subject: Where you are with your paint skills? [print this page] Where you are with your paint skills? Where you are with your paint skills?
Look at the art that you've created and try to assess where you are with your artistic skills. Don't be hard on yourself! Be objective, but don't be overly critical. At this point, you're either starting a completely new endeavor or building on the knowledge you have from previous paintings. Either way, it helps to have a clear idea of where you are and set reasonable goals for your work.
You may judge your work harshly because you don't have anything to compare your work to other than some master reproductions in books and magazines. That's pretty stiff competition, wouldn't you say? Instead, keep it simple and break it down to just a few questions you can ask yourself:
How's your drawing? Are the forms in your drawing believable? Your drawing doesn't have any problem that being more observant won't solve. Most of the time, the problem is simply that the forms are too generalized. In other words, the shapes you've drawn are only generally like the actual form of the object. If you look closer at them, you can draw the shapes more true to their actual forms. This is true of painting the forms as well.
Are you painting your forms flat like cartoons, or can you make them look three-dimensional? Being able to make them look three-dimensional is an indication that you can work with different values of paint.
If you've been painting a while, do you rely on stylized techniques to paint the forms in your artwork? For example, are you flipping the brush a certain way or picking up colors on your brush in a prescribed manner? You should be working naturally and concentrating on developing patterns, textures, and colors, not focusing on narrowly defined ways of using your brush or applying color.
Do the colors look fresh and clear? Have you ventured beyond painting colors straight out of the tube? If your painting looks too vivid, you may need to be a little more adventurous with your color mixing.
As you read over these questions, what do you think about your work? Maybe you do well in some areas but not in others. None of these areas is worth beating yourself up over. These questions merely help you establish a baseline for developing your goals and show you how you can break down your goals into specific areas to work on.
As with any set of goals, you want a specific main goal for your overall painting endeavor that can be broken down into sets of smaller goals. You can choose to emphasize any of these goals in each painting.
