#13: Enjoying a good book (Patreon)

As those of you who watched the live streams probably noticed, I made a lot of mistakes throughout the process of painting this one, so it took way longer than it should have. However, the mistakes gave me a much clearer idea of how I'd like to structure my workflow in the next paintings, so I feel like I've learned some valuable lessons from it.

Specifically, I'll be trying to do a more thorough job nailing down all the details in the picture early on, before I start adding color to it. This way the process will be divided into more clearly separated stages. Sketch -> Base colors -> Lighting -> Rendering.
Those of you who receive the work-in-progress images for this painting in about a week will notice that the sketch was still too loose and undecided when I moved on to adding colors. Letting the sketching process bleed into the coloring process like this introduces more uncertainty and a higher risk of unnecessary changes happening. And once you get into the coloring, changes take a lot more time than they did while sketching. So unless you always have a very clear picture in your head of what you want to paint, I would recommend doing a thorough job of each of the clearly separated stages instead of letting them bleed into each other.

Structuring your process like this should, in theory, allow you to focus more easily on improving your efficiency within each separate stage of the process. It will become easier to wrap your head around what exactly it is you need to be doing at any given point in the process.

Having the clearer overview of the steps of your process should also make you better at judging how much time each of your paintings will take, which is an important skill to have when working professionally. It should allow you to plan your work hours and set your prices with more confidence.

Those of you who are old school enough to have the WIP images from the Halloween themed picture from last year will see how that picture actually had a more structured process than my more recent ones. Lately I've been experimenting and making mistakes left and right that in many cases have slowed me down, but that's not a bad thing! Mistakes are very good, as long as you analyze your work, notice them and understand why they are mistakes. You usually learn more from your mistakes than you do from doing things right. So don't let them discourage you. Instead appreciate mistakes for what they teach you. :)

If you have questions surrounding this topic, feel free to drop by my daily live stream and chat about it.

Thanks for your support, everyone!