Pandemic Log: Daily Paintings
During my social media break (which I might write about in a future blog), I found time to start a daily painting habit. Spoiler alert, I only lasted about 10 days, but nevertheless, there’s always something that can be learned, so that’s what I’d like to share in this post.
The idea to do a small painting a day came from a book I read by Nathan Fowkes - “How to Paint Landscapes Quickly and Beautifully”. Nathan Fowkes is an artist and teacher, who has done concept art for animated films such as How to Train Your Dragon. His paintings of landscapes are amazing, and he manages to convey a strong sense of environment with a minimalistic approach. His book talks about keeping a daily practice of painting, mostly on location, if possible, and the key to success is to resist getting into the details and only focus on creating a simple statement.
Traditionally, painting outside requires lugging around a lot of equipment and spending hours at a time on one piece. Nathan demonstrates that it doesn’t always have to be that way. His approach is all about efficiency and removing as many mental and physical barriers as possible that could deter you from getting your daily painting done. I agree with his sentiment that when people think of art, they usually think of photorealistic detail - but it’s merely one form of artistic expression. There is more than one way to paint a subject, and when it comes to visual storytelling, the bigger question is, what are you trying to convey through your image? Rather than, can you perfectly render that rock? One of my favourite quotes from the book says: “The moment you can visually convey emotion to your audience, you are officially an artist.”
Now onto my foray of daily paintings! It just so happens that we were in a stay-at-home order at the time, so I decided to use street views from Google Maps instead of painting on location.
First step was to get everything ready ahead of time so I had no excuse not to paint. I set up my desk with the paints and brushes I planned to use. I also precut my watercolour paper into 5x7” pieces. The night before, I would tape down a new piece of paper onto my desk. I wanted a way to track my progress, so I decided to also set up a rig to hold a cellphone above my painting area to record the process.
Next, I didn’t want to waste time at the beginning of each session trawling through Google Maps to decide on what I would paint, so I screenshotted all of my images in one sitting and saved them into a folder on my desktop. Everyday I could just pull up that folder, open the next image and get straight into painting.
Can you tell where the phone goes?
Lastly, I gave myself some constrictions:
A limited colour palette - the less choices, the less time I waste, and the more unified the painting will be. You can see a ton of different colours in that last photo, but I actually didn’t use the ones in those little wells - they are the original cakes (now old and cracking) that came with the kit when I bought it a long time ago - the actual colours I used (4) are the little blobs seen in the corners of the mixing area.
A time limit - around 30 minutes max. I knew that if I gave myself too much time then I would end up lost in the details, which isn’t what this exercise was supposed to be for. As Nathan Fowkes said, it’s all about that clear, simple statement. Because it is our human nature to look at every minute detail, I needed to remind myself to focus on the bigger shapes and overall range of values.
I have to say that even with a clear goal set before me, I still succumbed to the urge of painting every detail! The first few days were terrible. Ugly. I won’t even show them in this post - perhaps I will in a future newsletter, just so you can see the progression (sign up if you want a peek!).
The one nice thing about having a time limit is that if the painting doesn’t work out in the end, I didn’t spend hours on it so it feels like less of a loss, and I can just move on and try again the next day.
That’s not to say it was easy to let go of the bad paintings (I already told you I only made it to 10 paintings in a row!). Seeing the failures can be really discouraging. However, just like a muscle, painting strength has to be built up consistently over time.
Here are 4 of my favourite paintings (along with the Google street view screenshots):
You can watch the process (sped up) for each of these paintings here:
I learned two things from this experience:
It was really worth the extra effort up front to create as convenient an environment as possible to paint everyday.
I shouldn’t expect to have a painting that I’m happy with after every session - I have to accept the bad paintings and be able to keep going.
A couple things I would have done differently:
Though it was fun to speed up my videos and rewatch my process, I believe this extra step of setting up my phone to record played a role in deterring me from doing more paintings - it was just another obstacle.
I should have used even less colours than I did. I found I was trying to recreate the colours I saw in my screenshots, which distracted me from the more important value relationships. I noticed when I used only 2 colours and didn’t try to mimic the colours from life, my end result was more harmonious and interesting.
I’m happy to announce that I’ve turned all four paintings into greeting cards, and they are now available at NoWords gallery in Downtown Galt, Cambridge.
Also, two of the originals will be up for sale at the upcoming Dundas Valley School of Art 50th Annual Art Auction, April 12-17.
5x7 paintings in 8x10 frames.
Proceeds support both the artists and the school - if you are interested, you can watch for the link on their website, or on their Instagram.
The auction will be online this year due to COVID, so even if you aren’t in the Hamilton area, you can peruse all the artwork from the comfort of your own home.
Until next time,
Stay safe friends
Blog Categories
Past Work + Shows Explorations + Learning Illustration Urban Sketching Makes + Crafts etc.