Painting

Pour l'Halloween

Roots of Amber, leaves of gold. This tree carries my ancestors' strength, and every acorn holds the seed of the generation to come. We were shaped by fire, and we keep rising.

I keep hitting a point with coloured pencil where a passage looks luminous, the values are sitting right, there is actual light in it, and then I do one more pass and the whole thing goes flat. Dead waxy surface, no life left.

It happened again last week on a kitchen scene I have been redrawing (yes, the same kitchen corner, again). The copper pot had this glow to it and I wanted just a little more warmth in the shadow side. Three layers later the paper tooth was gone and so was the glow.

I find it so hard to stop while something is working. The urge to refine pulls me in every time. With graphite I can usually feel when the tooth is filling up, but with coloured pencil the shift from "enough" to "ruined" seems to happen in a single layer.

Does anyone have a way of recognising that tipping point before they cross it? Do you step back at set intervals, photograph it, put it away for a day? I would love to hear what actually works for you.

Finished! If only I could say that about everything I paint.

I keep coming back to this idea that some people essentially draw with paint, building pictures through edges, values and shapes, while others approach painting as its own discipline with its own logic. Brushwork, colour mixing on the canvas, working wet into wet. Two genuinely different mindsets.

As someone who layers coloured pencil and graphite, I recognise myself immediately in the first camp. When I have tried acrylics, I found myself doing exactly what I do with pencils, just with a brush. Mapping values, finding edges, building up slowly. It felt like drawing with extra steps. I never got anywhere near that loose, painterly quality some people seem to arrive at naturally.

So I wonder whether it actually changes how you should learn. If you already think in terms of value and edge, do you just need to adapt your mark making to paint? Or does real painting require you to unlearn that careful, line driven approach and think in masses of colour from the start?

Which camp do you fall into, and did recognising it change how you practised?

Last month I had three illustration deadlines land in the same week and my daily sketchbook practice completely fell off. When I picked it back up, my gesture drawings felt stiff again, like my arm had forgotten how to move from the shoulder. It was this weird reset where the looseness I had been building just evaporated.

I know consistent practice is what builds that muscle memory. Drawing every day, even badly, keeps the momentum going. But when project work eats all my hours, I struggle to find space for the unglamorous stuff like construction exercises and perspective drills. And those are exactly the things that make the project work better in the first place.

I have been experimenting with doing just ten minutes of warm up sketches before jumping into deadline work, treating it like stretching before a run. Some days it helps, some days it feels like I am just going through the motions.

How do you hold onto that momentum when your schedule gets chaotic? Do you carve out a non negotiable window for studies, or do you fold practice into the projects themselves?

I think the title I can change to "Forest Waterfall Gaze"

Although this is a 5" × 7" canvas, I am curious as to the price for style snd brushwork on this piece. I am thinking zbout painting a bigger version.

Yesterday I scraped a shadow passage back to almost a stain and loaded the sunlit ridge next to it with a fat stroke, and the whole thing just clicked. I didn't plan it that way. It happened because I was running out of time and the light was already shifting.

But it got me thinking. When I'm out painting, thicker paint in the lights and thinner paint in the shadows seems to show up in my panels over and over. I'm not sure how much of that is a conscious decision versus just responding to what the light is doing in the moment. Bright areas feel like they want more pigment, more body. Shadows want to recede, so I leave them lean.

Do you think about paint thickness as a deliberate tool for building form, or does it just happen as a byproduct of how you mix and apply? I'd love to hear how other people handle this, especially if you've tried to be more intentional about it and noticed a difference.

Last week I stood two inches from a Sorolla at the museum and realized the shadow on a white cloth was basically three fat strokes of lavender and grey green. On my phone the same painting looks like a smooth gradient. Completely different information.

I keep going back and forth on where I actually learn more. In person, I can see the tooth of the canvas through thin paint, how a loaded brush dragged across a dry passage, how much texture is doing the work that I always assumed was color. That changes everything about how I think about my own surfaces out in the field. But online I can sit with a painting for twenty minutes, zoom in, compare it side by side with my own studies. I have found color relationships on screen that I missed standing in front of the real thing, maybe because I was too distracted by the surface.

For plein air specifically, seeing how fast someone laid paint down in person has saved me more time than any tutorial. You can feel the speed in the brushwork. A reproduction flattens all of that.

