Small Stroke Big Impact

I find it so exciting to see how something as seemingly insignificant as a small stroke paint , can make a massive difference in a painting.

​Last Thursday night when I was painting, I picked up my script liner brush and started applying small strokes of titanium white and after just one or two strokes, I saw such a difference.

​I wish I had a picture of my painting after I’d added just those first couple strokes so I could show you the before, with no white fur strokes, and after, with just two white fur strokes.

​I don't often think about how much of an impact a small add on can have. But I started marveling at this fact when I saw what those white strokes were doing for my painting.

​The thing is, I didn't know that those little white strokes were what my painting needed, but I'm confident now that my painting could not have been complete without them.

​Besides painting and drawing, I've also come to love cooking in the past few years and I hear cooks say all the time that adding just a little bit of a particular ingredient will make such a difference to the recipe.

​I need to point out something important, though. I just talked about cooking and we know that not just any old ingredient is going to create a mind blowing recipe, right? It has to be the right ingredient. Well, the same thing applies to art. I said earlier that I used my script liner brush to apply these strokes and that was the key. The lines had to extremely thin and that brush was the only one that could help me accomplish it.

If I’d used a round brush, or a filbert brush, or any other brush, it would not have been the same.

​So for a word of caution, yes, you can create a big impact with a tiny stroke, but only if you’re using the right brush, the right color, putting that color in the right place and using the brush the right way.

​I know I said not to agonize over color choice in another video, and I’m not taking that back, but you will have to get everything right, including color, in order to make a giant impact with a tiny stroke.

​I mean, there were points where I could see that the titanium white was not having an impact in some places and that was because I needed the transparent mixing white for those places.

​Also just because you see that a couple of tiny strokes are making this huge difference in your painting, doesn’t mean you can stop there, necessarily. Sometimes, you just need a little smudge of color somewhere to make your painting right, but even after I saw that those first couple of strokes were having such a big impact, I kept going and making more strokes because that’s what my painting needed. If you do this, you’ll just watch that impact grow with each stroke.

​So have you ever done something small in a project and seen it make a world of difference? Tell me in the comments.

Before

After