Intuitive painting, part 1—How I REALLY "plan" my paintings

I can't teach this on YouTube.

“Leaving All That Behind”, an intuitive painting that emerged from a series of “mistakes” during a 15-minute figure painting session

Thanks subscribers, one and all, for your support! This post was exhausting to write. I find it difficult to write clearly on any subject, but intuitive painting is an especially challenging topic. Luckily, whenever I got completely discouraged there would be a new email or comment from one of you, plus new subscribers at all levels (and wow, was it a delightful surprise to see that we now have some Founding Members—never thought anyone would sign up at that level!). Thank you all for keeping me motivated. <3

We’ve just wrapped up a four-part series about planning your watercolors where we looked at planning a hypothetical painting in detail. I mentioned that I certainly wouldn’t go through all of those steps for each painting, but even so, you’re probably thinking I’m an outstandingly virtuous and organized painter who always plans everything out carefully ahead of time, unlike you lackadaisickal scalawags who just wing it all the time.

(‘Scuse me while I go wipe the tears of hysterical laughter from my face.)

I don’t plan like that in real life

That semblance of organized diligence is an accidental illusion. Unfortunately, most books or videos about design, planning and composition reinforce this illusion. We imagine that real artists—except perhaps a few rebellious geniuses—always plan their paintings in an organized, logical way, because that’s how it’s explained everywhere. This means you’ve probably absorbed a sense that this is what your planning should look like if you want to call yourself a real artist.

Not necessarily. Not all experienced artists plan everything out in advance. It’s just that when people talk about the planning process, they edit out all the dead ends, false starts, and wrong turns. Not because it’s a big secret that there are dead ends, false starts and wrong turns, but just because those things are distractions from the main ideas they’re trying to teach. Organizing your writing (or video script) about how to do a creative activity makes it seem like the activity itself was more organized than it often is. But a lot of the organization is actually happening during the writing and editing process.

I’m actually way off on the “disorganized” end of the spectrum as a painter, although I prefer to think of it as “spontaneous” or “intuitive”. I get fed up with planning a painting in about 5 minutes. I just want to get started painting!

Is that a bad thing?

Teaching and doing commissions eventually forced me to learn how to plan. So these days, I can plan a watercolor up front and produce a painting that’s pretty close to the plan, but I don’t like working that way. It takes a lot of the joy out of the painting process for me.

Worse, it doesn’t make me any more likely to arrive at a painting that I’m really happy with. I am more likely to end up with a “nice” painting that doesn’t have any major boo-boos. But I also make fewer discoveries, and I’m far less likely to wind up with a painting that surprises, delights, or fascinates me.

One of the joys of painting, for me, is that if a watercolor doesn’t turn out well, nothing bad happens. Here’s a rare opportunity in our adult lives where we can be completely free to try whatever wacky ideas come into our heads, experiment freely, and make mistakes with no repercussions.

So sure, careful planning might be a good approach if you’re a portrait artist or a botanical illustrator who needs to create a good likeness or capture essential features of a plant for identification. Or if you want to follow a reference photo pretty closely and create a photo-realistic painting. If that’s you, the series we just completed was for you! I’m not saying you’re doing anything wrong if you prefer to plan thoroughly in advance.

But, what if you want to paint something more impressionistic or abstract? What if, like me, one reason you love watercolor is the dance with the medium, where the painting becomes some blend of your ideas and the lovely gifts watercolor gives you?¹

What if you’re not using a photo and can’t visualize in advance how you want the finished painting to look? I often start with only a general idea of how I want the finished painting to feel. The painting process becomes a journey of discovery, seeking clues about what might convey the feeling I want to evoke. Or sometimes, especially with field sketching, the painting process is a way to learn: what the scene really looks like, what draws me to this scene, what I want to record or convey about the scene. If I don’t know yet what I want to express, how on earth can I plan the painting in advance?

When I think about how I’ve arrived at the paintings I was most satisfied with, the process feels more like wandering around a mysterious magical forest in the dark with a tiny penlight, gathering little full-color glimpses here and there.

But how do you even get started?

Wandering a magic forest sounds all romantic, but there’s the blank piece of paper staring back at you.

If you don’t have a photo (or a real scene) in front of you, or at least a mental image to aim for, then how do you deal with these questions?

• How shall I begin?

• What guides my creative decisions along the way?

• How do I know when I’m done?

Finding a structure (system/guidelines/constraints) for creative decisions

What we’re really doing when we’re planning a painting is giving ourselves a structure or system to deal with these creative questions.

If you most often work by closely following a reference photo or an actual scene, you might not even be aware of how the initial creative choice to closely follow the photo (plus systems you’ve picked up from experience or other artists) provides the structure to guide your creative process.

In many cases, you’ll be able to mostly follow a “default” painting sequence.² For the boat-and-river example in the last series, you might first transfer a drawing, then mask the boat, then lay the sky wash, then paint the trees, etc. You’ll know you’re done when you’ve rendered everything in the photo or scene to the level of detail you prefer. These routine “steps for painting a landscape” are the creative structure or system that guides you through those troublesome questions of how to start, what to do next, and when to stop.

Intuitive painters also create structures for themselves to help them get started and make these creative decisions.

It’s just harder to learn intuitive painting from watching other artists (harder to teach, too!). It’s tough to explain why you’re making the choices you’re making because there’s no known destination (photo or scene) you can point to. For intuitive painting, the very same system or structure for making creative decisions can take two different artists to entirely different destinations.

