Trust The Process

It’s a crystalline watercolour portrait painting today.

I followed my usual process by:

• creating a three value plan using the Notanizer app
• putting down pencil outlines of the value shapes using a grid
• masking out all the highlights
• sprinkling crystals over all the darks and running a wet brush through them, only using short strokes and cleaning the brush after every stroke, allowing colours to merge together without prompting
• once dry, sprinkling crystals over the midtones, spraying them with water, leaving for a few seconds and then pressing down with kitchen paper to remove all the water
• swiping any rogue wet crystals in the dark areas to add a bit of streaky energy to the background and to not confuse it with the midtones
• removing the masking fluid

And, as usual, this painting looked nothing like the subject right until the very end when the masking fluid came off and he strode forwards victorious out of the paper. When doing a painting like this, it’s important to trust the process. Do this and the results will come.

Someone else who knows how important it is to trust the process is Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta. Just like me today he trusted the process and ended up as a winner. Mikel is up for sale, with the price to be found here.