The Process of a Painting

I'm currently taking an online painting class with Flora Bowley. I've really admired her style of painting and you can see it here. I've taken an online painting class before and it was a big fail. Basically it was a link to 24 instructional videos, but there was no text or comments from the instructor. No feedback whatsoever. Flora has obviously taken a lot of time to convert her process into a step by step method. All of us students are doing 1 layer of paint on a canvas, learning another technique and doing another layer, then another, and so on. The idea of the class is to create 2 canvases over the length of the course. Well, I'm too impatient to wait for her next lesson, so I just keep starting new canvases. I have nine going right now. I'll show you more later, but for now, I'll show you one canvas as it has evolved over the weeks.

The first layer is just to get some paint on the canvas. This was done by dripping the paint on, spraying a water mist on it, and smearing it around. We were told to just use warm colors, so we wouldn't mix wet warm with wet cool and get a muddy color.


After that was dry, we added cool colors.


Then I started added color with abandon, losing a lot of what I had done.


I added a little black and white, but not much.


I painted, sprayed, and let some paint drip down.


I added a few images.


And then tried to define them.


I really don't think this painting is done yet. What do you think? Should I have stopped sooner?

I'll post more paintings in process later this week. Tomorrow's painting shows how I tried to try something different, and not do flower buds and pods like Flora often does. My intent is to eventually find my own style. Well, we'll see.