Challenging Myself To Paint a Large Piece Faster

Hello Moonbeam,

Here is a look at one of my newest pieces, painted for the band L'uomo Nero.  You might recall that in recent posts, I  was talking about painting more efficiently.  Losing less time spacing out, and instead, focusing deeply on the process.  This post is by no means a lesson on how to be a speed painter (which I am certainly not), but more, my experience with connecting to that more focused mindset. 

Before painting this piece, I spent some time doing various studies and really thinking about what it was that could sometimes frustrate me with my current way of working and that is when I began to deeply analyze my mindset and realized that things like stress, sleepiness, and distraction tended to slow me down.  So while I might be working all day, I was often left feeling like I had not gotten much done. 

I also began to analyze my working methods while I did other pieces and noticed a couple of things that were holding me back.  One of the main issues with my working process is the tendency to sometimes try to focus on details too early.  I get excited and distracted so I start ignoring the big picture, favoring the little hidden things I want to portray.  Unfortunately, this means I sometimes  leave big, gaping mistakes in the work that I then have to figure out how to correct amid all the premature detail which ends up slowing me down a lot.  

I have mentioned this before as well, but I am also prone to noodling, moving around totally pointlessly when I feel unclear on my direction.  A way for me to bypass some of this was to do colour and value studies for this piece ahead of time.  These consisted of me printing out thumbnails of the work and quickly painting over some of them, and rendering others in pencil so that I knew what direction I wanted to go in.  It took a bit of extra time, but ended up saving me hours and hours of trying to figure things out in the larger picture.  Which was a very good thing as I had left myself a LOT of room for experimentation in this piece.  Having sketched only the creatures with some detail and otherwise relying on an incredibly basic composition.  I left a lot of the work to happen in paint.  

Another thing I had to really focus on while painting this piece was self-trust.  It sounds weird but I really had to give myself the room to breathe, and follow my intuition without over-thinking. Of course that intuition is something we build up over time as we practice and study.  This meant that the ocean scene took me the longest because I was least familiar with oceanic environments and had to allow myself to slow down and learn.  But even during the moments where I was slowing down, I tried to keep my focus purely on the work and not on my wandering thoughts.  So much of this process relied on me telling myself that I COULD and making my brush strokes intentional, and less cautious.  Amusingly, sometimes just picking up a brush that was slightly larger than what I wanted to use forced me to loosen up and follow instinct.  

If you struggle with a distracted mind, or if you lack confidence in your mark making, just know that you are not alone at all and even some of the masters I look up to feel the same way.  It is not about making work fast, it is about making work with confidence and intention and being deeply absorbed in the process.  At least for me.  And for me, that also means moving through certain steps faster, as intuition allows.  And I love those moments because they always feel like an incredible chemistry between myself and the work.  

Anyway, I hope you liked this wordsy post!  I love sharing my personal creative experience with you in the most honest way I can because I feel it is important to show the reality of creating and not try to hide behind the idea that it is effortless.   And I want to mention that after finishing this piece, I  fell into quite a stressed out and distracted mindset so the piece I made during that time took probably 7x longer than it should have.  It just reminded me again how important mental health, passion, and focus are to my process.  When I am working on a piece I am just not feeling, or when I am in a deeply stressed mindset, I am prone to working much more slowly.   I regularly try to analyze what is making me feel a certain way, or do certain things, and I am trying to be kinder as I do.  I hope so much that you will do the same <3 

Be well~
~Aria