‘My only worry is the painting I’m doing. Nothing else.’ — David Hockney
It happens quite often: we get lessons from unexpected places or people, in surprising ways.
Lately, I have been going to evening art classes, where I have been playing and learning to paint with acrylics. Painting with acrylics is definitely teaching me a lot about colour theory and perception, visual communication, but there is something else: the process of painting has taught me 3 valuable lessons that can apply to any creative process. And to life:
Expect the start will be a failure and engage with the journey.
There are two general approaches to starting a painting: you can either plan the process upfront, visualising the result and working out the steps to achieve the outcome; or, you can choose a framework that gives you the freedom to experiment and let go of the result within those constraints. Either way, the beginning, the start, is going to be rough, incomplete. Always. Your painting is not going to be good, and for obvious reasons: it lacks all the work, any work, the iteration, all the layers that give depth and time to an artwork.
The same applies to anything we do creatively, and this includes Design. ‘To be a truly creative company, you must start things that might fail.’ - writes Ed Catmull in Creativity, Inc. We must embrace failure and engage with the process. Only then we’ll get the most creative outcomes.
Every layer counts.
An interesting observation is how a layer of paint, or any little touch or detail on a painting, has the power to change the overall look of the picture. Every layer of paint that we put in the picture adds to the never-ending result, sometimes underdone; overdone some others.
I like starting my pictures with a complementary colour palette, or an entirely different colour than the one I will lay over. That colour influences the colour on top and pops up in some areas, like the orange and the purple I used for priming the painting below.
Think carefully about the layers you are adding to your picture. And don’t be afraid to keep adding until you achieve the result you are after. Just look at the Monet in this link: how many colours can you see?
There’s never an end to a painting - you decide when to finish it.
I did this little experiment in the painting below: I started with bright colours and kept mixing my palette to achieve the greyer colour as possible. I kept painting on top of the previous colours, going towards more neutral tones. I could have kept going but decided to put an end to it when the evening session finished. Indeed the colours are still quite vibrant and I could have gone even more neutral. I won’t go back to it again for now, I might do it in the future. I’ll start a new picture, perhaps exploring the same theme. Put an end and move on.
Sometimes it’s hard to put an end to projects but from my experience, if anything, it’s much better to leave things undone, or rather, unfinished. David Hockney’s iPad paintings have a bit of that: an impression, an idea, an unfinished, suggestive powerful picture.
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Happy sketching!
Ana