'Goldfinches & Cornflowers' painting process

From concept to completion, a deep dive into the creation of this painting for a wildlife exhibition entry.

What I’ve discovered during my time writing newsletters, substack posts and creating work as an artist, is that I have very good intentions about what I’ll write create and share, but I fail to factor in two of my characteristics which often renders these good intentions obsolete:

1. My time optimism

2. My ability to be easily distracted

Both these characteristics have their pros and cons, being a time optimist makes me more ambitious, and when I’m distracted it’s often because my curiosity is being pulled towards something I find interesting. These things can be incredibly useful as a self-employed creative, but pretty bloody awful when it comes to project management and deadlines.

My time-optimism tendencies were in overdrive this month when I planned to share the process of a new painting using Deep Deep Light watercolours, plus complete a separate painting as a submission to the SWLA Natural Eye exhibition.

But then, with the submission deadline looming, I had a lightbulb moment. I would create one painting using watercolours and this would also be my entry to the exhibition. Huzzah!

Blackadder The Third

At first, I congratulated myself on coming up with this efficient plan, but soon I discovered two flaws which would make this grand idea a tricky one to put into practice.

Firstly, I tend to work in mixed media, not one single art material, so the issue I faced was, did I feel confident that I could create this submission using a self-imposed rule of only using Deep Deep Light watercolours? If my submission had been a simple study of a bird, then the answer would have been ‘yes’, however, issue number two was that part of the submission criteria was that the subject matter must be shown in its natural environment and not divorced from it. This meant putting the wildlife into context and creating a piece with a background, which, for me, posed more of a challenge and made me less confident about using only watercolours for the whole piece.

When faced with these challenges I had to make certain decisions:

• To have a chance of meeting the submission deadline, the subject matter needed to be one I was more familiar with and the composition of the piece not too complicated.

• I would disregard my rule of only using Deep Deep Light watercolours and use extra materials if needed. As it turned out, I used mostly watercolours for this piece so I only cheated a little bit.

I only had a day and a half from thumbnails to submitting the piece and although it wasn’t pleasant to work to such a tight deadline, it forced me to make quick decisions, not overthink the process and work more intuitively.

In the process video further down this post, I talk through each stage of the process and the video switches from real-time commentary to timelapse, but I thought it might be useful to list these stages here. By writing it down, I’ve surprised myself at how many stages are involved!

The ‘fiddly detail’ phase.