Never mind the finished painting, just practice!

Demo: Never mind the finished painting, just practice!

There's a lot to learn by 'just messing around' with paint. Sometimes the strain of always creating masterpieces just gets too much for any artist !

I keep telling myself "relax, its only paint and canvas". It's important to remember that, as artists, no-one ever gets hurt if we mess things up (it not like we're surgeons!). I tend to be far too precious about my paintings. I hate it when they fail (see Failed Paintings). So this year I'm just going to relax and mess about more. I'm sure I'll learn some good lessons.

So this article is just about messing around with paint. This involves not setting out to paint a masterpiece, or even a painting that you'll want to keep. It describes how I created such a painting, destined for the dustbin, but how I learnt a few lessons on the way.

I took this photo a couple of winters ago. Its not an obvious subject for a painting but it does have something I like about it. There was nothing on TV so I picked up some watercolour paper, some watercolour and gouaches and messed about with it.

You probably have lots of pictures like this tucked away in drawers - pictures that aren't an obvious painting but have some quality you enjoy. Now's the time to dust them off and use them as source material for a little painting practice.

Pretty soon I'd laid down some loose washes and sketched in the main mass of the trunk. At this stage I was having to ignore my inner critic - the little voice that says "that sky's the wrong shade of blue" or "no-one will like this". The inner critic has its place, but not in practice paintings like this.

Then I got more experimental with the tree. I've always admired van Gogh's trees and somehow this tree suited his style. Van Gogh's was influenced by the Chinese style in many of his paintings. See the links below for good sites.

As I painted, I noticed that branches painted in a lighter tone looked thinner. The brush strokes remained the same thickness, but somehow the branches looked smaller - a useful lesson that I'll use in the future.

Finally, a bold area of darks was added to the bottom left and the fence was extended across the field. The darks in the foreground were 'beefed up' and more branches were added to the tree.

There a lots of things wrong with this picture. There are too many mid tones and not enough lights and darks. The colours are far away from those in the photograph. There's no detail (indeed, the painting is practically abstract - no harm in that though). Compositionally, the picture is unbalanced with too much on the left hand side and not enough on the right.

Of course the picture is poor, but that wasn't the point. I learned some useful lessons and made good use of half an hour. This was a disposable picture purely for practice. Painting disposable pictures keeps the creative juices flowing.

Remember: No-one ever got hurt by a bad painting!