Book summary “Daily painting”: summary

Introduction

You buy massive canvases, wait for grand bursts of inspiration, and spend months agonizing over a single painting. Perfectionism paralyzes you, procrastination steals your time, and your skills stall because you rarely finish anything.

Carol Marine offers a liberating alternative in Daily Painting. The central idea is that painting small formats frequently removes emotional pressure, accelerates your artistic growth, and builds a sustainable online art career.

The book guides you through establishing strict studio routines, selecting efficient materials, and mastering values, color mixing, and composition. You will learn how to navigate artist blocks, photograph your work properly, and sell your art directly to collectors online.

• How do you build a daily painting habit without burning out?
• What essential tools do you need in a small studio space?
• How do you price and sell your art on the internet?

1. The Daily Painting Movement and Routine

Daily painting is a movement where artists create small paintings frequently and sell their work directly over the Internet. Duane Keiser started a blog called A Painting a Day and listed small paintings on eBay starting at $100, which proved that an artist could make a living this way. Carol Marine discovered daily painting in 2006.

Painting small formats frequently and establishing a strict studio routine removes emotional pressure and accelerates artistic growth.

Benefits of Painting Small and Often

Small paintings require less time and lower material costs, which drastically reduces emotional attachment and the fear of failure. This freedom encourages artists to experiment wildly and learn faster than they would by spending weeks on a single large piece. 6 by 6 inches is a very common daily painting size used by many artists, and each panel costs approximately $1.

Carol Marine produced two hundred paintings in less than a year, growing more than she had in the previous five years combined. Building your painting muscle requires accumulating brush miles through frequent repetition rather than slow hesitation over precious canvases.

Practice paintings should be treated as ephemeral workout sessions rather than precious masterpieces. Carol Marine immediately wiped off her very first daily painting because she hated both the process and the result. You can avoid hoarding unsuccessful experimental pieces by following clear rules:

• keep practice paintings only to document progress or give them away if explicitly asked;
• wipe off bad paintings and reuse the surface if the medium allows;
• make a stack of fast-drying practice pieces and throw them out at regular intervals.

My Daily Routine

Establishing a firm start time and eliminating distractions helps artists overcome procrastination and maintain a consistent studio practice. Treating studio time as a legitimate job and setting hard boundaries around distractions protect the creative process. Simple administrative and sharing tasks can be efficiently batched into a daily routine.

Carol Marine sets her daily painting goal to start no later than 10 a.m. and turns off her computer and phone to maintain deep focus. You should follow practical steps to protect your creative energy:

• call it work to lend legitimacy to your studio time;
• turn off the computer or close email and social media programs;
• refuse to answer phone calls except for absolute emergencies;
• listen to music using cordless headphones to escape distractions.

Efficiently manage the administrative overhead of daily painting with tight time limits:

• take 2 minutes to take a picture of the daily painting;
• spend 3 minutes to load and edit the picture on the computer;
• use 5 to 30 minutes to post to the blog;
• spend 1 minute to create an auction;
• take 20 minutes to ship off a sold painting.

2. Studio Materials and Subject Matters

Equipping your studio with efficient tools and choosing controlled subjects like still lifes provides a solid foundation for daily creation.

My Materials

A studio easel from David Sorg costs about $700 and features counterweights for easy adjustments up and down. Sandpaper grips firmly hold canvas edges. You can stand comfortably all day by placing a 12-foot by 3-foot Cadillac mat from uline.com in front of the easel.

A friction-based panel holder allows you to paint all the way to the edges and bottom of small painting panels without obstruction. The author's husband invented the device to accommodate small Ampersand Gessobord panels ranging from 4 by 4 inches to 6 by 8 inches. A tool cabinet from a home improvement store serves as an affordable taboret. A palette paper pad sits on top, allowing you to mix oil paint and move big piles to the next page with a palette knife when full.

Smooth hardwood panels gessoed multiple times offer a great surface once paired with softer synthetic brushes rather than stiff bristle brushes. You should avoid student-grade surfaces to prevent constant frustration.

