand, gradations of values. Here's the expertise in painting... cut it down to less than six values in your painting, no matter how many colors you paint in it. Three to five values plus white is perfect for any painting, because it separates and defines the elements of your painting. Otherwise, too many values can be tedious, confusing,  and boring, well always more boring than a well designed 3 to 5 value painting.

 Now group the values and identify them in 3-5 shades of gray only. These will be the values you use in your painting.  Using only few values, (3-5 values plus white), quickly identifiable to the eye, makes a good painting.

Painting instruction 3. Ask yourself "What are my values?" Remember value defines form so the shadow on an object could divide an object into being part of more than one puzzle piece, and possibly 1-5 values. Take a look again at the above painting by Da Vinci  and see the colors divide into values. Now decide your values for your painting and sketch it up in a thumbnail. Again doing 2-3 three thumbnails of value compositions, will produce a better choice for your painting's values, so do 2-3 value-compositions. This is where a lot of inexperienced artists deviate, even when they have this material to guide them. So, be sure to stick-to-the-plan.

         4. "What's my Chroma" means how intense are the colors in your painting? How much light does your painting reflect? A dark painting is low chroma. An overall light painting is a high chroma painting. And medium is medium. You can have medium-high, and medium-low chroma paintings too.

Painting Instruction 4. Ask yourself "What's my chroma?". Look at your value study and decide, what you want it to be. Write the chroma you chose under your value study. If your value study doesn't match your chroma choice, fix it so that they match. Your choose how.

         5. "What's my temperature" means is your painting warm or cool, color-wise. Is it closer to red (hot) or blue (cool)? Now ask yourself what are the influencing colors in my painting? Is that a cool blue or a warm blue? A cool red or a warm red? Every color can be warmed up, or cooled off. Temperature is decided by comparison.

Painting Instruction 5. Choose and maintain the temperature throughout your painting overall.
  
Note: See Lesson 3 on temperature.

        6. " What's my Color" means what is my color scheme, analogous?, complementary? monochromatic, etc.

Painting Instruction 6. Choose your paintings temperature and make sure the temperature of your other painting colors are of the same temperature overall.

Note: See lesson 2.

So now here is how to critique your own paintings: 

1. Each painting you do, answer 1-6. 
2. Reference your thumbnails as you paint.
3. Check your painting and ask yourself did I follow the plan?
4. Usually you problems will be in the areas you went astray.
5. Fix it. Finish the plan.
6. If you want to change the plan, fix this painting according to this plan , then paint an entirely, new painting according to the revised plan.
7. Many Artists copy good photos or other people's work to start out. In order to evolve as a painter, you must understand why a photo or painting works in the first place. These six questions are The First Place.

Good luck! This is my best advice I can give anyone who is learning to paint. Internalize this checklist, live by it as a painter. Soon you will be in-the-zone painting. Happy days of painting are ahead!
Oh, and if you answer all these questions and do the work, it gets easy. 
Oh and all these steps define your focal points, which you choose and describe with opposites. (See Lesson 3.)

  

How to Critique your Own Art Work

     Be sure to photogragh your work in progress. Reduction is the best way to immediately see how things are progressing, alert to problems, and unfinished areas separate out easier. Often, a simple solution provides you, the painter, with immediate direction and an overall sense of accomplishment where you couldn't see it before. If you don't have a camera handy, get one. In the meanwhile, surprise yourself. Walk out of the room, engage your eyes and brain with something new, like " my, my, I wonder how sis is doing", trick yourself and pretend you forgot something back in the room you just came out of, return, and take a fleeting look around the room as if your painting does not exist and BEHOLD you stumble on your painting! Oh my, you see it with fresh eyes. You can immediately see it objectively where you might not have for the last hour of working on it. The same thing happens, (but without the drama), as it does when you see it reduced in a photo. As an art director, my photographers and I always took polaroids before the actual photo shoot, just for that crisp view of light and subject and to check the composition. In the small photo, you can see needed lighting changes, too much or not enough value or intensity, all along with what is working, and it is subjective instead of personal criticism that you accomplish. Now, it's all digital and on computer monitors, where an Art Director can see instant corrections and play with what if's! Amazing time for creativity because of being able to quickly see another view.

   Also be sure to take a completed-work photo. It helps you learn even more in the future.

   This is an in-progress painting of "Sweet Catastrophe", a young lady from the Illinois Renaissance Fair, painted in 2002. I painted 2 versions of this delightful subject. This was 24"x 36", oil on canvas. Afterward, I finished the lower arm, hand, and upper rocks, leveled the mirror and painted it as brown wood dropping it into the background. I also took some of the intensity out of the skirt because it demanded too much attention. I had a  Solo Exhibition coming up and hurried to meet a deadline for a postcard photo image and used this photo, then finished the work after. (No photo of the finished work survived my divorce, sorry).

     Conversely so, take a photo and find it is finished! Chelcey Offill, a promising young artist, painted this impressionism-style painting in one session during our Van Gogh Class. We were on the edge with it not being finished. Photograghed at the end of class, produced sound evidence it was finished. The photo here is a little cropped because of  wet glare edited out. I hope you enjoy this painting as much as I did. Impressionist work is rarely varnished, however we varnished this because it was perfect, but dry, Chelsey was disapointed that some of the color darkened when it dried and liked the wet fresh  paint look so we varnished it in the next class.
    Varnishing is easy with a sable-soft flat brush. Dip your brush in varnish. Place your brush outside the edge of your painting to contact the most remote edge and draw a long uninterrupted, one-stroke application of varnish across the painting, starting from the top edge of your painting's shortest side until you reach the opposite side of your painting,(portrait orientation), drawing the brush off the edge as you finish your stroke.The brush is held parallel, low to the canvas, so that the face of the brush contacts the surface of your painting as you draw the stroke from side to side across your canvas. Slightly overlap the next application with the prior stroke as you travel down your painting in horizontal strokes. BE SURE your painting is laying FLAT when applying varnish!  KEEP IT FLAT TO DRY. The finest varnish I have found is Maroger's Mastic Varnish. With the Maroger's Mastic Varnish, unlike other varnishes you can varnish within 2 weeks of the painting if the surface is dry to the touch. Longer than two weeks, you must wait a year for wet paint to cure. More on Maroger and varnishing later. More on keeping archival records to create provenance to come in future issues of Susan Sprigg Daily Art Weekly.