THE SOLUTION TO AVOID LEAVING YOUR WORK UNFINISHED

Have you ever painted the edges between two objects and ended up staining the colors?

O …

That you have to change the direction of the brushstroke over and over again to delimit an object and this makes your work look weird, with hard edges, all on the same plane, without volume or depth?

And as a result … You end up getting frustrated and your work is half-finished.

If you went through some of these situations, keep reading this article because here I show you the solution.

A very common mistake when we start painting is to paint random elements without previous planning of the order in which we should work on each object.

I always recommend my students to paint the background first and then make their way to the next planes, overlapping layers.

This way, we will work with smoother strokes and without the worry or tension of overdoing a brushstroke when painting the edges and ending up ruining the object next to it.

The key is to start painting the elements of the farthest planes, finish them and then move on to the closer planes.

Let’s see how this technique works:

I have a sketch of a landscape ready, you can see that it is made up of a sky, mountains, a lake with a tree, and a beach or coastline in the foreground.

The first thing to do is to paint the background, that is, the sky.

As we paint the background and approach the next plane (in this case the mountain), there is no problem with going a little over the line or leaving a gap.

Why?

Because in the next stage, when we paint the mountain we can cover that excess of the background (in this case it would be the sky).

In this way, the upper layers are always superimposed on the lower or deeper layers of the work and this generates an effect of depth on our work.

Now let’s look at a more complex case: for example this lake and the tree (see in the video).

The correct way would be to paint the lake first and then the tree.

What happens if we do it the other way around?

Well… if we paint the tree first, it will be very difficult (and above all very slow) to cover the edges of the lake on the tree.

We would have to rotate the canvas to work more comfortably and it is very likely that we would go over the line and end up smudging the colors.

Can you imagine having to paint a lake in the middle of the leaves of a tree?

That would be crazy.

In my early days, I did something very similar and in fact, I still keep the work as a reminder of what not to do.

My model was a landscape with a tree in the foreground and a background with mountains.

I started with the tree and painted all its details.

At that moment I was very motivated because I was making good progress.

Then it was time to paint the mountains and that’s when I realized I was doing something wrong.

I was trying to outline the tree but it took me a long time and it was tiring on my hand because I had to be very precise.

Still, the edges didn’t look good at all because I had to change the direction of the brushstroke over and over again to get into every nook and cranny of the tree.

This generated hard and textured edges that completely took away the sense of volume and depth.

In the end, the work was half painted, but I still keep it as an apprenticeship.

I hope this article has been very useful to you.

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