Mixing specific proportions of stand oil, linseed oil, and odorless mineral spirits creates a homemade medium that extends paint strokes and leaves a varnishing sheen.

You can create this custom oil medium using these steps:

• Mix one part stand oil with two parts linseed oil and one part odorless mineral spirits.
• Cover the mixture when not in use and replenish the evaporated odorless mineral spirits about once a month.
• Dip the corner of the brush into the medium until it breaks the surface, mix it into a small pile of oil paint, and then paint.

Murphy Oil Soap cleans brushes faster while leaving them soft and conditioned. A tennis ball cut in half provides a gentle rubber texture to massage the soap into the bristles without damaging ferrules.

You can restore damaged bristles using this procedure:

• Fill a jar partly with straight Murphy Oil Soap for severely dried brushes, place them bristles down without soaking the metal ferrules, let sit for twenty-four hours, and clean as usual.
• Use the inside of a tennis ball cut in half to rub the soap and bristles together during regular cleaning.

Subject Matters

Still life is an ideal subject for daily painters because it offers total control over arrangement, lighting, and timing without complications. Artists like Victor Tristante, Julie Ford Oliver, Raymond Logan, and Kara Bigda rely on still lifes to create deep compositional control and explore three-dimensionality.

You can set up a still life using these steps:

• Wander around the house to look for simple objects like fruit, vegetables, mugs, plates, silverware, vases, or flowers.
• Find a simple one-color background using paper or fabric and set up the still life.
• Test different lights from various angles and adjust the height of the table.
• Crop the scene with a viewfinder, take time to find an exciting composition, and paint it.

Cameras compress the full range of values the human eye can see, often rendering shadows completely black and skies stark white. Barbara Jaenicke and Robin Weiss note that while photos help when weather or time prohibits outdoor painting, direct experience with plein air painting teaches artists how light truly falls.

Walking through local neighborhoods and scanning everyday urban scenes yields rich material for cityscapes. The author transforms morning photographs taken in San Francisco into compact cityscape studies like Shadowy Corner.

You can capture urban scenes using these steps:

• Take a walk around the neighborhood with a camera and look for interesting scenes with an open mind.
• Take numerous pictures and review them on a computer screen.
• Squint at each image to judge the composition and value structure.
• Choose one image, crop it, and match it to a painting surface with the same dimensions before painting.

3. Value, Color Mixing, and Drawing

Mastering values through squinting, balancing limited color palettes, and measuring proportions ensures your small paintings are visually compelling.

Value

Value is the lightness or darkness of a color and serves as the most critical element for depicting three-dimensional objects and ensuring online thumbnails stand out. Accurate values let you play around with proportion, color, and looseness. To see values accurately, you must constantly squint to view the big picture and prevent detail-itis.

• Close one eye and squint the other.
• Take off your glasses if you wear them.

Dynamic value compositions rely on unevenly distributed values categorized as dominant, secondary, and smidge amounts. Arranging values so that one takes up most of the space, another takes up a secondary amount, and a tiny bit serves as a focal point creates a much more interesting image than an even split. Qiang Huang's Everlasting Rose is dark dominant, mid secondary, and light smidge, while Oriana Kacicek's First Kiss/True Love is mid dominant, light secondary, and dark smidge.

• Set up a still life so you have dominant, secondary, and smidge values.
• Use a viewfinder to find your composition.
• Tone your panel or canvas with burnt umber and a little OMS, wipe down to a mid-value, paint in darks, and wipe out for lights.
• Mix a range of three values between black and white, using straight black and white for your fourth and fifth values.

Color Mixing

Mixing colors using a limited palette of the three primary colors plus white and burnt umber creates cohesive paintings by harnessing the power of grays. Every shadow contains red, blue, yellow, and possibly white. Too much saturated color overwhelms a composition, so grays act as a supporting cast that makes saturated colors stand out. In paintings like Beloved and Straight Up Egg measuring 5 to 7 inches, using straight tube colors makes objects too light and saturated, whereas mixing primaries creates realistic, complex hues.

• Write your colors and how they lean on a strip of paper and put it directly above your palette for reference.
• Set up a paint card sample five feet away from your palette in the same light and try mixing a color to match it.

