Watch the ‘How to Start a Painting Like A Master’ video by clicking here.

How to start a painting? How many stars are in the sky?

One way is a creative start such as throwing colours onto a canvas, and then deciding what it will become. Another is a disciplined start, which is the topic of the day. This approach involves:

• tonal value sketches/studies
• colour studies
• a final masterpiece.

There are no right or wrong approaches in painting. What matters is what you want to accomplish. As an example, I embraced the disciplined approach to pump up my painting skills.  As much fun as creative starts were, I wanted to produce better paintings. 

What have I learned about the disciplined start to a painting? How long to you have?! 

There are a few musts before starting, things such as:

• Be excited about your idea (if you’re not sure, don’t paint it!)
• Have a theme, such as the passage of time. For myself, I like to paint about pathways and connections.
• Play with formats, such as portrait, landscape or square (or circular or triangular)
• Experiment with different tonal value keys. For example:
  • high key, low key or mid key. Change a day scene to a night scene and so on.
    • or in other words, light-filled, dark or overall medium toned.
• Be aware of the design, meaning to make sure the value plan and design works!
• Have a dominance of temperature, brightness and value. 
  • Is it warm/cool; bright/dull; dark/light
  • Don’t let beautiful colours disguise a poor design
• Consider the mood, such as somber versus playful. 
• For representational work, besides using ‘found’ colours, consider using creative colours:
  • Study and practice using colour schemes, such as monochromatic, complementary, split-complementary and so on.
  • Do the same idea or similar idea several times using different colours, temperatures, and brightness levels.
  • Use colours you like
  • Try colours you think you don’t like. You might surprise yourself.
  • Decide on the mood of the piece, and use colours that assist.
• Try the same idea in several formats. Zoom in and out of the image idea too.
• Number one important thing: always do a tonal value sketch before painting.
• Have a dominance of brush marks and texture (smooth or not). Brush marks are like a signature. Make it all you… 

Overall, the more preliminary work done, the better your masterpiece will be. And you’ll have more fun (less frustration), and be better able to get into the magical sense of flow.

Choosing colours

I often use colour wheels to help with choosing colours. In general I tend to choose a range of analogous colours, and to add complements and/or discords. When I was a more beginner painter (really, we’re all beginners), I mainly used complementary colours.  Doing things such as adding glazes at the end made for interesting colour changes.

Understanding colour schemes and colour wheels are integral to painting. There are many theories on how to mix colours. For this reason, it is good to earn how to use traditional colour wheels and the more modern Munsell colour wheel. They have differences and open your mind to more colour combos.

Learn more on my blog post How to Choose Colours for a Painting.

Now go forth and become more masterful!