DON'T MAKE THESE PAINTING MISTAKES IN 2023

today I want to talk about painting mistakes I don't want you to make in 2023 these are all of the mistakes that I see artists make every single day that are actively getting in the way of reaching your goals and doing it on a timeline that honestly you can be really excited about before we jump in What I am putting together for this video today is just a taste of what I'm going to be offering in my free master class that I'm hosting live this coming Monday that's Monday December 5th at 3 pm Eastern I have all the details Down Below in the description so if you enjoy this video make sure to check that out because I'm going to be going in even more depth in that video and you will get the opportunity to ask me questions live so without further Ado let's go ahead and jump in and discuss the seven painting mistakes you don't want to make to reach your goals and 2023 first off let's talk about practice and practicing with a purpose or a goal I wanted to kick off with this particular Pitfall because it is very very rare that I see artists actually include this into their own Studio routine that is to say that they might know like oh I want to paint in a more painterly fashion or I want to be able to really capture a likeness with my portraits without muddying up the canvas or even I would really love to paint like John Singer Sergeant but these goals are somewhat vague and the reason that more often than not we really struggle with setting goals as painters is that we are trying to describe a goal in words when what we actually need is a goal that we can look at that makes sense to us as painters I think this is one situation where that idea of a picture being worth a thousand words really comes into play we are using maybe 15 words to describe a goal whereas we could look at a collection of paintings that represent our goal that we could describe in thousands of words and to help us to get very granular and very clear on what our goal actually is so for instance in my case all of the kind of token descriptions that I just gave about capturing the likeness and being more painterly or painting like Sergeant those are all ways that I could describe my own goal but that doesn't compare to what I see when I take a look at my Pinterest board that has all of my favorite paintings on it on that board I have dozens upon dozens of paintings from a handful of painters that are very specific in terms of their composition their value structure the mark making technique the color Harmony and especially things like the brush marks the edges the the paint application technique compare pairing what I see when I look at that board to what I just spoke aloud the difference is really Stark if I actually look at those paintings I can get crystal clear on exactly where I am headed and more importantly what the Gap is between what I'm able to do now and what I really want to do once I have that information I can tailor all the rest of what I do in my painting practice to helping to make sure that I am actively working toward that goal and not just painting with the hope that somehow I will get there and I'm really grateful to be able to point out that very last thing because I think that's what we all default to we all default to just sitting down and kind of crossing our fingers and saying okay well hopefully if I sit down and I just do some painting today this will move me closer to painting like Sergeant or whatever your particular goal might be but that is never enough to get you to the finish line for the rare exception that might help a particular artist get started and then over time they can get more and more clear on exactly where it is they're trying to go and what they need to adjust in their own paintings but that happens pretty rarely and I think that's why it is so uncommon to see people be able to do this so successfully for a living now if you are curious about what it looks like to get really clear on that goal this is exactly the kind of thing that I talk about in the live master class that's coming up so make sure to save your seat if you want help putting together that vision for where you want to go with your work all right with that let's move on to Pitfall number two which is not knowing what skills you actually need to build to reach your goal now this tricky one because in my experience people do like an okay job of this on their own and I believe that that makes it easy to feel like oh I don't suffer from this particular problem but in my experience having talked to literally hundreds of artists about what's standing in their way of reaching their particular goals it's pretty common for me to hear these following points I have trouble with mixing up accurate color and not creating mud I need help with brush work and not overworking the paint and then I would say like a distant third place for painters interested in portraiture would be I'm struggling to capture a likeness that being said that third one is quite a bit more rare so here's what this list neglects first and foremost for most people there are problems that are occurring with the accuracy of your drawing and when I talk about drawing I don't mean pencil or charcoal I mean the placement of shapes on your canvas and the accuracy of those shapes in their proportion relative to one another if you are interested in capturing portraits figures Animals still life cityscape with any accuracy drawing needs to be a central priority of all the work that you do in the studio and even if you give yourself six hours to get an accurate drawing and in the end you get there you still might have some room to improve with your drawing if you want to be more painterly and here's what I mean by that if I give you all the time in the world and you can eventually get to an accurate drawing but you couldn't do it within the first half hour of your painting session and you want to paint in a way that is loose and painterly or you want to be able to paint all in one sitting there's some work that needs to be done to help you to achieve an accurate drawing more quickly another fundamental thing that I hear over and over is I'm good on value I just need help with color this is exceedingly rare most people do have some things that are coming up with color but there's still a whole lot of room to improve with value I know this because whenever I talk to all of the artists who are living that you all look up to they will tell me over and over that they are still trying to work to improve their values so if that's true for the painters you look up to it is almost certainly true for yourself and there's a little bit of a disconnect between your understanding of what needs to happen color wise and the extent to which value feeds into that and if you're curious to hear what this looks like in practice I'm going to link up above my recent video where I was creating an original