Blog

I loved drawing and painting as a kid. I took art classes in high school and more in college but opted for a career in business.  Now, my career in business has evolved into a role where I am able to teach and coach others. Meanwhile, I have started a second career in fine art, and I have learned that finding success in painting has many parallels with finding success in a challenging business venture.

Here is what I have learned about making a successful painting – The Six P’s of Painting a Masterpiece. When I wrote them down, it dawned on me that these are more than painting tips – they are lessons for life.

P is for Passion

Painting requires passion.  It takes passion to begin the process of discovery and learning.  It takes even more passion to overcome setbacks and maintain forward momentum.

If you compare your creative endeavor to a jet airliner making a cross-country flight, then “passion” would be analogous to “fuel”.  It is the stuff that gives you energy and feeds the engines that give you thrust and create forward momentum.  With a little fuel, your engines can start and gain enough power to taxi.  With more fuel, your jet can achieve liftoff and climb to a good cruising altitude.  Once air-born, your flight path might take you into some strong headwinds or require that you circumvent dangerous weather. Your fuel level determines how far you might be able to fly and still land safely at your destination.   If your engines run out of fuel, then forward movement ceases and the jet returns to the ground – one way or another.

Making a successful painting takes a lot of time – there are more steps and more effort required than you might realize if you haven’t tried it – so you need to be sure your fuel tank is full to the brim. (Where to find your art passion is the topic of a future blog post.)

P is for Plan

If you have ever visited an art museum or exhibit showcasing the work of a famous painter, you might have seen some great masterpieces but you probably also saw some preliminary works exhibited that might have shown how the artist planned and evolved the work over time.  Artists use sketches, thumbnail or notan drawings, value studies, color studies, and sometimes successive painting attempts of the same subject to plan and work out all of the design elements of a composition. 

Many modern-day artists I know use the camera as a design and planning tool, working out the compositional elements of a painting in a photo processing program on their computer.  This serves a similar function as doing a sketch or study – it allows the artist to design and plan. 

And in painting the old adage applies – failing to plan is planning to fail.

P is for Process

Every artist has a process.  Often this is an adaptation of a process passed on by art teachers and mentors and modified by the artist’s own experience, goals, work preferences and knowledge level.

The stereotypical artist many of us imagine is a right-brained creature who works completely spontaneously and intuitively and who lacks structure, analytical skills and discipline.  I do agree that right-brained creative flair, spontaneity and unstructured thinking can often be useful inputs to the artistic process.  However for me, the painting process itself is largely a left-brained exercise.  It has much to do with structured learning, repetition of practiced skills, application of knowledge and craft in a disciplined way, careful analysis of visual inputs, attention to detail, refinement and correction, measurement and following a predetermined set of steps.

Learning a process, refining it and making it work consistently is a large part of what learning to be an artist is all about.  Honestly, I never realized that until I started painting myself.

P is for Persistence

When I was in college, I took a watercolor painting class which was very frustrating for me – everything I painted looked terrible – and I concluded that I had no talent and no reason to keep painting.  After that class I threw away my paints and brushes and did not return for a second try for many years.  I didn’t realize that I just needed to persist.  I needed to try a little harder for a little longer until I made a break-through.

Every painting I do goes through three stages (and other artists have described similar experiences):  Stage one is usually all smiles and roses.  It is the visioning and beginning stage.  Your painting exists mainly in your mind, and in your mind, it is ready to hang on a museum wall right next to Rembrandt and Van Gogh.  It will be the best painting you have ever done.  Then, after you have made some marks on the paper or canvas, you enter Stage two, which comes with a lot of discouragements.  This is the stage where you realize this might not turn out to be the masterpiece you had envisioned, where you realize it is going to take a lot more work than you initially thought, where people who see it fail to give it the glowing praise you had thought would pour forth, where there are problems and mistakes and parts you just don’t know how to handle.  This is the stage where it is easy to stop, start something new or quit altogether, like I did in college.

But, if you persist, keep working, keep trying new approaches, keep problem solving and just keep on keeping on, then you will make it to stage three.

Stage three is not a return to the euphoric stage one, but neither is it the often-discouraging stage two.  This is the stage where you actually like at least some elements of the painting and where the mistakes and problems can be seen in the light of “lessons-learned” instead of the darkness of “I-am-an-idiot-and-why-did-I-ever-think-I-could-paint.”

Truthfully, many of my more successful paintings, including a lot of those problematic and unforgiving watercolor paintings, barely escaped death in the trash can during Stage two and were rescued only by blind persistence.

P is for Prayer

Not everyone believes in a higher power, but I am here to tell you that prayer works, even for things like painting.  I can’t explain it.  I don’t know what kind of art God hangs on his own walls, if he takes an interest in every mundane and seemingly inconsequential activity we engage in (I am one who hopes He does) or if there is some other reason, unapparent yet connected, which explains this phenomenon which has helped me multiple times to help a painting come into being.

In case you are a little rusty with your own prayers, here is a little Artist’s Prayer you can use free of charge.

Dear God, I sincerely thank you for every good thing in my life, including this marvelous world I live in, the people surrounding me who make it worth living and these eyes and hands that allow me to try to paint pictures.  As always, I need help.  Please send me the wisdom and judgment to make this painting all that it is meant to be.  Help me see what I need to see.  If it be your will, bless me to create something that might be a gift to someone else, to inspire them, console them, lift them or touch their heart.  Help me each day to see ways I can do your will by helping other people in need. Amen.

P is for Poetry

Great paintings are poetic.  Like a poem that captures an image, an idea or a feeling in a few succinct, beautiful, elegant rhymes, a painting does the same in succinct, beautiful, elegant brush strokes.  There is something magical about these little pieces of poetry embedded in successful painting.  They sparkle.  They illuminate. They explain. They transcend.  They take us to another place.

I find that my poetic painting passages seem to happen almost by accident.  Sometimes they are accidents.  I am painting along and suddenly – wow!  How did that happen?  I love that.  I’m not sure how I did it, but that accident makes the painting.  So, resist the urge to correct them.  Leave them.  And thank God for answering P number five.

These are my six P’s of painting a masterpiece.  If I finish a painting and feel that it just didn't work, I look back and review all the P’s.  Did I run out of passion for my subject or composition part way through?  Did I fail to plan and design a successful painting?  Is there something wrong about my process which is introducing mistakes in drawing or perspective or color harmony?  Did I give up too soon, and should I persist a little longer?  Did I think to pray?  Did I miss the poetry?

Happy painting!

By Rob Talbert, painter and occasionally an artist