The benefits of painting timed studies - Smerdon Toast Episode 2

 Smerdon Toast is a YouTube/podcast channel by Australian artists Anne Smerdon and Seabastion Toast. Each episode Toast and Smerdon challenge each other with a painting topic, to push their painting skills and artistic ability. Viewers/listeners are invited to join along each challenge as well.

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The benefits of painting timed studies

Nothing beats a 20 minute deadline to make you realise just how much you can procrastinate. 

When you've only got 20 minutes, there's no time to be seduced by the details. You just paint. And sometimes that makes for a way better, more honest painting.

Today on Smerdon Toast, we’re talking about the benefits of painting small studies with a time limit. Why?

Because as an oil painter, I get seduced by details. I am too quick, too eager to paint the teeny, tiny details in my painting that I miss the “whole”. So I set this challenge to counteract that.  The idea came from artist David Dibble while I was on an Artable art retreat with him in Tasmania earlier this year. He recommend that I should set a timer. So I did. And the results were life changing!

This episode’s challenge:

Paint 3 different artworks of the same object, one for 20 minutes, one for 1 hour and one for 2 hours.

For this challenge, I set myself a mini-challenge inside the challenge, I wanted to see if I could make a painting look good with just a single round object smack bang in the middle of my canvas. Because that generally makes for a really boring composition. 

And that is the whole purpose of these short, timed studies. To explore an idea without investing too much time or energy (or paint!).

I purposely decided not to make bird paintings for this challenge, even though bird wall art is what I make. I’m known as a bird artist and when people think of Anne Smerdon, they think of Australian bird art. But this challenge I wanted to really give myself the opportunity to explore, and by painting something different from the norm I gave myself more freedom to do that.

20 minute oil painting study

For my 20 minute oil painting study, I was just thinking about the light, covering the canvas, just getting the general tones in and the different shapes.

To aid me in doing this, I used a fluffy brush. You know the kind, the one that you really should throw out because it no longer holds its shape. That kind of fluffy. I used this because I had been chatting with Mina Mohtasham about how I can override my impulse to race to painting details and she suggested painting only with fluffy brushes because you can’t get a straight line or sharp edge. It has been life changing! And I don’t know that I’ll ever paint with a sharp, new brush again! Or at the very least, I wont feel so bad about being a “neglectful brush parent” as Toast calls it. 

60 minute oil painting study

It was in this 60 minute oil painting challenge that I entered the dreaded self doubt! I was just thinking, this is rubbish. Like I just need to start a new one. I hate this is just, who am I to think that I could make an interesting painting of a apple smack bang in the middle of a canvas. But I just had to remind myself like, you're in the ugly stage. Just, just keep going. Just like you are only doing this for an hour.

And yet again this shows the brilliance of the timed studies! Because you have set a limit, it encourages you to push through that ugly stage until the timer goes off, regardless of how good or bad it is looking. It’s such a short amount of time you’re investing, it’s not detracting from your main painting time. And often when you push through, it all comes together and it doesn't look so bad after all! I always encourage my students at Artory to push through the “ugly stage”, as hard as it is. Because, as Toast says, it’s that staying power that “makes you become an artist that you know you can push through. That uncomfortable feeling, you can sit with that uncomfortable feeling because most people quit as soon as things go bad.”

Chroma

After I pushed through all that self doubt, I got to my favourite part of painting - the high chroma pops of colour you find on the edges of light. You don’t see these when painting from a photo. Only when you paint from life. They’re so delicious and fun. 

it's funny because at the end, for me, this wasn't actually a painting about an apple. It was about that pop of green on the very, very edge, of the shadow and transitioning into the light.

Speaking of chroma, this little oil painting study was quite eye opening when it comes to chroma. (chroma is how bright, vibrant, colourful our paint colour is. Colours with low chroma are dull, greyish, brown. In contrast colours with high chroma are bright, saturated and vibrant.) The colours we see in real life can be so bright and vibrant, but the colours we have on offer in a paint tube are much more restricted than the colours we see in real life. So matching the chroma of a bright red apple in a painted form can be really tricky! When you have a light but high chroma subject, such as my bright red apple, it can be really hard to make that light red chromatic. Because as soon as you add white to lighten it up, it just goes dull and you lose the chroma. 

White is a chroma killer.

And in this case, I just simply couldn’t match the light red I was seeing on the apple with the red I had in paint. So to counteract this, I made the background a little bit greener to make the apple APPEAR redder. 

2 hour study

So this was my two hour study. I painted the same subject as my 20 minute study because by this stage it was afternoon, almost evening. The light was very different and I wanted to try to paint it in a different light. And I also wanted to see what would happen to that 20 minute study if I resolved it a little bit further.

As Toast suggested, this idea of painting the same thing over and over reminder her of American artist Thomas Moran, who explored certain landscapes multiple times, offering different perspectives in his works. A subtle shift in light, or shifting the subject to the left can create a completely different narrative. Monet did a similar thing with his haystack paintings.

It’s an idea I’ve been exploring more and more in my work. For so long, my work has been based on painting pretty things. Painting beautiful bird paintings, beautiful flowers. Things that are already beautiful. But what I admire most in art is when someone paints the mundane in a beautiful way.  For example, can I paint a toilet, something that we see we all have and we all see it every day, but can I make that beautiful? Can I make someone look at that same object now as an object of beauty when it's just been this object that they haven't given two cents of a thought to?

That’s what I was exploring with this little timed study.

What did I learn along the way?

Well, read on my friend, read on. Because I’ve outlined all the things I learnt from doing this exercise in a Part 2. And I think it’s information every artist should know.