Ninety-Ninety Rule for Art-Making
This week, we talk about the agony that’s associated with finishing.
Last fall, I had a turning point when I started making digital art. I’m not giving up painting, though. There will be just fewer oil paintings this year.
New Start
This year’s first oil painting started already in October last year. First, I made a mess with pastel hues. Then I began to figure out what kind of personality the painting could be.
This kind of intuitive painting is wonderful and for example, my latest course Liberated Artist Revisited is based on it. Instead of the model, we study the painting itself and let it go in its own direction.
When I paint, I often listen to some talk or music program at the same time, that’s why the iPad is also visible in these pictures.
Ninety-Ninety Rule
Programming and painting have a lot in common. One of those is definitely the ninety-ninety rule. It states that 90 percent of the work is done effortlessly and takes only 10 percent of the time. And the remaining 10 percent is difficult and takes 90 percent of the time!
For example, in this part of the painting my intuition was working fluently, and finishing these details was also easy. I especially like that beige flower near the edge.
But the further the painting progressed, the less often I worked on it. I wasn’t satisfied with the center and the soul of the painting was missing. I looked at it every day, but all my ideas seemed too ordinary.
Then when I finished the video artwork last week, I suddenly got ideas for the painting. First, I brought similar greenish tones and then, by keeping my mind on the video, I solved the puzzle stroke by stroke!
The name was now easy to find: Käännekohta – Turning Point.
The ninety-ninety rule applies to the fond factor as well. It’s easier to like an unfinished painting than one that is close to a finish. When under 90 percent, you can see the potential and ignore the unpleasant parts by saying that the piece is not ready yet. When working on the last 10 percent, things get more complicated and there are times when you hate the piece!
Old Supports New
During big changes, I have often thought that I leave the old completely and jump fully into the new. But this time I feel that the old and the new support each other.
Life is an interaction between the past and the present and that applies to art-making as well.
Liberated Artist Revisited
With the newest course Liberated Artist Revisited, I invite you to paint with me – to follow directions from Paivi many years ago, and then create more with the current Paivi. At the same time, you can ponder, how your art-making has changed and will change.
Liberated Artist Revisited is a limited edition – only available for purchase until the end of March 2024! >> Buy Now!
Artist’s Life – Starting New Media Art
This week, I share my latest new media art and thoughts about my career as an artist. This is a sequel to the blog post called Beginner’s Video Art that was published last month.
Unstill Still Life – Video Art
The video above is my latest artwork “Unstill Still Life.” I have done this largely by programming. I have developed generative algorithms that create and alter shapes. I have designed the individual shapes with a 3D modeling program called Blender. The models and the code are put together with the Unity Engine which is a software environment for developing games.
Inspiration from an Old Painting
With the artwork, I participated in the Finnish National Gallery’s Web3 community Alusta challenge called “Nature and Nourishment.” The Finnish National Gallery has many copyright-free images and the organization encourages artists to use them for creating new media art.
I have taken inspiration for the colors and surfaces, as well as the concept itself, from Fanny Churberg’s 1876 painting “Still Life with Vegetables and Fish.”
I love old paintings, so this challenge was made for me. It’s so interesting to examine the brush strokes and think about the 3-dimensional shapes that they are related to. And I have so much to learn in making generative art, that I need small challenges to keep heading forward.
I Will Continue Painting, But …
I am still going to continue painting traditionally but I also want to start a career in new media art. I want to bring back my skills in programming from the years when I was a software engineer and use those for creating art. I also have a degree in Industrial Design that helps a lot with 3D modeling. The grant that I received from The Finnish Cultural Foundation has enabled me to develop my style in new media.
But all this is not only exciting but hard too. Do you know that feeling that comes when you have to start life over again? There is enthusiasm in the air, but also some “oh no”.
Building a CV
For a full-time artist, most opportunities are based on a CV.
That was not a problem when I graduated in software design in 1996. I thought: “I have plenty of time to grow my CV.” Then, when I graduated as an industrial designer in 2009, life seemed to be halfway over, but I was able to get quite a decent CV by combining some old and new projects.
When I started working as a full-time visual artist in 2014, I didn’t think about CVs at all at first.
The picture above is from 2015 when most of my art was in art journal pages.
But when I moved forward in painting, the reality hit me – it was very hard to get accepted to exhibitions and organizations without a CV. Mine was practically blank at first, and it has taken a lot of time and effort to add rows to it.
The picture above is from last summer at the exhibition organized by The Albert Edelefelt Foundation. See more pics in this blog post!
New Media Art – New Career?
And just when I thought that life was almost over at the age of 55, this new media digital art came into my life and it hit me – I’m a beginner again with an empty CV. So, I need and want to participate in challenges, competitions, and exhibitions, to get accepted again. And I want to believe that I still have time to create this new kind of art, not only paintings.
Some leaves of the big plant are connected to an invisible virtual camera that moves around and sends a mirror image to them.
I learn new things about generative art every day and I am amazed that I have been given this long life to experience it. Gratitude is the overriding emotion that emerges from this new beginning. I am lucky in what I have seen in the development of information technology and what I have been able to develop and be involved in developing in the past. I want my future CV to tell the story of a girl who wanted to become an artist as a child, who fell in love with computers as a teenager, and who finally has the artistic vision and the technical tools to combine the two.
