In order to master oil painting, students need to know the three moving parts.
What are the stages of the art-making process?
How would you describe your creative process in art?
Becoming aware of the steps you walk from concept to completion, and consciously examining each of these steps individually will help you better understand your creative process and its outcomes. It will also boost your artistic creativity and help you find more inspiration for your art.
In this blog post, I’ll break down the art-making process into stages, address the concept of “failure”, and reveal to you the secret to successfully dealing with so-called “bad art”.
There are 3 main stages in the making of art:
In this specific order.
You should never start with the end in mind when you make art. So, let’s start with finding (not searching).
Find
This is where a new creative process begins. It’s the inception phase, which often starts with a gaze. Look closely and slowly around you and inside yourself. Observe, dive in, and wonder. Don’t forget to listen at the same time. Like the Persian poet Rumi said:
“You look past your thoughts, so you may drink the pure nectar of this moment”.
Collect input from nature, from other visual artists, or from within yourself. Gather things that interest you, speak to you, and awaken your spirit. Then research the things you love, and notice patterns. Make unusual associations between familiar objects, materials, textures, forms, structures, and colours.
Gather plenty of rough ideas – so many potential ways to explore, combine, and transform reality into something else, unique, and meaningful!
In these moments of amazement, excitement, and possibility I feel my creative vibes awakening inside of me. The encounter with The Possible, my attraction to the basic art elements (the point, the line, and the surface), and the colours, textures, and forms I experiment with activate my creative energy. My spirit lifts literally up. I plunge into The Boundless Unknown and come back home. I’m on the vertical axis, the axis of life.
Feeling the same? Then embrace this feeling and sit with it for a while. Cocoon and nourish it, absorb its exciting and invigorating energy!
Not feeling like this at all? Then be more mindful about the first little steps you take in your creative process. Pay more attention to the things around you and within yourself, notice what resonates with you, and how it affects you.
To sum this up, I’ll quote Pablo Picasso’s wise words:
“I do not seek, I find. It is a risk, a holy adventure. The uncertainty of such ventures can only be taken on by those, who feel safe in insecurity, who are leaders in uncertainty, in guilelessness, who let themselves be drawn by the target and do not define the target themselves.”
What does it mean to me to find? It means to look inward, to “go beyond my form”, and to identify unique solutions to my questions within my creative Self. It means to see reality differently – to rediscover the world anew each time. It means to recognise.
To find also means to choose and reinvent. But to choose and reinvent is not to make. To me, it means to transform an ordinary thing into something extra-ordinary; to take a thing out of its familiar context, to dissociate it from its initial function, and to change something about it. In other words, it means to give a thing another life.
2. Transform: develop – make your artworks – complete
2.1 Develop
It’s in this phase that you start feeling inspired and must take further action: sketch frenetically. Because every wasted breath of inspiration is a wasted chance to make art. Put down your marks, your visual language, and gather lots of threads.
Once your creative energy is awakened, narrow down the spectrum of possibilities. An intuition of the way you want to walk begins to emerge. Follow it and continue to sketch, sketch, sketch. Then choose the most exciting concepts, marks, and colour combinations to work with. Continue to distill and transform the inputs and elements you’ve collected so far into something different.
2.2 Make your artworks
Now you know you’re ready to make the actual artworks. This is a pivotal phase in your creative process.
My breath stands still for a second before the rocket takes off. There’s something holy and frightening about the moment when I begin to transfer my sketches onto canvas or paper. It’s like sitting at the piano quietly, listening in, and beginning to hear the gentle voice of music whistling in my ears before I start to play my repertory.
Have you felt like this before? Then you know that the only thing you need to do now is to dare to go further.
I personally love to work on several paintings at the same time. Instead of channeling my complete focus into one single work over many days or weeks, I prefer to spread my creative energy and inspiration over several paintings simultaneously. It’s like playing a whole repertory instead of a single piece of music to perfection.
Therefore, my expert tip is: work on several drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations in parallel: it will take the pressure off yourself, unlock your artistic creativity, and help you play more freely with your ideas, intuitions, marks, colours, and surfaces.
There are 3 main advantages for me in doing this:
1. I don’t obsess on one painting,
2. I avoid overworking it, and
3. I can easier detach myself from it (which helps me see my art with fresh eyes and change the way I initially perceived it).
The outcome is often rewarding: my paintings share a common vision, but each of them has its own character. At first sight, they give the impression of a relatively unified whole. Seen from close, they reveal themselves as individual and unique artworks. Try it for yourself!
How to deal with failed works
You make a choice, you carry out an action, decision after decision in an uninterrupted flow of creative energy, focus, and joy. There’s so much playfulness involved in it! There’s inspiration and spontaneity in every mark you make!
