Making Stuff Up: Using your Imagination in your Art

Draw and paint from your imagination as much as you can.

I often tell my painting students that sooner or later they should all try to work from their imagination. For me, that’s what most of my studies lead up to.

So, sketching is very helpful; sketching and doodling. Great for getting what’s in your mind out into the world in a quick and convenient way. Life-drawing will equip you with the ability to render what’s on your mind; I just don’t think it’s enough to have all that craft ability and to not use it for expressing yourself in an imaginative way.

This little work was a demo I did to show my students how you can paint an underpainting (a brunaille* in this case) if you’re not sure how you want your painting to turn out. I had no particular plan with this other than demonstrating how to achieve a result. I made it up on the spot because I’ve done things like this thousands of times.

Anyway, you can design the painting and add other details or subtract them as you go along -and it’s not going to affect your final work. The underpainting is like painting with a safety net; all the details and tonal values are worked out before any colour gets added. Then the colour can be glazed over it, eventually building up to opaque paint. Just make sure you keep you brushstrokes nice and flat -you don’t want to form little ridges in you paint as your transparent glazes could pool.

Tubes of paint used for this are:

Ultramarine
Burnt Sienna
Pale Terracotta (also known as ‘Flesh Tint’) or Warm Bright Yellow from Sennelier.
Titanium White (you can get away without using this. I just used it for the shirt and the bright highlights in the eyes).

*Grisaille = A monochrome grey painting
*Brunaille = Warm monochrome painting

Of course, the other thing you should be doing to exercise your imagination is to draw: Doodle and sketch as much as possible. Buy a sketchbook that you can carry around with you and fill it up. I’ve written a book that will help inspire you to do just this. It’s called, ‘The Care & Feeding of your Sketchbook’ and you can find it here.