Let's take a look at a common, but extremely frustrating situation;

You sit down in front of our new canvas and look at the image or set up you're going to paint and feel super excited to get started! You are hopeful that this will be the day you paint something truly special.

Something you can be proud of, something that looks like magic mixed with paint!

... But halfway in, you can feel it's not going to happen.

Nothing on the canvas feels right, and when you step back to get a good look at what's going on, you just want to leave the room. Everything on the canvas looks slightly off, you feel overwhelmed and don't know how to fix it.

...

If this has ever happened to you, let me just say, you are not alone my friend.

This used to be me all the time!

Now, there can be a few different reasons why you end up not being happy with your painting.

Here are a few examples;

1. You're a perfectionist, and your self-critique is off the charts... (guilty)

2. You don't feel in control of the paint, and every time you make a brush-mark, it looks nothing like what you wanted.

3. You need to practice your sense of color, values, or drawing skills to be able to paint what you see.

... Or it can be a fourth reason why nothing on your canvas seems to be in the right place.

You started with all the shiny details when you should have started with the solid foundation of what you're painting.

To immediately focus the attention on the details is one of the big slips I see people make when they start working with oil paint, and it's one I used to make myself a lot!

Now, don't get me wrong, I love details, and I think details have their place in a painting, but it's not about IF you should add those details in a painting, but WHEN.

A classic example is if someone is painting a portrait, and they immediately start to paint an eye with eyelashes and all before they have established the large shape and structure of the head. Sometimes you can still produce a good portrait if you work from the smaller towards the larger shapes, but I would argue that 8/10 you probably won't.

That's because usually if you don't have all the big shapes and proportions working well together before adding on those smaller shapes and details, then you’ll have a difficult time integrating them with the big impression. You’ll have no structure that the details can relate to.

Now, if your details and smaller shapes don’t connect with the larger shapes then they won't make much sense.

Think about it like this, If you are building a house you want to start with the foundation, the walls, the roof, the floors, right? Then you add in the windows and the doors. The very last thing you usually do is to decorate and it's the same with creating form and light with this method of painting.

Here you can see an example of how I started my painting with larger, more simplified shapes and later included more details to model the form. Because I already had all the large areas of value mapped out, I knew where to add the smaller areas of value because I could relate them to the big impression.

Another great point is that if you train yourself to work from larger, more simplified shapes towards smaller, more complex ones, what's going to happen, is that you'll discover how little detail is going to be necessary to convey form and light in the first place.

To paint in this order will also train you to see how large blocks of value work together and how they create something called ''The Big Impression''.

If you have a good big impression in your painting, then when you step back and look at your painting nothing seems out of place. All the values, colors, and big proportions are working together as a whole.

The best benefit of working from larger, more simplified shapes towards smaller details is that it's much easier to move and change big simple blocks of value around on your canvas to get a start you're happy with, then it is to keep changing and moving lots and lots of smaller details.

When you have your large areas of value working together, adding those smaller details and shapes on top will make a lot more sense and be the icing on top, which makes your painting pop!

If you would like to study this method the next time you're painting, here are a couple of tips to help you simplify what you paint.

Squint.

Squinting will compress and unify the different areas of value so you'll be able to see larger areas of value at the time. This is a great way to simplify something because when you compress and unify your values, you wont get distracted by all the smaller variations within the big areas of value.

Step back.

To step back a couple of meters so you can get some distance from your painting will also help you see a big impression more clearly. If you spend a lot of time painting up close things look a lot different then they do across the room.

Remember that most people will look at your finished painting hanging on a wall so it’s just as important that you’re happy with your painting at a distance, as up close.

Focus on the negative spaces in your set up.

Another tip is to paint the negative spaces around an object, like the background or foreground.

If you paint these areas instead of the object in focus, this will help you carve out the shape of what you're painting in a simplified way. This will also help you look at what you’re painting a bit more abstract which can be helpful when you’re simplifying something. When you paint the negative space around your object this also means you put it into context with the rest of the painting right away.

Work with straight lines.

If you look for the longer and straighter lines of what you're painting in the beginning, this will help you simplify what you see and provide more structure to your object.

You can always break up the line later and make it softer and curvier later, but to look for straighter lines will force you to keep the shapes of what you're painting more simplified.

OK, so that was a little bit about why working from larger blocks of value towards the details in a painting will simplify your painting process, and also a few tips that you can use the next time you're painting if you would like to try this method yourself.

I hope you found these tips valuable and that if you decide to try them out the next time you paint, they'll help you make a painting you're proud of.

Happy painting,

Why simplification will help you improve your paintings.