Developing ideas for painting | Kristin Rawcliffe Art (2024)

Developing ideas for painting can feel overwhelming, but it’s a brilliant exercise in creativity, and is much easier if you break the process into steps.

Building creativity

Whether or not you have a brief for a painting, it’s a really good exercise in creativity to develop a painting based on a word, phrase or theme.
Try to think of things that are relevant to you:

• Places you love
• Things that have happened to you in the past
• Things you particularly love drawing or painting – think of different ways you could portray them
• Your surroundings
• Your family
• The news
• A feeling you have at that moment
• Someone you admire
• A song you love
• A story you love
• A style that is very ‘you’

Initial concept

Sometimes the initial concept for a painting is vague, it might be a word, or a feeling, or an idea. Whether it’s from a client or from your own imagination, the first step is to brainstorm some ideas to try to see how you can capture initial thoughts and expand on the subject.

Writing your ideas down as a mind map, or a list, or finding pictures and colours to stick on a mood board will really help you to understand what is is you want to portray.
Think of associated words, images, symbols, concepts, phrases, song lyrics, stories, use google for inspiration; you’ll soon start to picture ideas rather than just having a starting word or phrase.

For example, when I decided to paint a self-portrait based on the stroke I had some years ago, I thought of all of the words that I felt at a particular moment when I was lying in bed after it happened.
Fear, twisting, tension, complicated were words that sprung to mind.
I also decided that my picture would have a distinction between left and right as it was my right side where I felt most problems.

For a recent painting I was given a brief of a ‘fresh start’. I tried to think of all of the words and ideas that signified new beginnings to me:

• Dawn
• Coming out of the trees
• Following a path
• Seeds growing
• Spring

From there I was able to think of colour schemes (light, dawn-influenced, spring-like, colourful) and come up with some very simple thumbnail sketches of landscapes and woods:

Developing the idea further

Once you have your idea written down, try to think of the visual elements that will help you portray it. Colours have psychological meaning and it’s worth using this to emphasise any emotional element to your picture. It’s also really useful to look at successful paintings to get ideas on composition, try to thumbnail sketch ideas based on layouts that you think work well.

With my stroke self-portrait I developed a colour palette based on the psychology of colour, playing with the idea of a difference between the two sides of my face so one emphasised the dark and fearful (greens and blacks) and the other was brighter and more hopeful.

I turned to look at paintings from the past for inspiration, I liked the moody colour palette and ‘split’ nature of a Matisse portrait. I added all my ideas to a mood board (above) to capture my thoughts and to put with some initial drawings before I started painting.