Unleash Your Color with Jessica Fields

Artist Jessica Fields (Ep.67) loves color.

So much in fact that she can lose sight of everything else…including what makes a good painting.

Instead of fighting that love, she takes it into account. And in the end, she has a painting that’s colorful but not chaotic. Here’s how she’s built a process that helps her do just that.

Fields has broken her process into two pieces color wise. The first part is where she gets to play with color. She gets to fully immerse herself in the brightest brights and lays it all down.

Then she pauses, and she moves into her second process: being analytical. She’ll look at her painting with a quieter mind. She’ll make sure that the color actually works. And if it doesn’t, she’ll change it. Tone things down. Make sure the color leads the viewer’s eye where she wants it to go.

By having two distinctive approaches to color built into the same process, she’s giving herself two things. First, a space to truly play. Second, a space to turn that into a painting that doesn’t overwhelm her viewers.

Put it to Practice:

Your process can work for you in many different ways. Part of that could be breaking up how you create a painting into sections that allow true play.

But because true play doesn’t always end in a finished painting, you can build a second step (or third or fourth or whatever) that allows you to change gears (physically and mentally) and helps you work towards a successful piece of artwork.

Not every step of your process has to be all things at once. The more you can think about what you need it to be, you can design it to do just that.