3 Things to Help Improve Your Paintings
Hey, how's it going?
My main focus lately has been working on watercolor paintings and improving the quality of my paintings.
As I've been going through this process, I've had to think a lot about how to improve and what is necessary in order to do it.
Here's some things you can focus on which can help to improve the quality of your paintings in long run:
Sketching
Drawing and sketching more will help you to be able to render your paintings more accurately and effectively.
Most of the time in the beginner's work that I see, drawing is usually an issue.
But don't get too caught up in this either, sometimes the way you draw (even if not "perfect") can help to bring so much life and even style into your work. So just embrace the way you draw.
But improving your sketching skills is just a good idea overall so that you can sketch up your ideas quickly and confidently and get to the painting.
Color Mixing
Another issue I see a lot is lack of color mixing. Which is almost just a lack of neutral and grey tones or colors within the painting.
If you're unhappy with the colors in your painting or you're finding that your paintings don't look "natural", it's probably due to lack of neutrals.
You're either using colors straight from the tube too much, or only mixing 2 bright colors together for a particular tone. This can give the appearance of "primary"-looking colors to your paintings, and it looks unnatural.
Most colors in nature and in the world are quite grey and dull. For example, green leaves on trees or bushes. They might look super bright green to you, but you shouldn't paint them like that.
Whenever I paint green trees, I "almost always" use a mixture of at least 3 colors, something like: Ultramarine Blue, Cad. Yellow Medium, Transparent Red Iron Oxide.
I think most folks wouldn't realize that a warm color is needed to neutralize the green a bit, like a red or a brown. It's actually super important and looks more like reality and nature, rather than just mixing blue and yellow together.
Design
Composition and design is super important, and may actually be the most important on this list. Congrats if you're still reading this then :)
Imagine if you create a painting without considering the placement or design of anything and you paint the entire painting really well, but the design is bad. No matter how well you render and paint it, the design won't look pleasing and neither will the painting.
That's how important design and composition is and it's something I've been considering and practicing a lot lately.
Now, almost every time before starting a painting, I will do small thumbnail sketches to play around with the composition. Then I'll also do a small value sketch use some black watercolor paint to plan out 3 values across the whole painting.
This lets me see the painting as a whole and how it reads, before I spend all my time painting a crappy painting haha.
Planning it out first, is amazingly helpful and so worth it. And you get to practice sketching and design at the same time.
You can even do a small color study of one of your thumbnails and you'd be practicing this entire list all at once! (sketching, color mixing, and design).
Hope you this helps you out a bit. Or at least just serves as a reminder of something you can focus on and improve in your own art.
Most of all, have fun :)
In other news:
I've painted about 14 good paintings this month so far, I'll be sharing some of them with you soon.
I still have so many more paintings I want to do, and I'm slowly working my way through them all.
If you'd like to see some of my paintings from last month, you can check them out here: https://www.schaeferfineart.com/2024
More to come, stay tuned!
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Thank you for your time and support,
Brandon Schaefer
Creativity Fueled by Curiosity
