What Should You Work on First?
Looking at your reference, it can be hard to know where to begin your painting.
But Ep.13 guest Kim Smith has a suggestion: Start with what scares you most.
Here’s why.
First, if something scares you, it’s going to potentially distract you.
For Smith, she doesn’t want to spend the whole painting avoiding, for example, the bird's eye. The artist realized that she was nervous about doing the eyes because they really matter. And she knew that if she got it wrong, the whole bird wouldn’t work. So she was avoiding them.
But painting is about being present. If you find yourself worrying about something coming up in your painting, it means you’re not fully present where you are.
Second, when you start with what scares you, if you mess it up, you haven’t lost much time.
Smith works in oil. If she starts with something scary (and potentially hard) right at the beginning and it doesn’t work out, she can just wipe it all off and start again. She hasn’t lost anything… including much time.
Ep.38 guest John Salminen takes a similar approach. Salminen’s process can take hundreds of hours. And in each painting, he tries something new and kind of tricky. It’s part of his artistic growth.
And so he’ll make sure he tries that part FIRST… and not at the end of his hundred hour process.
Put it to Practice:
Think about how you respond to the parts that scare you.
Are you avoiding them? Are you leaving them until the end when stakes are even higher?
If the answer is yes, try reversing it. Tackle them first . See if that helps you work through the anxiety. Or if you mess up, no big deal. That’s how learning works! Grab a new piece of paper or surface and start again.