How I Keep Track Of My Upcoming Art Projects

​I think it’s very important to have a place for your reference photos, so when you’re ready to paint something, you’re searching all over your computer for that photo. So I have this file among the pictures in my computer called, “reference photos” and anything that I think I might want to use for a painting or drawing, whether it’s a photo I took myself, one I have permission to use, goes in this folder. Even doing just this one thing, makes things so much easier for me, because when it’s time to start a new project, all I have to do is go to this folder and choose one of the photos I’ve saved.

​Another thing I like to do is name photos that I’m particularly interested in. Not every photo I put in the “reference photos” folder will necessarily become a painting or drawing, but if I feel one will, because I just love it that much, I like to give it a name so I can find it easily. I don’t know about other people, but I remember names I give things more easily than I remember the names they had when I downloaded them, or what name my phone gave them. If I need to credit the photographer, I will include his or her name in the title as well. The name I give to the photo may not what I end up calling the resulting painting. It’s just to help me be more organized.

For example, I named this photo, "Duck On A Pond", which is probably what I'll call the painting I'm going to make from it.

​The last thing I’m going to talk about is not the something I’ve been doing so far, but it’s something I think I’m going to start and that’s writing a list of the painting projects I have in my mind that I know for sure that I want to do. First of all, it’s not good to keep things up in our heads. Writing things down is very freeing. I heard someone say, your brain is for having ideas not holding ideas. The second reason for doing this is it’ll help me be organized a bit more than just having all my reference photos in one place, because when I finish with one project, if I don’t know what to do next, I could refer to my list and there’s my next painting. Just like with the names I give to the photos, the titles I write down on this list, don’t necessarily have to be what I’m going to call the finished pieces. They just have to descriptive enough that I know what it is, because this list is for me.