At some point, I suspect everyone has heard the familiar idiom: ‘practice makes perfect.’ It’s a mantra thrown about frequently for anyone attempting to learn a new skill. Frankly, I think it’s a crock, and I’ll tell you why: if you ever think your work is perfect, then give up and go home as you’ll stop growing as an artisan or worse yet, become complacent and your quality will suffer while the world passes you by. Thus, I prefer the simple statement that practice brings improvement.

When I set about to begin painting again after not having touched them in twenty years, I knew my meager skills from high school had completely fallen aside and that I would have work to do to get even those back. When I left high school, my most accomplished piece of art was painting one of those little bears with hats that used to be in the art school ads in the TV Guide so I knew I had a lot of room to grow!  Thus it was with a bit of hesitation that I invested the dollars needed to purchase my first supplies. Even harder was getting over the fear of how badly it might turn out and touching brush to canvas.

Sure enough, my first paintings were pretty bad. So bad that I didn’t even scan them for posterity. So bad that being viewed by the naked eye would cause sterilization in lab rats. They were on acrylic paper stock that I purchased at my local craft store. It would have been easy to be discouraged and to return to the other interests that I already did well at such as sewing and calligraphy but I wanted to press on as it was important to me to find another vehicle for artistic expression. So I persevered.

I picked up some pointers by looking at different books. Donna Dewberry (always sounds like a fake name to me…dew-berry?), Bill Alexander, Bob Ross and so on. I worked hard on just one thing in order to measure my improvement, and that was my cherry blossoms. Thus, my first real success came after about two dozen practice paintings:

Interestingly, that is still my most popular piece today, and cherry blossoms have become my signature of sorts. Completing this painting emboldened me to try landscapes, which is my first true love in any visual medium. My results, though garnering praise from my family, left me feeling discouraged. I could see everything that needed tons of improvement:

Those of you familiar with Donna Dewberry’s HD One-Stroke techniques may recognize this painting. It’s from one of her ‘Learn to Paint’ packs. Very colorful and not bad for a beginner, but it denoted the first major element I needed to improve: my perspective. In all of my early paintings, my water was very round and a number of my elements look like you are seeing them from a different angle compared to the rest. I also have no defined light source thus there aren’t any real shadows or contrasts other than color contrasts.  The question I was faced with was: where do I focus on improving first? I chose to work on blending techniques and thus, came 3 or 4 more practice pieces before getting to this:

The reason that I chose blending to focus on was in order to start building in shadows and to make my skies look better. I started making progress with my ‘Tranquil Mountain Pond’ painting in that I have shadows on the mountains and on some of the grasses along the trail, but I still had a long ways to go.  Once again, my perspective also proves to be a challenge as I end up yet again with a boring round pond that looks like it should be flowing towards the viewer and onto their floor. Yeeech!

This time, while still working on improving my blending, I wanted to start working on perspective. Thus again, I spent two hours a night working on drawing out landscapes to get perspective correct, then made a couple of practice paintings before finally feeling ready to put one on canvas. The result was the ‘Peaceful Mountain River’ as seen here:

I really enjoyed painting this as I could see my improvement while I worked on it. My skies have better blending, my mountains have better blending, my water has good blended reflections, but most of all, my perspective is solid. But still, there is plenty of room for improvement in all areas, and my bushes seem rather flat and lifeless so that needs to be worked on as well. Thus came more paintings, such as the ‘Peaceful Mountain River - Bold’ edition that I did to experiment with darker colors before finally moving to a new medium for honing my skills. The new medium? Oils.

I chose to move to oils because my chief frustration in honing my techniques had become the fast drying time of my acrylics. I could either spend a fortune on retardants to slow down the drying time or I could move to a medium that didn’t have the same drying speed. My first attempt at an oil would have been nicely demonstrative of the challenges of shifting mediums, had I not accidentally dropped it and ruined it (never have I been so happy to own a steam cleaner before). To see my second oil painting (the not-very-imaginatively titled ‘Peaceful Mountain River - Oils’…who says I need help naming?) , see the one at the top of this post on the right, or a few posts down. Again, there was still room for improvement in the use of color, shadows, and perspective. Thus, I played with a multitude of color test paintings (no cheap exercise with oils) before completing my latest piece yesterday, the simply titled ‘Northern Lights.’

I feel that this painting served me well in understanding how to blend, how to add shadows, the use of good perspective and so on. I am very happy with it. That said, I still see lots of area for improvement but that’s OK with me as I welcome the opportunity to continually improve. Hopefully, as you’ve read this post, you see how important it is to never be satisfied and to keep seeking improvement also. It’s important to note that I first put brush to canvas again less than three months ago so I believe you can see what a difference that attitude has meant to me. I hope you continually seek improvement and never believe your work is perfect either!