Cotswolds Apples

Cotswolds Apples – Oil on panel, 5 x 7 inches

Currently up for auction, click here to bid

I was about to hit the publish button, but I just couldn’t do it.

Making something new public is always at least a little nerve-wracking for me. But it’s very rare that I actually stop myself doing it.

I have a rule of thumb that I should hit publish whether I’m happy or not, because I never really am.

It might be a blog post. In which case I usually want to spend longer on it because I think I might not have got the ideas across clearly enough.

Or it might be a painting, as it was here.

How do you decide when a painting is finished?

I’d done three sessions on it, which is usually enough for me to be fairly happy with a painting.

But for some reason, even though I’d signed and photographed this one, and set up the auction, I just couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t ready to put out into the world yet.

I knew I could make it better with a bit more work.

What happened next is that I put it back on the easel, set the cameras up and hit record.

And this video is the result. It’s a record of what was going through my head as I was trying to work out what I need to do to take this painting a bit further, to become – I suppose – happier with the result.

Just get to the easel

I really, really didn’t feel like working that day.

I don’t know about you, but every now and again I have a day where I feel so low I can hardly get myself into the studio. I don’t know where it comes from. I wish it wouldn’t come at all.

But it does. Less often these days, but I know that every now and again I’ll really struggle. And the only way I know to deal with it is to just get started.

I don’t always manage it. This video is of one of the days when I did. It was streamed live on facebook at the end of last week.

Mostly this is a video of me thinking out loud while I paint. I had a separate camera on the palette and managed to get both into the stream at once, which makes it a lot more informative I think.

If you want to be in with a chance of catching one of these streams (I usually do at least one a week, when I’m on a roll) then you can follow me on facebook here.

Also, here’s a pic of the painting at an earlier stage. You can see the raw umber and black underpainting I usually start with now, in the background.

I’ve filmed the whole process of painting this one too, which will be coming out soon as a complete video – along with excerpts from the live stream. I hope having both, some edited video and some more off-the-cuff live footage where I talk as I paint, will help give a clearer picture of how I go about putting together my little paintings these days.

The video should be out sometime in the next few weeks. It will be part of a new subscription thing I’m bringing out soon, which will cover both sides of being an independent artist making a living online – the art part (like, the painting) and the online part (like, running a website and building an audience).

I’m getting ahead of myself though! Stay tuned and I’ll have more on that soon.

Best wishes and thanks for reading.

Paul