Print this pageSpeedpainting tutorial
Definition
Speedpainting is exactly what it sounds like... painting fast. It's a proven method for improving your artistic skills quickly, and it's a lot of fun! The point of speedpainting is not to worry about detail or producing a finished work, but to concentrate on the elements which make up an image - light, volume, proportion and color, etc.
Purpose
A lot of beginners become frustrated with their art because they get caught up in details and feel like they're not progressing outside their speciality. Speedpainting is a great way to get past that, because it teaches you to put aside detail in favor of learning to break an image up into its key parts, e.g. learning to paint an entire head which you can add fine detail to later, instead of spending an hour on the face and then giving up when you get to the hair because you don't feel confident enough to try it.
In time this skill will allow you to draw and paint absolutely anything because you'll learn to see your reference image not as a thing (cat, person, drapery), but as simply an arrangement of its parts (light, shadow, color, etc). To give you a better idea of what I'm talking about I've linked some examples below.
Animal speedpaint (40 minutes) | Nude speedpaint (12 minutes)
Mediums
Speedpainting can be done with any medium you like, although no-fuss mediums that are quick to set up and work with are usually best, e.g. painting software, watercolor, watercolor pencil, lead pencil, color pencil, graphite, charcoal, etc.
Timeframe
I tend to allow anywhere from five to ninety minutes for a speedpaint, but the amount of time you spend on it is really up to you. The important thing is not to get bogged down in detail because the point of the exercise is to learn to see the whole of the image, not isolated parts of it.
I highly recommend timing yourself as you work as this is a great way to stay on track and see how you're improving. You can use a stopwatch or just set your mobile phone to beep when your time's up.
In terms of how much how often, I can only really talk from personal experience, but I found that speedpainting for an hour a day dramatically improved my work within eight weeks. After that, two or three one hour sessions a week, combined with my normal drawing and painting, was generally enough to keep in practice.
Speedpainting Walkthrough
First I start my stopwatch so I can keep an eye on the amount of time I'm spending on the speedpaint. This stops me from fussing with unnecessary details. Next I load up my painting software and choose a reference image to work from.
Here I've chosen a simple landscape to use as my reference image. For the purpose of this tutorial I've pasted the landscape into my painting space, but I normally work on one canvas and keep the reference image on a separate canvas in the Painter workspace.
To start with I block in some basic colors for the grass, mountains and sky. I don't like the over-exposed white sky so I've made my sky blue.
The next step involves adding some basic clouds to the sky to give it some dimension, as well as blocking in the light and shadow of the mountains. Use as many tools as you like to get the look you're after... here I'm using the scratchboard and grainy water tools.
Next I paint in the trees. Pretty simple.
The grass and flowers come after that and I paint them with quick strokes that suggest what they are, rather than spending a lot of time painting every blade of grass and every flower petal.
Finally I add the date, and the time it took me to complete my painting, so I can look back in a few months and see how I've improved. If I wanted to improve my background painting, making speedpaintings like this a few times a week would be a great way to do that and the basic principles apply to any subject - people, costumes, hands, faces, animals, etc.
If you want to improve it simply speedpaint it for a while. If you prefer theme-based speedpainting to improve in general subjects visit ConceptArt.org's Daily Sketch Group and Sijun's Speedpainting Thread.