This is the first in a series of posts concerning the mental process your brain should be taking in making a great painting.  Every piece will go through these stages and depending upon how well they are executed will result in the quality of the painting.  I’m going to skip over “Concept”, which is actually the first stage.  I’m assuming you know what you what to paint.  If now, then step one is as follows…decide what you’re going to paint.  After you’ve got your initial idea it time to figure out your most basic layout or your compositions.

Composition is simply the arrangement of shapes and values on your picture plane.

You want to aim for a combination of shapes, angles, lights and darks that is pleasing to the eye.  Well, what is pleasing to the eye you ask.  The eye likes what the brain likes and your brain likes to put things in some type of order.   It wants to take the chaos and arrange it into things that it understands.  It wants to group like shapes or sizes.  It wants to clean up a mess.  Don’t go overboard.

Aim for “Unity with Diversity”.

Most student will remember this phrase from art school.  The last thing I want you to do you to line up all your shapes from smallest to largest and call it a day.  That is the extreme that your brain is trying to do but if we travel all the way down this road will sacrifice all diversity and thus all the visual interest.  See, even though your brain is trying to put object in order it will get bored after it’s done and you don’t want boring painting.  The objective is to find that balance between unifying your composition but keep the diversity or visual interest.

One of the easiest ways to start this process is experiment or decide based on your subject matter what your dominant value will be.  Paintings should always have a dominant value.  It should be mostly dark, mostly light, or mostly a middle value.  This creates that unity by connecting large portions of your picture with one value.  Ohhh, your brain likey!  Here are some examples below.

Fig. 1 has a dominant dark value has has a number of shapes arranged or grouped in a pleasing fashion.  Fig. 2 on the other hand is weak and needs to make a decision.  In this instant as well as all you do in art, be CONFIDENT!  MAKE A DECISION!  Push your shapes and values to get a pleasing composition and then decide on your dominant value.  If you get this stage right you can make a slew of mistakes throughout the rest of the process and still end up with an impressive painting.  Nothing makes a great painting like a strong foundation and inversely nothing is worse than a weak one.

Yes, throughout my years as an artist I’ve found a valuable secret that is 85% of being a successful artist or as part of your quest to becoming an artist, period.  It’s not hard.  In fact, it’s one of the easiest and most simple things you can do but I find that many professional artist have this very problem.  It’s the number one thing you can do to get your work done.

JUST SHOW UP!

Yes, Mr. Monkeyman, you too have a great chance to be a great artist if you just plant your monkey butt at your drawing desk or easel.  All you have to do is show up at your drawing board.  I’ve got a hundred and one reasons why I can’t work on an oil painting tonight.  The garbage needs to go out, Mario can’t save the princess all by himself, the children need to eat, there’s a party at Fred’s house.  I’ve heard and used most of em’ but you can’t let them stop you from consistently working on your art.

Ok, I did stop to feed the kids.  Who can work with all that whining and “Daddy, we’re hungry” going on in the other room.  The older ones can fend for themselves but you have to at least throw a few packs of fruit snacks at the smaller ones.  (In the course of full disclosure I have only one one child and the wife makes sure he’s fed but I have thrown fruit snacks at him)

The point is that you have to make your art a priority.  Every day or as close to that as you can get.  I’ve found that if you “just show up” everything else will fall into place or it will at least have the opportunity to do so.  The hardest part really is just picking up the brush to start.  After that my art monster takes over and before I know it it’s 2:00 in the morning, I’ve got some cad red on my forehead, and I’ve still got to get up at 7 the next morning.  Yeah, you pay a price but look what you just created and if you’re anything like me, it’s all worth it.

Oh yea.  If you do throw fruit snacks at your young ones make sure to open them first.  They don’t have enough  coordination yet to open them and a toddler with a sealed pack of fruit snacks is much worse than one who is just hungry.