Looking Back Enables Seeing Forward
If you have been following my blog for a while, you must have noticed that my blog posts are often self-reflective like this one. Visual art-making needs self-reflection too. It’s useful to go back and see how things have changed to make future changes and take steps forward.
With the newest course Liberated Artist Revisited, I invite you to paint with me – to follow directions from Paivi many years ago, and then create more with the current Paivi. At the same time, you can ponder, how your art-making has changed and will change.
Liberated Artist Revisited is a limited edition – only available for purchase until the end of March 2024! >> Buy Now!
5 Tips for Quick Abstract Flowers
This week, we paint quick abstract flowers freely without any references.
I have a black Dylusions Creative Journal and make small paintings there occasionally. It is especially good when there’s still paint left on the palette at the end of the painting session. I think it makes sense to use all the paint, and not throw the leftovers in the trash.
I don’t use any gesso but paint directly on the page.
When I painted pieces for the course Liberated Artist Revisited, I noticed that there had been a long break in acrylic painting and some of the tubes had started to harden.
It motivates me to paint in the black art journal again because I don’t want those paints to go to waste. And sometimes it’s nice to paint something small quickly and see what comes out most effortlessly.
Quick Abstract Flowers – Five Tips!
I like painting abstract flowers, and thick paints are very suitable for abstract flower paintings. Here are my five tips for painting flowers quickly.
1) Start from the Old Mess
The fastest way is to start from an old painting.
I have a lot of pages in my journal where I’ve hastily painted shapes with leftover paints.
Continuing the beautiful mess feels much more effortless than starting a new one from the beginning.
For example, here’s one page that still waits its turn to become a finished painting.
Most of my beginning messes are much more messy though!
2) Dark-Bright-Light
Include all three degrees of darkness in one painting.
Make color mixes and compare them in terms of darkness. By including all three – dark, bright, and light – you can achieve depth and atmosphere.
Make clear larger areas so that you can point to different places in the background and say, there is dark, there is bright, and there is light.
Flowers can have all three – dark, bright, and light colors.
3) Forget the Real Flowers!
Don’t think too much about the real flowers.
Don’t think about what a rose looks like or what flowers you want in your painting. All that stiffens your expression.
Focus on the colors and let the flowers form from the brushstrokes.
After all, a flower is just a few colorful strokes and a line for the stem.
Use your imagination when you look at your work in progress!
4) Leave Room for Spirit
Not everything needs to be defined or look like a flower.
Flowers are concrete matter, so let the colors express the spirit!
If you want to be extra quick, sharpen just one flower near the center and leave the others more abstract and vague.
5) No Forced Feelings
Open yourself up to an emotional experience.
The speed of the painting depends highly on how soon you get an emotional connection with yourself and what you are doing. Let even the darkest thoughts come. For creativity, everything genuine is equally good.
The beauty of making art is that imagination creates abundance and eternal life from almost nothing – from the leftover paint and leftover energy. And the more often you create, the more you get out of it!
Liberated Artist Revisited – Buy Now!
In Liberated Artist Revisited, we time-travel to meet the teacher – Paivi from 2015, and create new art with her.
This course is both for the left and right brain. The young Paivi gives systematic instructions while the older Paivi enjoys her freedom and ponders about art-making and life in general.
Liberated Artist Revisited is a limited edition – only available for purchase until the end of March 2024! >> Buy Now!
New Beginnings in Art-Making
Let’s think about new beginnings and give one to our art-making!
In recent months, I have felt that a new era has begun in my life. It has been surprising. I have thought that I am already too old for anything new – that the new beginnings in life have already been experienced, at least in terms of working life. But it just so happened that my work as an artist has a new beginning thanks to the grant for creating digital art.
At the same time, I have gained a new perspective on the past and my artistic development. Now, it feels that life with its changes is full of new beginnings, and art, too, is full of them! There are big beginnings and then smaller beginnings within them.
Valuing Randomness and Intuition
I developed the latest course Liberated Artist Revisited, because I wanted to relive the idea of the old course Liberated Artist. I wanted to relive that time in 2015 when a new beginning meant letting go of excessive control and surrendering to happy accidents and intuition. Because isn’t it the case that whenever a new era begins, we need faith in chance and intuition – so, the art of letting go!
At the current new beginning, I have been thinking about what I have to give up. Because, couldn’t you say that life with its changes is full of not only beginnings, but endings, and ask if the same applies to art? While making the course Liberated Artist Revisited, I listened to Paivi from 2015.
Younger Paivi was very prompt: Step A and Step B and so on. If I compare her and I, I am partly different and partly similar. I would do some things differently now but in many ways., I am still quite the same artist. The new course Liberated Artist Revisited is a dialogue between the old and the new. You could also say that I have changed as an instructor a bit. Nowadays, I want to open up your artistic thinking, not so much to exclude options.
Life is so grand that everything that once had a beginning, stays in our hearts for a long time, even if it has ended. It’s the same in art. I can smile at Päivi after more than eight years, but not ironically, but warmly. “It’s wonderful to create something new with you again,” I say to young Päivi, and it’s also wonderful to invite you all to a new course again!
Liberated Artist Revisited – Buy Now!
Liberated Artist Revisited is a limited edition – only available for purchase until the end of March 2024! >> Buy Now!