So which one moves the needle more for you, museum visits or screen study? Curious whether it depends on what you are trying to learn.

I really wasn't planning on posting this, but I don't know. I remember when I was a kid about eight and I first heard the story about this little girl was in the middle of the snow and it was supposed to be a happy day to everyone, but it wasn't for her. I remember I don't. I didn't understand. How could people just go on and leave that girl in the middle of the snow and just keep on moving and shopping and eating and what about the girl I remember one day I got the courage to ask my mother mother. Did she die in the end I knew what was the answer, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to know, and my mother just answered very naïve yes, she has child but I'm she's with her grandmother. Now everybody's happy you see it's a happy ending. Remember, I got furious. What do you mean? This is a happy ending. There

Isn't room for happiness here. A child just died in the snow from hunger hallucinating in the snow put it inside with these words and just tell you that this is a happy ending what is happy? OK, I know it was a very intense child but whatever I mean, Hans christian well that some serious gaslight in my friend

I caught myself last week painting a row of distant trees along the ridge behind my house, and every single stroke was the same length, the same pressure, the same little flick at the end. The whole passage looked like wallpaper. Dead surface, no air in it.

It got me thinking about how easy it is to fall into a mechanical rhythm with the brush, especially when I'm working alla prima and moving fast. The moments in my paintings I actually like tend to be the ones where the mark changed because the form demanded it, not because my wrist was on autopilot. A drag here, a loaded press there, a palette knife scrape when the brush was building up too much.

What has helped me a little is switching tools mid passage. Even just flipping to a filbert from a flat will interrupt the habit long enough to make me actually look at the shape I need. But I still catch myself falling back into the pattern, especially in foliage or water.

How do you keep your surfaces from going stale? Do you consciously vary your marks, or is there something else that pulls you out of the loop?

Painting oil on canvas from the lost world collection. Painted for my new art book Title THE LOST WORLD.

Florent Farges lays out something here that took me years of ruined panels to figure out on my own. His emphasis on getting the value structure right before chasing any detail is the single biggest lesson for anyone working wet into wet, and he explains it better than I could.

Proko put something into words here that I have been circling around for a while, the difference between drawing on autopilot and actually paying attention while you practise. As someone who came to drawing late and spent months filling sketchbooks without really improving, this one felt pointed in the best way.

From way back in 1982, a pencil portrait of my husband. I drew it while looking at a photograph we had taken by the sea, under bright sunlight.

Critiques welcome, but I need advice! I did map it out. Measured, marked, measured again. Wiped it off, tried it again and now it’s overworked. The eyes were my biggest problem! The head is tilted and I think I kept trying to do the left eye “level”. It looks like her except the eyes, which are all important in a portrait!

“Portrait of a Korean mother” I revisited this oil painting tonight and played around with some oil pastels. My first attempt at a portrait and I painted my mom who passed away when I was only 7 years old in 1979.

You know that feeling when you're in your studio and everything feels scattered, unfinished, uncertain? That's not a problem. That's exactly where you're supposed to be.

The Chaos Isn't the Enemy

Antrese Wood dives into something most of us try to avoid: the messy, uncomfortable middle of creative exploration. We want our practice to feel tidy, purposeful, like we're moving in a straight line toward something clear. But exploration doesn't work that way. It loops back. It contradicts itself. It leaves half-finished ideas scattered across your workspace.

And here's what stopped me when I listened to this: the chaos isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. It's proof you're doing it right.

What Exploration Actually Looks Like

When you're truly exploring, you're not executing a plan. You're following threads that may lead nowhere. You're testing ideas you might abandon tomorrow. You're making messes you may never clean up, and that's completely okay.

Wood talks about how we mistake this natural process for failure. We think if it's not coming together cleanly, we must be lost. But exploration is supposed to feel like chaos because you're in unfamiliar territory. You're not retracing steps you've already mapped out.

Permission to Wander

Most creative people I know are terrified of this phase. They want to skip straight to the part where they know what they're doing. But you can't. The wandering is where you find what you didn't know you were looking for.

Think about the last time you discovered something unexpected in your work. I'm willing to bet it didn't come from following a careful plan. It came from letting yourself play, experiment, and yes, make a mess.

The Real Question

So here's what I want to know: Are you giving yourself room to explore without demanding it look neat? Or are you shutting down the chaos before it has a chance to show you something new?

Because maybe the mess isn't something to fix. Maybe it's something to trust.