At the start of every year, I think about my students and try to come up with a lesson plan that will teach them better than the years past. It's getting harder to come up with a lesson plan because my weekly and many of my workshop students have really become very good at learning to be a wonderful watercolor artist.
As a
teacher, I cherish seeing my students succeed in learning to create great works of art. If I can help getting that student to achieve their goal then I have succeeded in my job.
This year my big "One Thing" that will be the most important lesson I teach my students will be to encourage them to paint more. Nothing teaches a student more than when that student sits down or stands and creates tons of paintings and sketches. One painting a week just is not
enough to help you achieve what most of my students want, which is becoming good at their craft.
I have seen first hand how well students do if they paint a lot. Many of those paintings may not be that great at first, but little by little the percentage of good to bad climbs dramatically the more the student paints.
Practice, practice, practice, and practice makes perfect may sound like a broken record but you will always hear this when trying to
get good at something. Well, I can tell you for certain that it works, I have seen it time and time again students that take my class and paint a lot get really good real quick!
Then there are the students and artists like myself that want to paint a lot but make many excuses for why they can't paint a lot. So let's try cutting out the excuses and just paint. If you are not certain what to paint or make the excuse that you have nothing to paint, start
copying the masters. I use too paint a lot of the master's works and it really does an artist good, just don't claim them as your own creations. They should be painted for you to learn. No more excuses, we can do this!
Let us all start encouraging each other and our artist friends to paint a lot!
Happy Creative New Years!
David
