Whereas always, if you ' re an artist, a finished painting begins in your sense. You visualize it. You agonize over it. You alter to emotional about it. If you paint in a realistic style, you stereotyped stimulus over it for days, weeks, and sometimes horizontal longer. However, you know that if you can visualize it, you can paint it. And so, the secret is how do you get it from inside your cognizance and onto the canvas and make it since realistic for illusive.
There are certain procedures a realistic artist must do to bring emit a over painting to their enjoyment. Every artist will eventually settle on their own techniques, and they should. I tenacious on mine, and it works. However I didn ' t come up with my techniques. I took them from master artists that have been using them for hundreds of years. I always felt that if it was good enough for Rembrandt van Rijn, it is good enough for me.
Here are six steps to complete a realistic painting:
Step One: Make several small quick engross sketches of the picture you have in mind. I use 3X5 index cards. You can be very loose with these. I know you have in mind what your picture will be, but you need to experiment with this, changing around the arrangements and values. You want to discover abstraction in the sketches that would be the most pleasing to a viewer. If you have ten to twenty different possibilities, you can make a better decision. After you have sketched them, post them on a wall next to each other and give it some time. One or more will pop out at you. Get it down to one. It may not be how you originally envisioned the picture, but don ' t second guess yourself. You chose the correct one.
Step Two: Draw a full size study of the picture with charcoal or pencil. In black and white you will be able to work out the values for the painting. Make this as realistic and detailed as possible. While doing this, work out any problems with the background, foreground, and negative spaces. Also, try to imagine any other difficulties you might have while painting the picture.
Step Three: Make a loose color sketch of the painting using watercolor or gouache. If your painting is large, you don ' t need to make this full size. What you are trying to accomplish here is to see how the colors work together. As a matter of fact, you may want to keep it totally abstract. When finished with the compositional color study, hang it on the wall. Let it remain for a couple of weeks. Don ' t over concentrate on it. Don ' t try talking yourself into or out of liking it. If after a while it feels comfortable, go for it. If not, experiment around with another one.
Step Four: Now it is time to step back and decide what parts of the painting are going to present you with the greatest number of problems when you attempt to paint them. This should be easy to decide because you thought about them ( probably with a little bit of trepidation ) when you were making the thumbnail sketches, the full size drawing, and the small compositional study in gouache or watercolor.
After deciding specifically where the problem areas are, you need to make detailed full size color studies in the medium you are planning to use for the finished work. Hopefully, there will only be a few of these, but you don ' t want to practice on the painting. By taking time to do this, it will make the finished painting that much easier to accomplish. Besides, a great artist ' s studies are very valuable. Don ' t throw them away.
Step Five: Transfer the drawing to whatever substrate you ' re using; paper, canvas, or board. Most importantly, be very careful not to damage the surface of the substrate by pressing down too hard with pencil or roller. Once the transfer is complete, copy over the graphite lines using a small diameter brush and a light neutral color paint. You will want to do this so you do not have to continually keep copying the drawing.
Step Six: Paint the picture and make it a masterpiece. This should be easy to do because you worked out all the problems of the painting in steps one through five. You even know exactly the colors for your palette because of steps three and four.
In conclusion: As I said when I started this article, these steps are not mine. They have been around for centuries. I know Rembrandt not only used these steps, but a couple of more that I don ' t use. There are hundreds of other master artists that used them in the past, and there are hundreds of artists that use them today.
If you are a realistic artist and want to paint what you plan, then you need to make sure you ' re planning stages of the painting are covered by all the right steps. If you are not already using the six steps that I mentioned here, then I invite you to do so. They do work. However, whatever you do, just keep painting.
