Slow and meticulous vs fast and sloppy

Doing artworks fast is something that does not come naturally to me. I need to do more of it, because sometimes it gives good results. And it’s much quicker!

This is James / creating

I used to have the terrible habit of starting huge detailed images which would take forever to create and I would abandon when I made the slightest little mistake. So I would rarely complete a design. I’ve managed to get over that in several ways:

• Do smaller drawings that I am more likely to complete.
• Tolerate mistakes.
• Incorporate mistakes into the drawing.

There is another way which I’ve never been very good at, and that is doing artworks quickly. Often you can get a completely different kind of feeling with fast strokes of the pen or brush, and sometimes it works pretty well. This for example is a painting that I did a few years ago extremely quickly (for me). It’s not great, but it’s not crappy either and it has the energy that I wanted to convey:

(The fire is inspired by William Blake. Blake is really good at fire. I like the idea of black fire.)

Anyway, at the weekend I felt like doing something creative and painted some stones very quickly:

Crappy fast stone painting I did last weekend