Idea, composition and a lot of hard work

You need 3 things to start painting a painting:
A good idea, a suitable composition ... and hard work.
Personally I love what I call "hard work", because this is where the magic happens.
🎯 For more information about the painter Henrik Skorá go to: skora.dk/.
This video is about working with ideas, choosing a composition, and making the two of them come together through hard work: Spending time in front of the canvas really pays off. I will illustrate the part of hard work by showing the painting process from start to finish.
The easy part is really to get the idea, and then again the idea must be good, because a boring idea is a boring idea no matter what composition you choose and no matter how much work you put into it.
My video: "4 abstract painting ideas," is about the painting process, especially getting ideas for paintings.
Check it out here: • 4 ways to get ideas fo...
I sometimes know exactly what to paint, I get the idea “for free” as I say. And sometimes I don’t know.
Getting the idea for this painting was fun, and a little different than usually. I had this idea years ago, and I didn't really do anything with it. It was an idea to use the bird's nest as a motif in a painting. For some reason I didn't use the idea, I had other paintings in progress, and I dropped the idea several times.
I almost lost it until one windy autumn day it approached me in a very direct way. The wind had carried a little nest to me and and left it lying right in front of my door. Then, I understood there was no way around this hint, I had to use it.
After that I painted several versions of the nest-idea and in today’s painting I will use it again in a painting.
If an idea is good, it is still good again and again. I have no problem recycling my ideas and neither should you. I use an idea until I cannot add something new to it. I don’t paint the same painting again and again, mostly because it gets boring.
So now I have decided on the nest as a platform for my painting. Choosing the composition for it can be tricky because the rules of composition are many and complex.
Composition is a huge subject, and for many years I struggled with these rules on how to compose a painting … and to be honest, I still do. The composition in a painting is basically a way to control the journey of a viewer’s eyes to specific places in the painting and to make something stand out. A painting can be composed in such a way that we sense depth and perspective, beauty, emotions and even a whole story.
Many of the rules are ratio numbers and geometric measurements set in relation to each other, for instance ways of dividing lines or structures for space and colour experiences.
I don't deliberately think of the composition rules. I just paint, work intuitively and at some point the painting will be finished. As long as I feel confident about what to do, everything is fine. But sometimes I get stuck and can't see a way forward in a painting. In these situations the principles behind composition can be of great help to me, because they are giving me options … try this or try that.
It's not like: if only I knew the rules of how to compose a painting, all my difficulties would be over, and I don’t save the rules for a rainy day. It is rather that for many years I have implemented them in my brain so that they are constantly working for me in the background and helping me, when I paint.
As I said: The problem with the rules is, there are so many: My advice is … choose one of them, and if it works, keep it, if not … pick another.
In this video I pick one rule in order to demonstrate my process: The Golden Ratio, which has been a prominent element in the history of paintings and art. It’s believed to create pleasing and harmonious compositions. It brings a sense of balance and harmony to a painting, and can be used as a tool to enhance the visual impact and emotional resonance of a piece.
The Golden Ratio is found all over the place in nature and even in the proportions of human beings.
It is basically a certain ratio between the length of two line segments.
… and it is: a:b = b: a+b.
In practice it is easy to calculate the golden points on a line by dividing with 1.6, and in my view the rule fits nicely into the abstract painter’s toolbox, as it can bring some order into an abstract painting, when it seems that nothing else does. In other words it provides a framework for your painting.
This golden rule is making the process of painting easier.
Index:
00:00 Intro
00:30 Getting a good idea
01:36 Idea and rules of composition
02:20 The nest idea for this painting
03:15 Research
03:35. Rules of composition
06:40. The golden ratio
09:38 Painting tutorial
21:09. Finished painting
21:13 The development of painting
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