What Goes Into A Painting - The Artist's Creative Process

Have you ever wondered about the artist's creative process, what sparks the idea, what kind of research is done, if any? Whether you're an artist yourself, or a collector, or both, you may or may not have thought about what the creative process involves, but it is different for everyone.

How does a work of art come to life? My own creative process can start in a number of different ways, but I always research in the same way and create preliminary work. My ideas come from a range of sources, read my post here to learn more about how you can find inspiration for your own art, as well as where some of mine comes from. Most of the time a visual comes to me and I work from there. This visual is usually triggered from an experience such as a countryside walk. A sighting of a bird or flower I want to paint. I then collect my ideas, such as what I wish to include. This is when I start to look at photographs.

I must point out here that this is the creative process I mostly use for oil paintings and pieces created using watercolour and gouache. Although I am a big fan of working from life, the type of art I mostly create is time consuming and it is impossible to work from life for flowers, birds and other creatures. The vast majority of images I use are ones I have collected on my travels with my camera, over the years. I have a large library of floral images I use for my paintings and I am always collecting more. As for animals and birds, I source imagery from free image websites such as Pixabay, but I use more than one image for one bird or animal to change the position slightly. I also sometimes flip the image using Photoshop and if I have an image of a bird I have managed to take myself, (I'm no nature photographer!) I use the position of the bird and view other images that are similar but with more detail.Therefore I end up with something more of a representation and not a copy from a photograph.

Once I know which images I will be using, if I am working on paper I create sketches of all of the elements and transfer them to the paper I will be painting on. If I am painting using oils, I sketch out the composition directly onto the canvas. In an earlier post, My Creative Process, I describe how I start my oil paintings. Below is an example of the stages of a piece created on paper using watercolour and gouache.

This is how "Opulent Garden" started life! It was originally intended as a design for a repeat pattern (and still may be once I get around to it!) However I was so far into the painting and then life took over and I didn't finish it for quite a while. At a later date I came across it and decided that I had come too far with it to leave it unfinished!

The process I use for this type of painting involves drawing out the composition by tracing my sketches, I use a light box for this. I then use watercolour to give it a light colour wash. Then follows all of the detail using both watercolour and gouache.

This is the finished artwork on paper

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Fast forward to now and this is how Opulent Garden looks.

So, if you are wondering how? as there are other flowers in there that are not on the original, Opulent Garden is a digital composition of the original painting with added hand painted elements, pieced together using Adobe Photoshop. It seems like a complex way of working but is how I start a lot of my pieces available only as prints. There is no original painting other than the elements and pieces such as what you have seen as a starting point for Opulent Garden. This is another part of my creative process.

I can honestly say, for myself as an artist, a lot goes into what I do! And I know that it is the same for many other artists, regardless of what type of art they create. So the next time you look at your favourite work of art, see if you can figure out what the artist may have done to make the piece!

In my next few posts I will unpick some more of my creative processes and share them with you. Thanks for dropping by!