based on a master copy that I did from sergeant in it I thought my goal was going to be the brushwork and instead I wound up really falling in love with the color but the trick to getting that accuracy of color really came down to me making certain discoveries about the value but let's take a moment to zoom out away from the most common pitfalls of people's assessment of their own skill level and talk about what this means with the big picture let's say that you are working on a painting that you really want to look like it could belong with paintings from your favorite paint painters in terms of skill level and in terms of the stylistic qualities from their work that you want to bring into your own work if you're able to compare the two and confidently say oh I have a totally different value structure in terms of the subject relative to the background and in terms of the way light is falling on the face for instance that gives you very constructive feedback of what would need to change to take your work closer to that of your goal and that is true whether we are talking about drawing value structure composition color Harmony or brush work and edges and once you have an idea of exactly what the gaps are between all of these things it suddenly becomes very easy to realize oh there's only so many steps that stand between me and being able to paint the way that I want if I can address each of these five categories I'll be there and this brings me neatly into the next Pitfall on my list which is guessing at what kind of practice you need to reach your goal when you understand exactly what the Gap is between what you're doing and what you need to be able to do to paint and style that you are proud of that fully informs what that practice needs to look like if you understand that you need to be able to capture your drawing with more accuracy more quickly you need to be able to really minimize the contrast between your values to create a more nuanced picture of the form that you're trying to capture if you understand that you need to really really hone in a specific color Harmony to get the feeling of light in your composition this will help you to really practice with a purpose you can intentionally structure your painting sessions to help you to get those drawing skills to where they need to be or really hone in the Nuance of your value structure or successfully be able to make the kinds of painterly marks that you love from more expressive painters and once you are really clear on what this actually needs to look like the next Pitfall is juggling too many skills that you're trying to improve at one time so let me explain a little bit what I mean at any given time there inevitably are multiple skills that we need to improve it's rarely just our sense of color it's oftentimes our sense of value in accordance with color that we really need to strengthen but that itself isn't the problem that's pretty typical in fact the problem Lies when we are trying to improve everything at the same time and we are kind of scattering our Focus between multiple things so instead what I recommend and what I see really give painters a boost in terms of making progress address taking their work to the next level and reaching their goals is breaking down their practice to help them to build one skill at a time here's what this often looks like in practice just to illustrate why this sets us back so much so let's say that I give an artist a drawing exercise the purpose of this exercise is to really help pinpoint whether there is in fact a drawing error and give you the tools to correct the drawing when that comes up oftentimes when I give an assignment like this what can very naturally happen is that somebody goes in and they use the drawing skills they get the drawing to a pretty good point and then they say yeah but look at the color on here I really need to improve the color this does you a huge disservice because oftentimes this amount of distraction is taking you and preventing you from actually getting really really really professional level accuracy in your drawing and to help you to feel really confident that you can solve any drawing problem and instead diverts your attention to something that you aren't even focusing on for that given painting whether that's the color the value the brush work you name it so instead of letting your focus get pulled in all kinds of different directions that don't let you fully explore a given topic all the way to getting that professional level of proficiency make sure that you give yourself the time and the space to focus on one skill at a time after all there are only so many scales that actually go into being able to create really beautiful paintings if you keep ping-ponging between different skills it's going to take exponentially longer than just allocating your time to one variable at a time alright next Pitfall is one that almost didn't make the list but it is such a big deal and I see it come up so often that I couldn't help but include it on this list and that is working off of poor reference and by that I mean either a reference that doesn't align with your goals or that simply doesn't excite you and I'll clarify the distinction between those two so one thing that I see happen all the time is somebody will come in and they'll say Okay I want to paint like saroya or like Zorn or like Sergeant or whoever it is and I'll say great let's go ahead and take a look at those paintings and let's have you do some exercises that help you to build up those specific skills and they go off and they do this exercises and then I'll say Okay fantastic so now I want you to go ahead and set up an original painting that sets you up to really apply all of those skills and they will use a five-year-old photo that they took off their iPhone that has horrendous lighting no background and the subject's face isn't even even fully in the image it's been cropped off in an awkward way that typically happens with iPhone photos this reference probably lacks a great deal of information such as color information a really strong Line Shadow structure that matches what they might love from saroya or Zorn or whoever it is probably lacks intentional thought given to the composition to the background to the props and the list goes on but if we just do a quick comparison of any old random iPhone photo to a composition that you are extremely drawn to no wonder you are struggling your reference does not set you up to make anything like the kind of painting you are truly drawn to and I'll give you a secret right now being able to paint in your goal style for the vast majority of us and I say vast majority because there are occasionally like illustrators or concept artists for whom this is an exception but they probably aren't watching this Channel and the fact that you are watching this channel tells me that this advice almost certainly applies to you that advice