One Tuesday a month, I hope to offer a little more insight into my artistic process with art tips and tricks that I’ve learned over the years. Whether you’re an art lover interested in how the artistic process works or a fellow artist looking for advice on your own artistic journey, I hope you find this ongoing series helpful.

Sometimes paintings seem to flow out of you almost effortlessly. Some days, the moment you put pen to paper, paintbrush to canvas, the work seems to paint itself. These are the paintings of little revision and much joy. These are the paintings where you start to understand what that spiritual art professor of yours meant when they advised you to let the painting flow out of you. “I guess I’m just channeling a higher energy,” you, an artistic god among mere mortals, might suppose.

*Cue record scratch*

But then there are the days where nothing you paint seems to look right. You fumble through the painting right from the start, making rudimentary marks like a finger painting child. These are the struggle days. The paintings so problematic that they have you questioning your entire profession, your entire ability as an artist.

Any artist will tell you that art is truly a love/hate relationship. Some days, you’re flying high, confident and self-assured, and some days the Imposter Syndrome sets in hard.

But before you spiral into a full blown panic over a painting that just won’t cooperate, let me offer you a few tricks that I use to help save my paintings (and often, my sanity). This month’s Art Tip Tuesday is dedicated to those struggle days and the clever tricks that just might pull you out of it:

Print It

The first thing I do if I’m struggling with a painting, be it a portrait or landscape, is I print out my reference photo. While my computer screen can sometimes capture detail that my printer just can’t match, having a reference photo physically in my hand can be immeasurably reassuring. If you’re working small scale, try printing the reference photo to scale for comparison. You may notice important details that you hadn’t with that computer’s blue light glare.

Flip It

When I was in college, I started a business teaching art classes to kids in the summer. Whenever the kids got stuck on a painting, I would see the telltale signs of artistic doom setting in. Quickly I would tell them, flip your painting 180 degrees and paint it upside down. They always guffawed at this. “I can barely paint this right side up, how am I supposed to paint it upside down?” they’d lament.

IF YOU CAN TRAIN YOUR EYE TO LOOK FOR THE RIGHT THINGS, THEN YOU CAN PAINT ANYTHING. YOU NEED TO PAINT WHAT YOU SEE, NOT WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW.

Here’s the thing, art is all about seeing. If you can train your eye to look for the right things, then you can paint anything. But often times our eyes deceive us…or rather, our brains do. To paint something accurately, you need to paint what you see, not what you think you know.

For instance, you may think you know what a nose looks like. Go ahead and try painting your nose. Now try again, but this time, don’t think of it as a nose. Look in the mirror. See the gentle curving lines, the soft shadows, the highlights, the color variation, etc. Just paint that. Unless you’re already classically trained to look for these things, I assure you the latter painting will look more like an actual nose.

So where does painting upside down come into play? Painting upside down helps trick your brain into no longer looking at something as what it is (a nose, an eye, a tree, etc.) but instead as what it’s composed of (this soft shadow here, this diagonal line there, this bright highlight over here, etc.). It helps you to paint what you’re truly seeing and not what you think you see.

Without fail, when the kids in my class turned their paintings back around, they were shocked to find that they had painted upside down even more accurately than when they painted it right side up. Try it out for yourself. You just might surprise yourself.

Reflect It

This goes back to the central key to painting accurately: painting what you see, not what you think you know. Reflecting your painting in a mirror helps to give you another perspective on the painting. It’s like seeing yourself in the mirror versus in pictures. While they’re both you, you may notice subtle things about yourself that you didn’t notice when your image is reversed.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt that something was off about a portrait and only when I held the piece up to a mirror, did I realize what was wrong. A mirror will give you a fresh perspective on your work and help you to notice subtitles that may just make a world of a difference for your painting. I aways keep a large mirror in my studio for this exact reason.

Trace It

In the art world, sometimes “tracing” can sound like a bad word. Does it really count if you didn’t paint it freehand? Isn’t that cheating? If you’re a bit of a purist like I can sometimes be, the idea of tracing anything may sound offensive to you. It’s certainly taken me some time to adjust to the idea, but I’ve come to realize that just because you had an occasional template or guide doesn’t mean you didn’t create it.

Unless you dream of becoming a photorealistic painter, painting is not about how accurately you can render something, but about how beautifully and creatively you can apply paint to a surface. So if you’re absolutely stuck on a piece, give yourself a break and bring out that light board or projector. Cast your reference photos on your painting or light it from behind the piece with a light board.

PAINTING IS NOT ABOUT HOW ACCURATELY YOU CAN RENDER SOMETHING, BUT ABOUT HOW BEAUTIFULLY AND CREATIVELY YOU CAN APPLY PAINT TO A SURFACE.

Gesso It

If you’ve tried all of the above tricks and you’re still getting nowhere with your stubborn piece or worse yet, if it now looks (eek!) overworked, there’s no shame in gessoing the canvas and just starting over. Don’t think of it as giving up so much as giving your canvas the opportunity to host another, perhaps more fluid, beautiful creation of yours.

I hope you’ve found these tips to “fixing” your work helpful. Comment below and let me know if these tips worked for you. I’d love to see your latest work and follow your artistic journey.

How to "Fix" Your Art