Nearly every artist will experience self-doubt. It can be excruciating. When you doubt yourself, you won’t present your work with confidence. To be able to finalise your work and convince customers to pay you for your craft, confidence is a must.
You’ll only develop confidence as an artist when you’re confident that all of your skills have been put to use in creating your work. Convince yourself that your work is finished, and then you’ll have an easier time persuading customers to buy your artwork.
3 Things to Help Artists Feel Comfortable Calling Their Work Finished
1. Turn Your Process into a Checklist
When you have a checklist to tick off tasks, you can work through your art in stages.
As an example, a painting may not start with the stroke of a thick brush made on gut instinct. Instead, it could be the thinnest brush in your collection or a charcoal pencil that’s used to establish the composition when sketching or drawing the outline for your painting.
Once a sketch is done, transparent colours can be added with paints mixed with OMS (odourless mineral spirits – a paint thinner) to introduce transparent colours as a base layer, then use opaque paint as your next step. Stage three could be the addition of shadows and reflections, and then by stage four, add some further definitions for clarification using thicker paints.
The last step could be adding in the finer details such as light emanating from a lamppost, house window, or plain old sunlight.
When you have a detailed plan of action, you don’t need to rely on asking others if your paintings are finished. It’ll be done when you’ve run through your checklist and marked each stage as completed.
Artists who are early on in their careers are forever second guessing and trying to perfect works that are already ready for release. It’s the self-doubt that keeps the work on your easel instead of being appreciated by someone who’d happily frame and display it professionally either with an art board frame or canvas floating frame, depending on your preferred medium to paint on. Both can be enhanced with a frame to add further depth.
2. Have a Quality Control Process
Established artists have recognisable names that their customers and the wider art communities attribute a certain quality toward. The quality of your work is in your control. Once you have your process mapped out, you can then make a list of common errors that you know you’re prone to.
Every artist in every medium has their shortfalls. When you know where your work falls short, you can better check for errors, such as oil paintings with parts looking sunken in, which could benefit from an additional layer or thicker paint.
But, and here’s the thing… it’s only really an error if you know how to fix it!
You can always learn for future pieces, but for the time being, if you don’t know the fix, you can consider it finished. For your next project, to avoid the pitfalls of (for example) dark patches in an oil painting, you could add an extra layer of thicker paint into your process, or alternatively, work on a less absorbent material such as artist’s panels, which give artists better control over absorbency.
On the other hand, gesso adds texture and that helps pull the paint off the brush. Depending on how heavy handed or not you are, you may need more or less texture to avoid having too much paint absorbed into the board or canvas.
3. Continue learning
Every successful person in every field becomes an expert because they understand that they are lifelong students who are always learning.
Rarely is art considered perfect in the eyes of the artist. Artists are their own biggest critics. There’s always going to be something niggling that can take you hours trying to perfect, only to find it makes the situation worse. Every piece is a learning process.
It has taken many established artists decades to get comfortable with their processes, learn what materials they work best with, how to get the right shade, absorbency, and contrast, and create paintings that stand the test of time without cracking.
Keep your eye on the prize and keep on pushing forward, always learning, never perfecting, but instead, checking for errors that you know how to fix, and learning the fixes for the things you don’t know yet. Until you know the fix for things that you don’t like, you won’t be able to finish to the standards that you expect from yourself.
Customers buy art based on their appreciation, and the emotions your work conjures. As the saying goes, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. Where you see imperfections, others see originality.