Learning to be loose…

So I’ve been painting daily for 5 days now and what’s different this time from any other attempts to paint daily, is that I’m re-doing paintings I’m already aesthetically happy with, but painting them again to try & do them more intuitively. Here are the first 3 tries, my first attempt on the left and last one on the right.

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  Day 1

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  Day 2

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  Day 3

I know, it’s looks like each painting just got worst doesn’t it? 🤣 That’s because the 1st one was painted “copying” a photo and the last one was completely from my head. Painting it 3 times allowed me to remember where the colours should go, so I could just paint intuitively.

You would think that seeing how bad my painting was when painting intuitively, I would just go back to what I was good at, copying a photo. It actually had an opposite effect because I really treasured the process of learning to let go and so the 3rd painting is more valuable to me because of the freedom I allowed myself!

I also realised I needed to watch some tutorials to understand where to add focal points to bring out the centre image in a really minimalistic way. So I was really motivated to continue and I started another snowy bird scene, (I can’t help it, there’s snow all around me and I want to capture the beauty of it) with some help from Kristy Partidge’s tutorial.

This was my first attempt!

Which would have been ok if I wanted to bird on a branch of a coconut tree instead of a pine branch… I decided I needed a real life reference. So I went out and cut a branch from my tree. Isn’t it a beauty?

From the first painting, I put all my mistakes to good use by learning from them and painting something I’m rather proud of now.😊

I was so enamoured over the beautiful pine branch that I decided to do a painting completely focused on it and at the same time, practise painting snowy branches again.

Thanks for stopping by and I would love to hear about your painting process too.

Have a great day!