A Dip in the Planning Pool

A common question from an art viewer is “How long did it take you to paint that?” The answer can be hard to calculate. I think house painters say their job is 90% preparation and 10% execution. I tried to get up that ratio with my newest painting because it was a new direction and I wanted to give myself every advantage to get it right and enjoy doing it. Here is a breakdown of the hours to make this picture:

• Searching for reference photographs over a few days—4 hours
• Selecting one of those photos off and on for another day—1 hour
• Planning how to paint it (choosing color palette, size) for a couple days—an hour drawing color studies, half an hour (during H’s swim lesson) sketching to scale for different sized canvases
• Drawing a pattern for the swimsuit out of newsprint—less than hour BUT THEN I saw a giant pad of graph paper at Office Max and redrew the pattern on it. Add another half hour.
• --Quick trip to art store for new canvas—half an hour
• Toning new canvas and letting it dry—20 minutes
• Playing with that pattern on the canvas—stared at it in different places for a day.
• Mixing the colors on my palette—20 min (I couldn’t get the blue quite right on the first try)
• --Quick trip to art store for more paint—half an hour
• Actual painting—3 hours
  
• Total: I can’t even figure it out except to say about a week.

 
For some things, countable minutes are minimal yet need to happen over an extended period. As my friend fellow artist Anne Perkins Wert said to me once, “the looking is the doing, too.” I looked and thought a lot, especially on the background color. I did a lot of planning for this painting so that I could avoid freezing in front of the canvas mid-process when faced with indecision or error. It worked well. I painted quickly and happily. What? Planning helped? No kidding, Amanda.