Painting from an Outline: Mushroom
When I got my first Let’s Make Art box in 2019, one of the things that held me back from starting was the idea that painting was going to be hard if I didn’t know how to draw. This belief held me back from starting for almost two whole months!
Enter the concept of an outline. Not all of the Let’s Make Art projects have one, but a lot of them do. Want to paint a hummingbird? Outline. Want to paint a lighthouse? Outline. The purpose of the outline is to take the stress of drawing out of the painting process.
A lack of confidence in my drawing abilities can be frustrating. I have sketched and erased and sketched and erased and basically ruined a piece of paper, in the end not painting at all. Now, don’t get me wrong, drawing is still an important skill. It’s actually on my long list of things to work on. But having an outline can remove one big barrier to getting started.
With an outline, you have a starting point. You can go as simple as just filling in the lines or you can spend time adding dimension and your own interpretation of that outline. It was a game changer for me because it gave me lots of opportunities to just practice painting as I was starting out. It gave me a chance to (gasp) just have fun and relax.
As I have gotten better, I have started to take the same approach with paintings when using my own reference photos. Creating an outline to start helps me to simplify what I am seeing. Sometimes too much detail can end up muddying the painting because your eye doesn’t know what to focus on. My post Painting Ugly is a perfect example of this.
Outline used for original Mushroom, Glacier Nat’l Park
Creating a simple outline is the approach I took with my recent painting Mushroom, Glacier National Park. I wanted the mushroom to be the focus, so I created a very simple outline to get started. (You can read more about that painting and get your own copy of the outline here.)
The original version of my mushroom painting took about 3-4 hours, not including drying time, for a 5x7 painting. I’m generally a slow painter. Part of this has to do with the medium. Watercolor needs time to try between the layers, otherwise you are likely to muddy up the colors. I’m also not a very loose painter. Even on more illustrative work, I like to focus on the details. Painting quickly, loose, or even abstract are concepts that I struggle with.
So I created a challenge for myself.
I decided to paint a second mushroom using my outline, but I gave myself an hour max, including drying times. I did use a hair dryer to speed up the drying, but I still stuck to the hour limit. I was curious what I could come up with in a quarter of the time it took to paint the original. I also wanted to create a painting that was distinct from the original, so I completely changed the color palette. Instead of browns and greens, I went with blues, purples, and pinks.
Mushroom II, Glacier National Park
Things I love about this version:
Detail, Mushroom II
The watercolor blooms on the mushroom cap. Blooms are what happen when you have water or paint and you add a new drop of paint or even plain water. It causes the paint to spread away from wherever your brush touched the paper.
The sky. I like the blending of the blue and purple and how the mushroom itself is still vibrant against the background.
Not so favorite part:
The fallen tree. It seems a bit one dimensional to me because there isn’t enough variation between the light colors and the dark colors. You also don’t have any of the moss that I loved about the original.
I think there is value in both paintings. I don’t always have 3-4 hours to work on a project, but I still want to paint and feel accomplished. In an hour, I was able to complete this little guy. It makes me wonder what variations I might see if I tried to paint the same subject for a minute, or five minutes, or 30 minutes. How different might the paintings be? Would they also still look similar? Would a stranger be able to tell the difference between the 5 minute version and the 10 minute version? Perhaps there is an experiment in my future…
Which one do you like more: slow and steady or quick and loose?
Mushroom II, Glacier National Park
Mushroom, Glacier National Park
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