Okay, who could refuse a headline like that?
I have a strategy for when you just can’t seem to put together a painting. You lose, for example, the sky and nothing seems to follow. Or, you make a colour selection that’s too dark, and with watercolour, there is no real way to recover. These are not the only problems that make you throw a painting in the recycling bin, or start a new one on the back. They are, however, two of my favourites.
When I started painting a few years ago, I started with the sensible approach of working small. I found a 5×7 inch painting a day quite easy to handle and represented a rather small investment of time and resources if things didn’t work out. In the beginning, that happened a lot.
When I get into a rut where you can seem to muster any painting skills whatsoever, I fall back on the approach of working small. I usually paint 8×10 or 11×15 paintings, but when I get stuck on a painting or two in a row, I go back to doing smaller paintings. For some reason, a 5×7 gets me back on track.
Maybe it’s the necessity to remove detail because the painting is smaller or maybe it’s because I’ve painted more pictures that size, but it just seems to do the trick.
I’ve gotten into a rut of not being able to do a good job, so I decided to go back to doing a few smaller paintings. These have been fun to do and one was a complete experiment, which, of course, is even more fun (when it works, of course.) So, here are a few of the smaller paintings I’ve done this week.
Doug Rutherford 