Creating a series of paintings

   For those who know me, the circle is my trade mark, it can even be seen in all the other pieces on this blog. Creating a perfect circle was much easier for me than creating a perfectly straight line, I'm not a ruler for crying out loud!

To push myself out of my comfort zone, I decided that I want to create a series of “straight line” compositions, and here I'll talk about the process that made me overcome my struggles.

Here are the steps I went through, click to see full image.

1. Find sources of inspiration, can be anything as long as it is somewhat relevant to what you want to achieve. For me it was:

 * Architecture

 * Power lines

 * Maps

 * Paper clippings as color samples

2. Create many different thumbnails of what your finished piece might look like. Don't spend too many time on those, here is where quantity is more important than quality. Create about 20+, the more, the better.

 3. Look through all of them, think and consult with others about what elements work in each piece and what doesn't work. Narrow down your favorites to about 5.

4. Select few that you are interested in working more on.

5. Create few additional variations of one or more piece on bigger scale. (giving example of just 1 selected piece, but I have done 3-5 variations for 4 other pieces that I have left behind, but they did serve as great studies, and I might come back to them and develop each into a series)

6. When you reach a point where you feel that you are happy with what you are doing, and see how it can turn into 3 or more painting, start working on the series!

I think the most important things were:
- The quantity over quality in the initial thumbnail paintings that allowed me to               experiment with many different styles
- The search for successful elements in each piece
- Doing a lot of writing about what I like and don't like, as I created them to avoid the    things that I don't like in the next piece.
- Changing the scale that I work on, some things that are done easily on small             scale, can be quite challenging on a bigger scale.