Because paint colors lean toward other primary colors, you must account for these hidden components when mixing saturated secondary colors or grays. No paint color is pure, meaning every color contains bits of other colors. Adding an unintended third primary into a mix reduces its saturation and makes it grayer. Michael Wilcox's book Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green explains this concept in great detail.

• Mix cadmium yellow light and cadmium red medium to make the most saturated orange.
• Mix cadmium yellow lemon and phthalo blue to make the most saturated green.
• Mix permanent rose and ultramarine blue to make the most saturated purple.

Drawing and Proportion

Mastering proportion through daily sketching and using a viewfinder ensures that small-scale daily paintings have well-resolved compositions. Without a viewfinder, you tend to place subjects directly in the middle. Halfway marks on viewfinders and panels allow you to accurately map boundaries without tedious gridding. Carol Marine compared her poorly proportioned roommate sketch from 1996 with her realistic self-portrait from 2000 to demonstrate improvement through daily drawing.

• Cut a square or rectangular hole in cardboard matching your canvas proportions to make a viewfinder.
• Mark halfway points along the edges of your viewfinder and canvas.
• Draw boundaries of each object using straight lines before rounding out shapes.
• Wipe the drawing lightly with a dry paper towel until only a ghost image remains.

You must actively ignore what your brain tells you objects look like and instead measure proportions and angles using a paintbrush and thumb. Brains categorize objects by facts rather than visual reality, such as seeing a cup bottom as flat when viewed from above. Measuring ratios and checking angles prevents distorted drawings. Clinton Hobart's Apples and Grapes and Sarah Sedwick's Springtime Romance demonstrate correct perspective and converging lines.

• Hold your arm straight out with your brush straight up and down to measure proportional lengths and ratios.
• Stand up while painting and back up every few strokes to notice hidden mistakes.
• Turn your drawing backward using a mirror to spot leaning objects.

Complex ellipses on round objects can be accurately drawn by systematically mapping boundaries, establishing a cross, and treating quadrants as mirror images. Perspective makes the sides of cups taper toward the bottom and turns circular tops into elliptical curves where each of the four quadrants mirrors its neighbors. Elena Katsyura's Teacup and Mandarin illustrates correct proportions and ellipse rendering on panel.

• Locate the five boundaries of a cup and its ellipse including top, bottom, and farthest left and right points.
• Draw a vertical and horizontal cross halfway between the ellipse marks.
• Extend the lines of the cross to the edges of the ellipse.
• Round out the ellipse by making each of the four quadrants a mirror image of the adjacent ones.

4. Composition and Wet-in-Wet Technique

Applying compositional rules and working from the inside out in alla prima painting keeps your brushwork fresh and dynamic.

Composition

Dynamic compositions require avoiding identical intervals in spacing, size, and distance because the human eye craves variety. Derived from Greg Albert, the fundamental rule of composition states that no two intervals of distance, length, spacing, and dimensions of shapes should be the same. This principle of variety applies universally to shapes, values, colors, saturations, edges, brush stroke directions, and warm-to-cool balances.

In Karin Jurick's 6 x 3 in. painting Going Swimmingly, 2012, a dominant amount of blue and a lesser amount of orange creates a dynamic image. Brian Burt uses toned-down colors with a pop of bright green for a frog in his 6 x 6 in. Squash, 2011. Other small studies include Laurel Daniel's 8 x 6 in. Clear Day Study, 2013, Kimberley Santini's 5 x 8 in. Blue Skies, 2012, and Dreama Tolle Perry's 12 x 12 in. A Beautiful Day Awaits, 2013. Setting up a 6 by 6-inch painting can take up to two hours.

Placing focal points away from the exact center and avoiding visual traps like kissing objects prevents static and awkward compositions. Placing subjects on the intersections of the rule of thirds naturally builds in variety by keeping objects away from dead centers and canvas edges.

