A dilemma that many an artist suffers is overworking a piece.  It can be hard to know when to stop and move on to the next piece or to scrape down and start over with the current one.

Have a plan. It makes little sense to attack your painting without some sort of process in place. Creating preliminary sketches and studies (smaller versions of the painting) will help you work through a number of the pictorial issues in advance at a much smaller scale and within a controlled number of variables.  This will make it easier for you to create the finished larger piece without spending precious time working on problems that may have been solved at a much earlier and smaller stage.

Make sure when you are working on your piece that you work the entire surface together. Don’t stop and finish one part and move on this. This will generally lead to a very unbalanced look, as certain parts will be worked more than others, thus affecting the unity of the entire image.

Another useful tip to follow is to make sure you step back from your work often. Once at least every twenty minutes or so you should step back from your work at a distance that if you are working from life that you can see both your subject and your canvas in your line of site.  If you are working from a photograph you should have the two images side by side so that you can compare. If you are working from your imagination you should step back are enough so that you can see the work visually re-contextualized. Often when working we can become so visually absorbed as a result of intense concentration that we begin to lose site of the entire image. This can lead to the overworking of a particular area.

Also, don’t be afraid to scrape down your canvas to its surface. It is best to avoid leaving large amounts of inaccurate paint (parts that are the wrong color or drawn incorrectly) left on your canvas to dry. This will only affect the underlying surface of your paint, possibly leading to instability in the chemical make up of the paint as it dries, or in the least leave the surface of your painting uneven.  

This isn’t to say that creating a weathered surface with a history of the process is inherently bad, but that it should be an aesthetic choice that one makes, and not just the result of overworking a canvas and not caring for the surface.

It also a good idea to compare your work in progress to other finished works and reproductions of other artist’s work so that you can compare your work in progress to the desired finished state you are attempting.

This information is an excerpt from Painting with Jordan Schranz, an online course offered by Sessions Online School of Fine Art.

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