Initial Drawing

[Anna Marie]

I have been reading Lesley Harrisons book about painting Animals and she shows how very detailed her drawings are before she starts painting in pastel. I also paint in pastel but I find a get a sketchbook and plan a painting by doing very generic postcard size or even smaller sketches.
When I do my painting I put the basic lines in if its an animal position eyes ears mouth nose etc if its a landscape I scribble in the main features but after that it has to grow out of the paper.

I paint in 4 phases I think

Phase 1 I apply pastel to my paper and love it

Phase 2 I start building up and hate it and think its going nowehere

Phase 3 I start to like it again and know its going somewhere

Phase 4 I can see its nearly finished and know it just needs final touches.

Sometimes I bounce between Phase 2 and phase 3 a few times but I cannot get myself to do a detailed drawing of the final product I can only hint at it.

[magnuscanis]

Your description, Anna Marie, of how you work sounds quite similar to how I approach painting. I don't work in pastels (yet) but tend to use mostly acrylic or watercolour paints.

I tend to restrict my initial drawings to fairly minimal outlines on the painting support itself, though I often work up a few initial sketches beforehand, mostly in my sketchbook. Sometimes I just do compositional sketches (mostly in pencil), but other times I'll also do some colour sketches, usually with watercolour. When I get down to painting I usually start with a fair idea of where I'm heading, and usually enjoy the opening stages of the work. After that, I tend to flip-flop between hope and despair over how the work will come out. Eventually it will reach a stage where I'm reasonably happy with it (unless I decide to abandon it altogether) and feel I can't, or don't want to, do any more to it.

I find, particularly with acrylics, that I often benefit from taking a step back from the painting every now and then, to view the work from a distance (and quite often upside down etc.) while I consider what is to be done with it, and sometimes leaving it for longer periods. Very often the final painting diverges quite considerably from the initial conception and the underlying drawing, if any.

[Anna Marie]

Hi Magnus,
Great apart from the fact that you are male Welsh much younge than me dont do pastels we could be twins.
Joking apart I want to have a go at acrylics and I am glad not to be the only one who works this way I try never to abandon a painting but I often have long breaks.

[Jackmorgan]

This is interesting to me, this is kind of how I like to paint, whatever medium I'm using. I start right on the paper or canvas, no more sketches, unless I just feel like sketching.....

It's like ok, here's how I paint, take it or leave it, what you see is what you get...maybe the canvas will turn out, maybe it won't but I like to lay it all on the line and just dig right in.

Sometimes, my subjects go right off the canvas as I didn't give myself enough room to put all of them on....that's a disaster that could be avoided by sketching it in first, either on the canvas or off and transfering it. But it's kind of fun and makes it more interesting to me, to see if I can pull it off or not...

Here's my latest example of this, after I finished this, I cropped it down to about half the size of the finished work-it looked horrible before I tried it in this smaller mat...I started by doing the horses eye, and worked my way out...no sketching and no planning, just working along, waiting to see what if anything would happen. I also posted him in the animals section. It seemed to me that some of the lines and angles of a horse worked to strengthen the composition, I like to portray them as landscapes, I don't know if that shows or not? Really, they're no different, you have hills and valleys etc, it's just in animal paintings, the hills and valleys are furry..

I've never posted in this section before but I think I could use the help and advice and comments on composition as I've never really thought about it enough in my paintings and I need to strengthen my work...so any help and comments you have will be welcome. I won't learn new things if I'm scared to post! I called this painting, "I Have Seen Much..." Donna