Lesson Plan to try
Working small
Take a 6x8 panel or paper and divide it up into four rectangles. Create four thumbnail sketches to use as reference for your small works painting.
Limit your palette. Premix colors for each major color/value in the painting (no more than around 8 colors or so or if you want to limit further, try just three plus black and white. Using a mountain landscape as an example, you would need to premix the sky color, the light and shadow for the upright trees, the light and shadow for the ground plane, and the light and shadow for the slanting plane (mountains).
Limit your time spent on each painting to no longer than 20 or 30 minutes. Don’t keep working on a painting that is not working… just move on to the next one or try the same painting with a fresh panel, different light, different angle, perspective, etc.
Working small has great benefits with economy of time, material, and learning. Once you have a successful small painting, you can expand the ideas to a larger works with ease since you’ve already worked out the majority of the problems and tried the same set up in different lights, etc. Use every painting you do as an opportunity to design and problem solve. Work from nature or life as often as you can. Work to capture the essential information. Practice objectivity to critique your own work and make your own check- list of things that you want to pay special attention to.
There are so many things to paint and so little time to get them all done.
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