Back in January, I started listening to a lot of art-related podcasts while I set up my studio. One of the subjects that kept coming up was the value of daily painting. The idea is that by painting small canvasses every day (or nearly every day), you could not only increase your productivity (obviously), but also give a serious boost to your skills. That sounded like a win-win situation to me, so one week in February, I armed myself with a bunch of 8″ x 10″ panels and went to town (or rather, to work). Behold the results:
I always knew that I wanted to focus on the figure in my artwork, but seeing as I didn’t have a posse of models at my disposal, I decided to try landscapes instead. I suppose I could have simply painted images from fashion magazines, but I kinda have a problem with straight reproductions. If you didn’t have an actual hand in composing the original image, I think that merely copying it is a bit of a rip-off (unless you specify that it’s just a study).
All of these paintings were done from my own photos of our Best. Trip. EVER – a 2-week Xmas camping vacation through the South Island of New Zealand about 10 years ago. We were living in Wellington at the time and decided to stay in the Antipodes over Xmas instead of hemorrhaging money on a trip back to Canada (my family’s in Montreal, his is in St. John’s, so, yeah… complicated).
So what did I learn from this little experiment? A few things:
- producing a finished product every day makes you feel AWESOME
- every painting is a chance to try something new
- every painting is a chance to fail, and that is a-ok
- landscapes, while I do enjoy them, are not something I want to do for the rest of my art career
Have you ever experimented with daily painting? Did you love it or hate it? And most importantly: what did you learn from it?
EMMA PITTSON 