Painting 0/4 - Motivation
Painting is a moment of inspiration, followed by a lot of planning. Everyone can paint, but painting is not an impulsive process where one comes up with an idea, grabs paints or pencils and is ready in an hour and a half as we were taught in school. Whatever we do is done in stages, and painting is no exception:
- Composition
- Coloured base (underpainting)
- Painting loose
- Adding details to the focal points
We start painting the shape of the objects, but without going into details. The first layer (color base) contains only color silhouettes, and each subsequent layer adds additional details. We may not have the courage to start on a pure white sheet and be afraid that we will just stain it awkwardly with paint. In fact, this is exactly the purpose of the first layer.
Let's imagine we're making an animated film. If we do well the first 1 minute of the film we will be wrong, because we put a lot of effort without having a completed stage. Are we sure that the characters should look exactly like this? What would happen if we sketched the plot of the film in a notebook, wrote the lines and shot the pages? We would get a film of talking "rectangles", no matter how unprofessional it may seem, but we will have completed one stage. This guarantees that we will be motivated to continue, and looking back we will see evidence of our progress.
If we are painting a house landscape, the first step is not to finish the houses one by one, but to cover the whole area of the canvas with paint. Houses should be depicted first as a silhouette that corresponds roughly to the selected color range and lights/shadows. We can use dark gray-blue for the facades in the shade, and orange for the light areas. Only then comes the application of specially selected colors and details.
Beginning is half the work. If we cannot begin, the problem is not because we cannot do something or because we have never done it (a favorite excuse for many people), but a matter of pure attitude towards things. How do we get inspired and get started? Looking for the easy - using a ready-made photo or picture from the Internet, a book, a magazine, a food packaging image - inspiration can be found in the most unexpected places. Natural landscapes are usually the easiest.