is that your favorite painters almost certainly worked off of a reference that fully set them up to make that particular painting they did not paint what was in their dreams or what they imagined up or they didn't take a really mediocre setup and then use their imagination to take it to the next level you know if they painted a herd of horses galloping across a river at Sunset they were probably actually there they have painted that Sunset they have seen that herd of horses there was not a simple formula to allow them to invent Sunset lighting or to imagine what a herd of horses looks like the reality is is that for most of the painters that you look up to they spend far more time and energy curating exactly the right reference to paint off of then you are giving them credit for they did not simply sit down and say oh I think I'll paint such and such today they probably scattered a location they hired a model they experimented with the lighting and they probably took a couple thousand photographs to arrive at the one photograph that would actually help them to paint whatever it was or even if they aren't working off of photographs they probably explore dozens of different particular compositions and setups until they arrived at the exact setup that gave them what they needed and this is why this is something that I really enjoy teaching and helping the artists that I Mentor with specifically because really giving yourself the time and the space and the energy to explore this the way it deserves to be explored sets you up to immediately level up your work in a tremendous way I would say 95 percent of the painters that I speak to and work with come into their conversations with me completely setting themselves up for frustration with regard to their references now the second to last Pitfall is giving up before you actually get each of your skills to where they need to be this actually ties really well in with this idea of juggling too many skills that you're trying to build at one time but the reality is is that even once you are really clear on what your journey needs to look like what your goal looks like what your painting practice needs to look like to actually get you there most painters especially the ones that you really look up to they had years and years to get those skills to where they are and it isn't fair to expect that after one week of working on a single exercise your drawing skills are going to be exactly where they need to be or you your sense of color mixing and creating really beautiful color harmonies is the best it's ever going to be no we need to give ourselves time and space to continue to grow and evolve and really fine-tune the skills that we need to paint in our dream style and yes really thoughtfully laid out exercises can help you to see really significant improvements really quickly but the fine tuning of those and the securing and solidifying of those into the way in which you really want to work that often requires rest recharging taking a step back and really thinking about what you've been doing and how you want to improve it and it's important to not rush that process another way to say this is that there's a difference between figuring out how to reach your goals as fast as possible and figuring out how to reach your goals as efficiently as possible alright in my final Pitfall is focusing too much on painting exercises and not making the transition into creating complete original paintings so if you just spend one year doing barg drawings or cash drawings or even painting off of a model in an Open studio that doesn't mean that you have really practiced and honed the skill set necessary to compose the kinds of images that you actually want to create that is a completely separate skill and it's an important one to really give yourself time and space around the easiest way I can illustrate this is with my own Master Copy practice I can really Astound myself when I am working on a sergeant Master Copy I can sit here and think wow I can really match a lot of the brush work or color that Sergeant put down and that's super exciting but when I have a model sitting in my studio or when I am conducting a photo shoot and I'm more working off of a reference that I took I still need to figure out how to simplify that image to get the beautiful brush work that I was able to achieve in the Master Copy that decision making all by itself not to mention the decisions that go into lighting and composing and capturing whatever that reference is that is a skill that takes its own time and practice and repetition and if you are at the point where you can really hit exercises out of the park over and over and over again but the prospect of creating your own original composition that presents the same skill level and success that you're able to achieve in those exercises if that Prospect feels daunting just know that that doesn't mean that you can't do it it simply means that you have successfully built up all of the skills that you've needed thus far and now there's one last skill to really solidify and that is your ability to look at the reference that's in front of you whether that's a landscape still life portrait figure you name it and really understand how to break it down into a series brush Strokes that you're going to put on the canvas I could probably go on to talk about these for a whole extra hour which is why I have this live master class that I am hosting on Monday December 5th at 3 Eastern so if you enjoyed this if you found it helpful and if you're really eager to hear me speak about this more and offer more examples and answer your questions about it make sure to use the link in the description to go ahead and save your seat even if you aren't able to attend live there will be a replay of this for everybody who registers and if after listening to all of this you are really interested in mentorship with me and you want to get in ahead of the crowd there is a link in the description below to submit an application to see if we are a fit to work together so if that sounds like something that you're really excited about I would encourage you to go ahead and put in that application now because the holidays can to be very busy all right I look forward to seeing you all on Monday and until then Happy painting

Channel: Chelsea Lang

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Keywords: oil painting, time lapse, art, painting tutorial, art tutorial, art time lapse, alla prima, chelsea lang, painting, oil painting techniques, chelsea lang painter, alla prima oil painting, chelsea lang artist, canvas painting, paintings, painting ideas, painting for beginners, how to paint, paint with me, oil painting portrait, painting videos, oil painting tutorial, art painting, portrait painting, how to oil paint, painting time lapse, oil painting time lapse

Id: zfx7vou6PAA

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022