11 Tips for Painters
They help me....they might help you
Make something every day. Do a painting or drawing, or prepare surfaces for painting. Or prepare sketches and ideas for future work. Work small if it feels like you need too much energy to work large. Thinking is not the same as making. Have something tangible to look at, at the end of the day.
Learn how to make your own stretchers, cut your own Masonite or plywood panels (either with a saw or a blade), and prime your own surfaces. If you haven’t done these before, you can learn how to do all of them by watching You Tube videos. It is really not very hard, but takes just a bit of practice, and only a few tools. I built stretchers for years with only hand tools. You’ll save a lot of money. The truth is your substrates will be of better quality if you make them yourself. There is a lot of cheap junk out there being sold to artists in art stores, especially the canvases. You’ll also take real pride in your surfaces if you make or prepare them yourself.
Video on cutting Masonite with a utility knife
(The link above shows how to easily cut manufactured boards with a knife. Keep your blades sharp, and your hands out of the way. I cut all my painting panels this way now. I find it’s easier and more accurate than using the table saw.)
If you paint in acrylics, keep a bucket of water with a soft rag close at your painting station. Remember that subtracting is as good as adding. Sometimes when you put something in, it’s just not quite right, but wiping it out or partially wiping it out with a damp cloth, can make all the difference. I’ve discovered a number of useful techniques this way.
Play has to be a major part of picture making, or over time, you will just run out of energy. Play is self sustaining and re-energizing, so find ways to make play a part of what you do in every painting session. A simple thing you can do is, when you have paints left over at the end of a session, make an improvised composition to use up the paints. Don’t consider those finished works, although you may find yourself going back into them at a later time. This really makes you fall in love with paint all over again. You may find it’s a way to break old habits in how to apply paint and use color.
(at the end of a session I make doodles like this with left over paint. Sometimes I work on them later and resolve them more.)
Discover the pleasure of paper. Paper is wonderful to paint on. It’s both intimate and strong. Try all kinds of different papers to see how they react to what you’re doing. If you work in a small scale paper is the way to go. It can be laminated to panel to make it more substantial. It often makes no sense to use canvas for small works because the canvas texture can interfere with the work. Try working both on gessoed papers, and on raw papers. Both methods are fine, and both behave differently.
3 is the magic number! I balance every painting with 3 values: dark, middle, and light. And in every picture there need to be 3 sizes of things: big, middle, small. Just by paying attention to this, you can get a sense of implied space, and a true sense of liveliness.
Learn how to grey with opposites. You really do have 1000s of colors at your finger tips simply by mixing. Watch closely what happens when you gradually add an opposite or relative opposite to a color. You’ll be able to create space by designing with brights and dulls, and darks and lights. The magic happens when you dive into mixing and you see color in relationship to other colors.
When priming painting panels, prime both sides, and the edges. This will even out the pressures on the wood and will help the panel remain flat and un-warped, now and over time. I lightly sand my Masonite panels before priming, and between coats. I first prime my Masonite panels with Gac100 to seal the panel, then I use a commercial latex primer/stain blocker, and then I apply 2 coats of latex gesso.
Markmaking is the subject. Whatever it is that you are painting, remember that the way you make a mark, the way you draw a line, the way you lay down the paint, is as much the subject of the picture as anything. These things will either have a visible energy, or they appear dead and suck energy out of you. Watch for the abstract life in the way things go together. Avoid redoing or over-brushing an entry for no apparent reason. Doing that is like using fillers when you talk….all the ums, ahhs, and thats, you knows, likes,…..kill what you are saying!
Keep your art visible. Once a painting is done, I keep it visible in my living space for the whole day and for a time afterwards as well, until new work appears. You will interact with the work in lots of subtle ways by doing this. You’ll have continual quiet communication with the work by seeing it at unexpected times. You miss a lot by hiding the work away until the next work session.
(I always keep paintings in front of the television, and they get my attention in many ways throughout the day).
Remove ‘making’ stress. It is play. Most everything will end up in the garbage over time anyway….that’s just a fact of existence. So use this fact to empower yourself. Find ways to explore in ways that are meaningful to you.
(Image by Eric Stefanski via Derwyn Goodall)
New work is posted daily to my 2 sites:
That was a really useful tip about about playing with leftover paint - I usually just end up throwing it out! Really good advice 💖
Your suggestions are great. I need to hang them up in my studio so I see them every day. Thank you!