It all begins with an idea!
And an idea for an artwork can come from anywhere!
It can come from a book, a sentence in a film or a newspaper. You can be inspired by someones art or perhaps a song you heard on the radio. Or maybe it just popped into your head as you were cooking or cleaning!
In one painting I heard a sentence in a film that gave me the idea for a painting. It went something like this “there is no point doing anything in life, before you know it rigor mortise sets in” So inthis case the title came before the painting, usually its the other way around!
The sketchbook!
The sketchbook is very valuable, its a contained space with pages were you can write down all your messy thoughts and stick in photos and make small drawings. The sentence made me think of woman in the 17th century who were so bored lying around reading books and doing embroidery all day. At that time women were considered to not have very functional brains.
If you are to do the same every day, you might as well be dead right!?
When I have an idea of how I want it to look, I like to make a physical photo shoot. Here I have taken some props and arranged them so they almost create a little installation. My backgoand is from graphic design, I like to bring the images into Photoshop and add and rearrange the image there till I build an image that I think can work well as a painting. Now that all the planning is done its only the actual paint work left!
I like to finish one section at the time, some painters work this way, others work on the whole image with overlays of paint. I have been told it looks a bit weird the way I work, but it works for me!
This is a wet-on-wet technique, where you apply a new layer of oil paint on top of a still wet layer rather than waiting for a layer to dry before applying the next layer.
