Breaking Down the Painting Process

Since most of my recent "Painting Update" posts have shown paintings that have been in-progress for a while, I thought it would be fun to once again break down the process of starting a painting today.

Personally, I LOVE the painting process. I think there is nothing more exciting, fun, scary, and daunting than starting a new painting, as there is always such potential on a blank canvas (or panel, as I typically use for my painting surface). Similarly, once I've done my under-painting (step 1), I become absolutely giddy over the way that beginning to add color and depth instantly begins to animate the objects or shapes that were once just flat, linear sketches. It's wonderful and amazing to me that we can bring subject matter to life--to a completely different, painterly kind of life--with just some oil paint colors and a brush.

Don't really understand what I mean by this? Take a look at the process as it is broken down below...

Step 1. Decide what you're going to paint and create a composition. For instance, I've really been wanting to paint these tin coffee cans that Ben has been buying lately, so I have been stockpiling them one by one as he finishes them, and finally had enough to take them to the studio to paint last week.  I decided that instead of painting them on a table in a normal way, I wanted to hang them on the wall (if you haven't noticed already, I love painting things hanging. I love the shadows that are produced on the white background...). I then began adding other accessories--the masking tape and twine I used to hang them, etc.

---

Step 2. Begin the underpainting. An underpainting is basically a sketch--you use it to figure out composition, handle any perspective or size issues, etc. My underpainting for the cans is below. Notice that you can also use your artistic license here to change the composition a bit, if you'd like. In this painting I decided to squish all of the cans closer together, or tighten the composition a bit, so that they weren't quite so separate.

Step 3. Begin to add color! I forgot to take a picture earlier on in the color-adding process (that's what happens when you're completely involved in what you're doing!), but you can see how much this begins to change things, and hopefully you can understand what I mean when I say that the color brings the objects to life on the surface...

Step 4. Continue to define the objects by adding depth to each item and completing the background (here you can see that in the stage above, the underpainting was still showing around a lot of the edges of the twine and jars, while in the painting below, I went in and filled in the background in these areas). So the picture below shows where I left off last week! There is still obviously a lot of work to be done on the painting, but it's fun to break down these important initial stages of a piece for others to see/better understand how the process works...

Next steps? There are many. Begin to better define each object (especially the twine ball on the far left--I have hardly touched this so far and it has NO depth or detail at all at this point) and fix shape/size issues. Then, I'm going to go in and add all of the writing and detail on the cans (which will definitely take a while). Other than that, lots of small changes and better-defined shadows on the wall. Whew! I think I've got my work cut out for me :)

Painting=my creative refuge. What's yours? How can you find more time for creativity in your own life? I know I'm always searching for ways to increase the amount of time set aside for creative endeavors in my own life...

So here's to a creative week!

Namaste,
Mary Catherine