But there’s a flip side to this, too, which is called failure. I rather prefer to call it a chance because a dead-end always redirects you towards a new horizon; it blocks a path but leads, indirectly, to another one. Therefore, I urge you to embrace your failed works, to love your “bad art”, and to see that as a unique opportunity for future achievements.
Have you hit a dead end? Embrace it and be happy about that. Start all over again, erase or just convert, “keep on the ball” (we say in German), and move forward with your creative process. This is the secret to successfully dealing with failed works.
Don’t mind if your works “are not good enough” or even “failed”. Keep going, stay in the flow, and let your inspiration grow. Larry Poons, an artist with a solid vision in colour, rightfully said:
“A failed painting is better than one that’s just plain bad. The failed painting is one that could have been great.”
There’s no straightway to the art you’d love to make, for trial and error are an integral part of the game. There’s no other secret to turning so-called failures into success but this:
LOVE your artist blocks, moments of feeling uninspired, and failed works because they’re unique chances and amazing opportunities for profound change. And change is ultimately art, for art’s fundamental trait is deeply rooted in the principle of metamorphosis. Art is transformative and transformational at the same time.
2.3 Complete
You’ve explored, shaped, and moulded forms, materials, colours, and dreams along the way. Now you know that the process you’ve been so mindfully engaged with is completed but not ended. You know that there’s nothing more to add and nothing left to take away. Your artworks speak for themselves.
How does it feel? Are you happy, content, at peace? Or rather unsatisfied? Could it have been better, nicer, brighter, more sophisticated, simpler? Or is it OK just as it is?
When my work is completed, this is what I tell myself: you’ve learned the lesson, and you’ve enjoyed the experience thoroughly. Now be happy and thankful. So, I listen to the gentle voice of gratitude, and I express it loudly.
Oil Painting Process #1:Value
Value in the oil painting process is an essential part of the process. For beginners, value can be as simple as distinguishing between light and shadow. However, for advanced and master painters, value speaks to the structural elements of a painting and can be very complex.
As humans, we see and understand the things around us mainly based on how dark or light they are. Value can explain form, opacity, depth, and so much more.
Because value is such a crucial part of how we see and understand, it is essential that students learn how to handle and express value correctly.
Evolve students begin to learn the moving pieces of value by distinguishing simply between light and shadow. At the beginning of their education, they create paintings with only two light values and two shadow values. This teaches them how to determine light from shadow, and then categorize value within light or shadow.
From this simple start, students expand into reflections, highlights, value in color, and more complex ways of utilizing value to express something in a painting. Value is a critical part of the oil painting process and understanding what it is and how to properly see and apply it should be one of the first lessons a painting student learns.
An example of practice in edge and color and value. Credit: Evolve Artist student Sheila.
Oil Painting Process #2: Edge
Edges are another important piece of the oil painting process. Edges create the shapes we see, they explain form, and they can make or break a painting. From the very first exercise in Evolve, students are taught to carefully handle their edges. Without care for edges in your paintings, the entire piece will suffer.
There are two types of edges that Evolve students consider: gradients and sharp edges. Gradients are a gradual transition from light to shadow and express the form of an object. A soft, cleanly painted gradient creates the illusion of a three-dimensional shape. The ability to paint both large, sprawling transitions and small, tight changes from light to shadow is an important tool for an artist.
An example of beginning gradients and sharp edges within the Evolve program.
Sharp edges are exactly as they sound. These razor-sharp marks are used to define outer edges, explain cast shadows, and bring focus to a painting. When sharp edges wobble or waiver, they eliminate any focus or believability in a painting and are less than convincing.
Gradients and sharp edges also are crucial to maintaining the proportions of a painting. Along with proportions, properly placed and controlled edges bring focus and clarity to a painting, keeping it as realistic as possible.
Even a beginner’s painting done with only four values, and no reflections or highlights can be beautifully realistic if the edges are handled properly.
Edges are an essential part of the oil painting process, and without this moving part executed properly, the painting will fall flat.
Color, edge, and value all working together in a beautiful, finished painting by Evolve student Jennifer R.
Oil Painting Process #3: Color
The final step in the oil painting process is color. Though Evolve students start their painting education in grayscale, they soon move into color, adding another moving part to their work. Color brings another layer of realism to a painting, and much of learning how to utilize color comes from paint mixing and experimenting to find correct color combinations to express what you see before you.
Color has both hues and saturation, hue referring to the color itself, like green or red, and saturation referring to how intense that color is. Learning to identify how to mix those color characteristics and apply them to painting is an essential part of a student’s journey.
Color brings intensity and realism to painting, and when used properly elevates a painting and brings it to life.
By mastering value, edge, and color, Evolve students begin to understand the oil painting process.
