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Long Studies
2yr
@quizzy
Hi, my name's Quizzy. Over the last few years my art has improved fast, but now I have got through the basics, I've plateaued, used to the fast practice and simpler concepts of the basic fundamentals. Now I am looking at materials, detailed anatomy and larger paintings, I know where to start but can't break my rapid, rough painting style. My paintings last around an hour on average, I want to do the kind of slow practice that takes five or six hours. I have tried it but after the three hour mark I lose patience, rush it and leave, only to come back and groan at all the mistakes I know how to fix but didn't take the time to. Examples of my work are on my profile. How can I get into this? Thank you.
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Liandro
2yr
Hey, @quizzy! I see what you’re going through, and I totally agree with @Yiming Wu - it’s a matter of shifting the mindset about how the work should be done. As Yiming says, a longer piece is almost never done in one sit, so splitting the process into several sessions can be a great idea. Start noticing how your own process works - when you notice you lose focus and the work isn’t flowing well anymore, that can be a good moment to take a break. But that doesn’t mean the work is finished, and that’s fine - after a while (minutes, hours, even days or weeks), it’s good to come back to it with fresh eyes and a rested mind to try to see more clearly what could be improved - then do another work session, then take more breaks as needed, and so on. That’s how most professionals do it. Along with that, try observing how you can break the process down into stages. For example: 1) PREPARATION - Usually, preparation work can come first: develop the idea, draw thumbnails to figure out the composition, research visual reference, maybe do some color studies or separate sketches for specific elements that will be in the piece. 2) ROUGH - Then, based on the thumbnails, doing a larger initial rough sketch might be a good following step. For me, this is usually done very intuitively and loosely, in a way that helps me materialize the idea as best as I can without having to worry too much about techniques or “correctness” just yet. 3) TIE-DOWN - After the rough sketch is done, I find it helpful to do another more careful sketch pass on top, and, this time, it’s all about making adjustments so it looks “technically right”. I give the piece a more analytical eye and try to apply all the techniques I know of to see how I can improve it. In other words, I’ll go over the whole piece again and re-draw it with the specific goal of fixing mistakes, making it better and getting the construction and composition as solid as I can.  4) FINISH - Once you’re happy with how the more careful sketch turned out, you can then start to put into practice your finishing/polishing process - and this could mean different things depending on the style and technique, but since you’re working with painting, it often means rendering. Rendering is usually the longest stage in a painting and, at least in my experience, it can take up to at least half the amount of total hours you’ll put into the piece, or sometimes even more. With some practice, these things combined might help you get to that mindset shift and even start to plan you art pieces as projects, not just sketches. Hope this helps. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, just let me know. Best of luck!
@quizzy
2yr
Thank you Liandro. I always appreciate your thorough feedback, and the time you take with it.
Yiming Wu
2yr
Wow you said it so well XD... One thing I kinda do is I don't actually think of them as steps, because I do stuff just in a progressive manner, like even in a portion of the image, I go with big to small and if you get the shape relationship is right, the hierarchy is going to be alright. I think my mentality is more like... just think of the image as distribution of elements on different frequencies (or just visual scales). A piece of music if it's rich, it would have a lot of frequency components, just like an image (Well I'm no where near as good in distributing those shapes LOL), and if you think it that way, you then got huge shapes, medium shapes and tiny shapes, and also you will have nice distributions and it will not be too cluttered or too empty (well my stuff are more leaning towards the empty side, that's what I need to improve now). And this have two benefits, one is you can work on just regions of an image or "on a certain detail level" so you can break and continue any time. The second is that if you distribute those elements well, you don't even need to draw that much, that saves time! :D
Yiming Wu
2yr
Humm I think you could just change the way you think how a piece is done. Do some more "realism" stuff (whatever that means)... Try to get a photo study to as close to the original as possible, if you are impatient after an hour, just do an hour, and get back and do another hour on top of it at the later of the day or the next day. because each time you get back to it you find mistakes and stuff, you can easily fix them. What kind of medium do yo use? If you are using watercolor then probably that's not very good for working too much. Gouache, acrylic or painting digitally could allow you to work over top of existing stuff until you get it right.
@quizzy
2yr
Thank you Yiming, I do use gouache. I like your idea, I hadn't thought of that. Usually I try to go through the whole thing in one go. Thanks for your time and thoughts.
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