Painting Tips & Mindset

Why Most Artists Start a Painting in the Wrong Place

If your paintings ever feel stiff or overwhelming before you’ve even started — I know why.

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If your paintings ever feel stiff or overwhelming before you’ve even started, I know why. And I promise, it’s not because you lack talent or need more technique. It’s something much simpler than that. It’s about where your eye goes first.

The Detail Trap

Are you falling into the detail trap?

I see this happen all the time. An artist sits down in front of a landscape — or a still life, or a portrait — and their eye immediately jumps to the detail. The bench in the foreground. The angles of the tree branches. The shape of the clouds. And before they’ve even picked up a brush, they’re already feeling overwhelmed.

I can almost hear you say… hmm yes, I do that!

This is what I call the detail trap. Because the moment your brain zooms in on detail, it stops really seeing the scene in front of you. It starts drawing what it thinks things look like — a tree, a bench, a cloud — rather than what’s actually there. And the result is paintings that feel tight, stiff, or just a little bit… off.

“Stop asking yourself ‘what is that?’ and start asking ‘what shape is that?’ — it changes everything.”

Train Your Eye

See shapes first

What you want to do — especially at the very start of a painting — is pull back and look for the big shapes before anything else. Here’s a trick I love: squint at your reference image. Notice how the detail blurs away? What you’re left with are the big shapes. Areas of light, areas of dark, mid-tones. That’s your starting point.

In the video I work through a busy park scene — the kind of image that feels incredibly overwhelming at first glance. But when you squint at it and start looking for shapes rather than things, it suddenly becomes manageable. A large light shape of sky. A darker mass of tree. A mid-tone ground area. That’s really all it is. I do a quick demo working in greyscale — just two colours — blocking in those big shapes loosely. And what you end up with, even in five minutes, is the skeleton of a painting that actually works.

The Right Order

Big Shapes → Medium Shapes → Detail

Here’s the order I always come back to:

• ✦ Big shapes first. Get those large areas in. Sky, ground, main masses. Don’t worry about anything else yet.
• ✦ Medium shapes next. Once the big shapes feel right, you can start to refine and break things down further.
• ✦ Detail last. And only where it really matters. Too much detail everywhere is one of the things that makes a painting feel busy and flat.

The key is not being in a hurry to get to the detail too quickly. We all want to get to the ‘good bit’ — but working this way is genuinely so much easier than trying to build a painting from the detail up.

A Few Extra Tips

See the world like an artist

• ✦ Convert to greyscale. If you’re working from a photo, try converting it to black and white first. It strips away the colour and makes the shapes and values much easier to read.
• ✦ Use a viewfinder. Cut a small rectangle out of a piece of card and hold it up to your scene. It frames things beautifully and eliminates the overwhelm.
• ✦ Thumbnail sketches. A few tiny rough sketches — mapping out your big shapes — takes two minutes and saves you so much time later.
• ✦ Squint regularly as you paint. Not just at the start. Come back to squinting throughout to check your values are reading correctly.
• ✦ Look at the Masters for this. Next time you look at a Monet, a Turner, a Sargent — notice how the big shapes are doing all the heavy lifting. The detail is there, but it’s sitting on top of a really solid foundation of simple, well-placed shapes. That’s the secret.

“When you train yourself to see like an artist, it opens up a whole new door of opportunity. It’s not just about technique — it’s about how you look at the world.”

Why This Matters

The artists who make the biggest leaps

The artists who make the biggest leaps — the ones who go from feeling stuck to genuinely loving their work — aren’t always the ones who just learn new techniques. They’re the ones who learn to see differently. When you train your eye to look for shapes, to simplify, to see the world more like an artist does — it changes everything. Not just your paintings, but how you walk around and look at things.

Happy painting — and remember. Shapes first.

Michelle x