It can also be hard for an artists to put it into words what they’re doing when they’re painting intuitively. Many intuitive painters don’t bother to try to describe, even to themselves, the system they’re using to guide their creative choices.

If you do try to describe how you’re making intuitive choices, it can sound pretty silly, or pretentiously mysterious. I just feel like the painting wants some blue over here. Or it can feel too personal and vulnerable to share.

So instead of trying to describe what’s going on in my head when I’m working intuitively, I’m going to offer you some activities based on experiences that have helped me and my students figure out systems or structures for making intuitive painting choices. You get to decide for yourself what seems promising enough to steal and adapt for yourself.

In this article, we’re just trying a couple of ways to address “How do I begin?” So this isn’t a complete system for a whole painting yet.

Also, anything you are trying for the first few times is probably going to feel strange, and probably won’t result in a fabulous product. Try not to get attached to “making a painting” while you’re doing these activities. These are opportunities to explore a way of working, not “one weird trick” that will automatically allow you to crank out one fabulous painting after another.

There’s a good chance you might reach a point where you feel like you’re just spinning your wheels. It’s perfectly okay to stop if you get stuck. (You may want to hang onto your experiments and use them as a starting point for activities later in this series.)

Activity 1—Pure Intuitive Painting

In this activity, you’ll be trying the most minimal structure for intuitive painting: your only guideline is to follow your “gut feelings”.

This might sound (and maybe feel) like just doing things at random. But intuition is not the same thing as randomness, impulsiveness or capriciousness. The goal of the exercise is to listen for the tiny voice or the little nudge that comes from deep inside you, and act on that impulse without trying to find a rational explanation for what you’re doing.

Try to avoid (for this exercise) applying any of the “rules” you may have absorbed about how you’re supposed to do things. No golden section, no “papa, mama, baby”, no principles of design, no rules about not using white or not mixing two opaque colors, or whatever. Letting go of all this accumulated “wisdom” can be surprisingly hard, so be gentle with yourself. Beginners generally have an advantage here, because they haven’t absorbed a whole lot of rules yet.

Work as fast or slow as feels right, trying to get in touch with and be guided just by your intuition. Paying attention to body sensations can help.

Gather your supplies, put down a fresh sheet of paper (give yourself a little room to work freely, at least 6x9” or so, bigger if it feels freeing).

Take a moment to just breathe and get in touch with your body. Then simply keep asking, What feels right (or good or true) to do now? and do that.

One possible answer is always, stop. Even if you’ve only made three marks. If your intuition is saying stop, then stop.

You can also stop if you feel bored or frustrated or just stuck.

It’s also perfectly okay if you realize that you’ve gone too far and you wish you would have stopped a while back. Overworking things seems to be just as common for intuitive painters as anyone else. But the only way you really discover where the line is, for you, between feels complete and wish I would’ve stopped 5 minutes ago is by going too far sometimes. If you’re paying attention to your intuition, you’ll gradually get better at catching yourself before you overwork too much.

Activity 2—Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

This activity starts from a previous painting that you’re not completely satisfied with. (Don’t worry! You’re not going to paint on top of it.)

In this case, you can use whatever references and structure/steps you used to paint the previous painting. Except, you’re going to change your answer to “How shall I begin?”

In this activity, you’ll begin by telling a lie. Specifically, choose one thing about the previous painting that you’re not happy with or that just isn’t doing it for you, and change it to something that isn’t/wasn’t true about the initial scene or subject.

Bonus points: change it to something your head says is wrong or untrue, but your intuition says is worth trying, anyway. Let your intuition win that argument for once.

It can be a really obvious change, like giving your dog green fur, or making your flowers flat and two-dimensional like paper cutouts. Or it can be something that only you know is changed, like changing the color of the door on the cabin you’re painting or shifting the colors of your meadow from the greens of summer to the gold of autumn.

The video examples

These videos are an experiment. They’re just examples of how each activity played out for me on a particular day, but they are not intended to be something where you follow along with me and do the same thing. They’re just a little encouragement to help you get started, or maybe some company while you work. So let me know if this sort of thing is helpful or not.

There’s no reason you need to watch the videos at all, if you don’t want to. Or you might wait until after you do the activity yourself, if you don’t want to be influenced by what I did. For the first activity, I show two work sessions (side by side) of the same activity, so you can see how it went entirely differently on different days.

The actual work sessions were about an hour. I’ve edited the videos down to about a half-hour each, but I did it by removing chunks instead of speeding things up, so you’ll see me working at my normal pace instead of the frantic brushwork that happens sometimes when I’m trying to demonstrate a technique quickly in a YouTube video.

Aside from a brief introduction, I’m not trying to explain what I’m doing. I really can’t talk and work intuitively at the same time! Feel free to ask questions, but I may or may not remember what, if anything, was running through my head at any given point. :)

These are long videos, so they probably won’t download and play inside your email program. For most email programs, clicking the play button will take you to Vimeo to watch. If that doesn’t work, you can watch on my website.

1. Watercolorists call these gifts “happy accidents” when we like them. Otherwise, we call them “mistakes” or “disasters”. But in art, a “mistake” is just a surprise that you’re not sure you can use. Sometimes you can’t. Other times, the challenge of working with a “disaster” can lead to a really wonderful painting that you could never have planned.

2. If you’re new here, this video explains more about what I call a “default” painting sequence.