You might sit in front of a blank surface. Supplies are ready. You just decided what to paint (maybe you put some flowers in a vase in front of you so you will paint from observation). You feel excited, and the truth is, a bit scared of making a mistake, but bravely proceed. You’d like to feel in control, so you have picked up one detail and start from there (maybe from one flower). You mix your colors, apply them, and try to paint what you see. You finish the first flower. Then you move to the next one. You paint (and finish) the second to move to the next. And then to the vase. Then to the table runner and, at the very end, to the table. Then you realize there is only the background left, so you fill it with color. And that’s it, you have finished the painting.

If the process I just described is similar to yours, keep reading, please.

I use to say to artists I mentor to think about painting as of a quest for establishing the right relationships between parts of the painted surface.

When you start by starting and “finishing” the first flower first, you are painting this flower in relation to the void around it. Even if this relationship works well at this stage, you will immediately change it. Because when you start to work on the other flower, the void is not void any more. And as soon as the relationship between the first flower and its entourage has changed, the appearance of you first flower is not the same any more…

Then you start working on the third flower and everything gets more and more complicated…

So what to do?

If you look an artist (who is further on her artistic journey) while she is starting a new painting, you will probably see a very different process. She might ignore all the details and start putting one layer of paint on all bigger areas first. If we follow the same example, it might be one shape (first layer) for the whole bouquet, one shape for a darker area that includes a part of the vase, background and table, and one shape for the lighter area that includes the other part of the vase and table and background. Thus, she might quite quickly cover the whole surface.

Her painting looks rough at this first stage (no details at all), but she has already caught something of the core relations between these bigger areas.

The next phase is to start painting a second layer, covering smaller areas.

She checks where to apply the second layer by looking at the whole surface of the painting. She applies the second layer on smaller areas all over the surface.

Then, she applies the third layer. And this process might go on and on for quite some time;)

The benefit of working like this is that you keep the control over the wholeness of your painting. The parts work well with one another, and the whole looks “finished” at each stage. Hope this reading helps.