With today’s busy schedule, most budding artists don’t have a lot of time to devote to painting.
Unless you’re blessed with a lot of free time on your hands, you need to grab painting time when and where you can.
If this is your dilemma, try to make your limited time as productive as you can.
Here are some ideas to maximize your creative efficiency as you shoehorn studio time into your hectic lifestyle.
Choose A Medium That Works To Your Advantage
To be most productive, you need to choose a medium that is ready when you are and dries rapidly, so you can complete your painting quickly. Although oils and encaustics are beautiful, they require a great deal of time to dry.
Choose watercolor or acrylic paints, as they’re quick drying and easy to set up and clean up after you’re finished. Pastels or colored pencils are perfect, as they are easily toted around, don’t require any setup and can be used in conjunction with watercolor or acrylic in mixed media.
Use A Limited Palette Of Colors
You can create almost any color with only a few tubes of paint. Choose Titanium White, if you’re using acrylic paint, colored pencil or pastels. Include Cadmium Yellow, Permanent Red, Ultramarine Blue, Naples Yellow Deep, Burnt Sienna and perhaps Burnt Umber. Some artists add a tube of a cool gray to their tabouret.
When you limit your palette, you waste less time deciding whether to use Cadmium Yellow Pale or Cadmium Yellow Medium. Your painting will instantly have color harmony, as all the colors are derivatives of your limited palette.
You can further limit your palette to only one tube of paint for a monotone painting. It’s amazing the number of shades you can achieve with just one tube of paint.
Try painting with only two or three colors. This is also a great way to expand your color blending skills and help you to learn that less is more.
Make Every Brushstroke Count
Use the largest brush you can for each segment of your composition. If you can, use a two-inch brush for the initial layers of your painting. Lay in broad washes of color for the sky or background. Do the same for the middle ground and foreground. Those few sweeping strokes only took a few seconds, and voilà, your support is covered with color.
Use only a very few brushes. Make it a game to see just how few you can use to complete your painting. The more you work with your brushes, the more dexterous you will become at manipulating them.
Work On Reasonably Sized Supports
Reasonably sized supports mean a couple of things. First, don’t work on a huge, full sheet of watercolor paper or a canvas that fills half a wall. You’re setting yourself up for a long haul to complete those heroic works.
Don’t paint tiny miniatures. Sure, these petite pictures don’t require much paint or work space, but the fine-line detail work they require can render them as time consuming as the huge, over-sized canvases.
Select moderate sizes for your quick-time paintings. If you choose supports that can be packed into a carrying case or tote, you’re work becomes portable. The smaller size allows you to finish it in short order, but it’s large enough allow for rapid development of your composition.
If you’re working with pastel or colored pencil, a good quality drawing pad can go almost anywhere with your. Just add a handful of pencils and you’re good to go.
A water media artist can use a block of watercolor paper. These blocks allow you to paint without stretching your paper and it’s easy to carry for on-the-spot painting sessions.
What To Include In Your Painting
We’ll assume you’ve decided what you want to paint. First, you need to find the focus of your composition. You should have a definite focal point for yourself and your viewer to concentrate.
After you’ve completed your composition, it’s time to consider whether you’re looking for accuracy or an ambiguous representation. Remember, accuracy usually demands detail, and detail requires time. Try to paint the essence of your subject without the unnecessary details.
Another decision you need to make is whether to include a background in your painting. Many lovely images use the stark white of the paper as a compositional aid, and this area is considered part of the aesthetics. It must be an integral part of the composition, or the work will feel incomplete and unfinished.
Become a minimalist in what you include in your composition. You don’t need to leave every tree in a landscape, nor do you need to include every leaf in a floral bouquet. Reduce the images in your composition to the minimum amount needed to convey your message.
Decide The Tone Of Your Painting
The tone refers to a couple of things. The color tone of your painting is whether it’s a warm or a cool painting. When you begin to paint, decide on a definite color temperature.
The second meaning of tone refers to the lightness or darkness of the painting. Just for a moment, forget about the local colors of your painting. Think of it in masses of light, medium and dark tones. Your painting should be made up of two-thirds, one-third and a touch.
For example, your painting can be two-thirds light hues, one-third medium hues and a touch of dark, or it can be two-thirds dark hues, one-third medium hues and touch of lights, or any other combination of the three. Beginning painters often tend to have very medium-toned paintings. They forget to include deep darks and bright highlights. By using this Rule Of Thirds in your painting, you’ll give your painting visual variety.
Know When To Stop
Don’t keep worrying your painting to death. When you get to a stopping point, stop. Give yourself some breathing space and get away from your painting.
Come back to it in a day or two with fresh eyes. View it from across the room, instead of from your normal painting distance. Now that you give it a second look, you have a better chance to see if it really does need more work, or if it’s ready for your viewing public.
Follow these tips to increase your productivity and speed up your painting process. Even if you only have an hour or two to spend painting, you’ll make the most of it and add to your growing art inventory.
