Artists place great expectations on themselves. They’ve put so much time and effort into learning their craft that executing less-than-marvelous pieces seems like a complete failure. For beginning artists, this failure can be devastating to the point of giving up.
One great thing about being an artist is that you’re always learning. Learning should be fun and shouldn’t be stressful. Every time you touch your brush to paper or canvas, you don’t necessarily need to create a masterpiece. Exploring different ways of manipulating your tools and experimenting with different techniques and mediums can be a learning experience that doesn’t result in a finished piece of artwork. Your trash can may be the only recipient of these experimental endeavors, but that’s perfectly okay.
Time For Recess
Once you figure out that everything you create doesn’t have to be successful, it frees you from the stress that comes with an artist’s perfectionist personality.
By allowing yourself free time that’s not connected with the production of artistic work, you’ll loosen up your brush strokes, free your mind of preconceived notions and open yourself up to spontaneous creation. Take a tip from children. Part of your studio time can, and should, be play time.
Warm Up Your Artistic Muscles
Athletes always warm up before exercising or taking part in a sporting event. They need to loosen up their muscles to be ready for their physical exertions. Take a tip from these folks, and loosen up before you begin your artistic exertions.
Spend the first portion of your studio time wielding your brushes, trying out color combinations and wasting some paper. Let your mind off the hook and just enjoy the action of putting paint on a support without worrying about the outcome. You may have created a pile for the trash, or there may be a diamond in the rough lurking there.
Color Combinations For A Visual Taste Treat
If your brush is your main tool, colors are your main ingredients. Cooks are always experimenting with combinations of ingredients to come up with new and interesting flavors. Use your artistic play time to experiment with colors and how they interact with each other.
Your paints vary in intensity, opacity and value. Each tube has unique characteristics that work differently with every other tube in your taboret. Use the most unlikely combinations to see what happens. Take colors to extreme limits. They change as you dilute or intensify them in ways you may not expect. Learning as much as you can about your personal palette frees you to give more of your attention to your composition and less to color decisions.
Colorful Scraps For The Trash Bin
Give yourself some fun challenges to loosen up your artistic muscles. Don’t spend a lot of time on any single sheet or think too much about what you’re doing.
Limit a challenge to only two or three colors. You’re trying to learn the intricacies of how colors work with each other and by using a large number of hues, you’re increasing the difficulty of the task.
Play with colors that you seldom use. Maybe you don’t use them because you don’t know how they behave. Give them a chance to move up in your circle of favorites.
Experiment with just one color. See how it behaves when used alone and in conjunction with compatible mediums. Explore it’s properties of transparency, if it’s granular or has other unique characteristics.
Plan other exercises for yourself to loosen up at the beginning of your work session or to cool down after a hard day of painting.
The creative experience should be fun. If you feel your shoulder muscles tightening up, you’re taking this painting thing way too seriously. Give yourself permission to play. It’s recess time.
