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            When I was growing up, my mother taught her sons to do various domestic chores. As kids, my older brother and I did a lot of work around the house both inside and out. When my dad was home (he traveled as a pilot), he had many yard projects for us as well, so my brother and I, and later my younger brother to a lesser degree, learned by doing. We learned about sorting clothes, how to iron shirts and pants, how to mend torn garments and sew on buttons. We learned to cook a variety of dishes – I make some awesome stews – and we learned that cleaning up followed any sort of project. Following processes became second nature. If you wanted good results, you followed the appropriate steps to achieve them. Thoughtful organization made most any project easier to work through.

            Being a creative activity, painting is often not thought of as a process except in the most general way. There seems to be the attitude that if something is done according to the same steps that the creative expression is eliminated. I’ve found that through many years of painting that there are various ways to think about this idea. Most painters have one or more processes that they follow depending on whether they are doing direct or indirect painting, working in one session or completing a painting over many sessions. These can apply to any style of painting and also whether the intention of the artist is for representation or abstraction.

            Firstly, every artist is different and will have developed techniques and steps that work to his or her strengths. Secondly, the actual steps followed to create a painting can be quite varied. A painter may work from a toned ground, sketch an image or not, block in large areas of color or not, refine an image by breaking large shapes into smaller and smaller areas of color that eventually create the image. Another artist may make a careful drawing with charcoal or brush and then layer color within the lines, so to speak. There may be a wide range of variations on these few suggested steps, but ultimately the painter is balancing a number of essential design elements and refining their relationships to make a satisfying image: shape, proportion, placement, color, value, and whatever else is appropriate to the subject being painted.

            The process is about organizing the pictorial elements, and most experienced artists begin organizing with the first few strokes of the brush. The initial focus may be on line, but soon that will shift to concern over colored shapes. Students gradually learn the process of organizing the picture space, but more often than not their initial attempts tend to focus on parts rather than the whole. Over time, they, like the experienced artist, tend to think about the whole from the outset. It is certainly easier to create and maintain unity from the beginning than to try to cobble it together later in the painting process.

            In representational painting, many students do not see underlying patterns of shapes that are created by light-dark contrasts. These can be observed on faces and figures, in arrangements of objects on a table, in objects within a room, or in the seemingly haphazard array of natural shapes in a landscape. Making a series of tonal drawings or value studies can help to focus on pattern rather than detail. Serious students will take the time to do these kinds of studies; the dabblers will continue to dabble. These underlying patterns, though, are why many instructors urge students to locate the darks early in the painting process. As the range of values and colors are refined, the image, space, and light will emerge with increasing clarity. There is no great mystery here although seeing the image come to life still gives most painters a thrill, and that emergence can almost feel magical even as it’s predictable. Approaches may vary, but organization is the key.