• Trust only your instinct at first.
• If it looks awkward, keep moving things around.
• Give yourself a fair amount of time.
• If the composition just isn't happening, put it aside and save it for later.
• If an element isn't helping the composition, take it out.
• Always be open to completely changing the setup.
• Don't settle on something so-so.
• When your arrangement is almost working, consult the rules.
• Avoid putting anything super important right in the middle horizontally or vertically.
• Avoid putting anything too close to the edge.
• Either move touching objects apart or overlap them.
• Avoid any object or line just barely touching the edge of the canvas.
• Try a zigzag instead of a row of objects.
• Turn weird-side subjects around or replace them rather than excusing them.

In the demonstration painting Orderly Apples, 2013, the author intentionally breaks several rules by centering a plate, using an even number of objects, and aligning a fork and spoon in a row to demonstrate how rule-breaking can still yield functional results.

Practicing multiple varied compositions of simple objects under different lighting conditions builds compositional intuition. Limiting the props helps focus entirely on arranging shapes, vantage points, and lighting setups without getting overwhelmed by complexity.

• Choose a simple cup or object from around the house.
• Select four pieces of paper that are different colors but go well together.
• Create and paint four different compositions using just these four objects.
• Try different vantage points and lighting from different angles.
• Don't paint until you're excited about each composition.

Staying Fresh and Loose with Oil

Applying a thin, wiped-off ground color before painting covers white canvas and allows undertones to unify the wet-into-wet work. In alla prima painting or wet-into-wet painting, putting down a ground layer establishes mood and provides an underlying tone. The ground color is often chosen as the complement of the dominant color in the painting, though burnt umber or neutral tones are preferred when painting subjects with heavy white to avoid chalkiness or unwanted tinting.

Cathleen Rehfeld preps panels with black gesso ahead of time for Silly Chickens, 2013. In the 5 x 7 in. Escape from Alcatraz, 2012, a neutral burnt umber ground was used instead of a blue complement to avoid muddying orange flowers. Additional works include the 6 x 6 in. Cowabunga, 2010, and the 6 x 6 in. Green Squash, 2007.

• Apply a thin layer of paint thinned with OMS before anything else.
• Wipe the ground evenly with a paper towel so it is not too wet.
• Choose a ground color by identifying the dominant color and considering its complement.
• Avoid using white or phthalo in the ground.

Working from the most vulnerable areas to the least vulnerable prevents color contamination and keeps brushwork clean in alla prima painting. Vulnerable areas are isolated islands of color or highly saturated regions that would be muddied if surrounding background areas were painted first. By painting the focal subject and saturated light sides before shadow mixtures and backgrounds, and by extending paint past drawn edges to be reshaped later, the subject integrates naturally into its environment without looking cut out.

In the 6 x 6 in. Watermelon Soup, 2011, a complex composition of islands within islands was painted systematically in numerical order from 1 to 9. Other examples include the 6 x 6 in. All Off, 2013, the 5 x 7 in. Tan Room with Flowers, 2012, and the 14 x 14 in. Opposing Forces in NYC, 2013.

• Draw the composition lightly and wipe off excess paint to leave a ghost image.
• Paint vulnerable islands before surrounding oceans.
• Paint the most saturated light areas first, followed by transition zones and form shadows.
• Paint background and ocean areas last, reshaping edges carefully.
• Add highlights, stems, and small details as the final step.

Avoiding common pitfalls like using insufficient paint, heavy attachment, and rigid adherence to drawing lines prevents muddy and stiff artwork. Student work often suffers from specific habits that undermine freshness, such as being too cheap with paint quantity and quality, failing to clean brushes properly, maintaining rigid tunnel vision on small areas, and treating drawing lines as absolute laws.

• Use sufficient paint and quality materials.
• Clean brushes frequently and thoroughly.
• Release emotional attachment to every piece as a masterpiece.
• Compare values and colors across the entire painting instead of having tunnel vision.
• Avoid fussing over details and step back to see the big picture.
• Allow strokes to stray beyond drawing lines to maintain looseness.

Timed thumbnail painting exercises force simplification and build instinctive responses to value, color, and brush strokes. Setting strict time limits prevents overworking details and teaches artists to see subjects as abstract shapes, values, and colors rather than conceptual objects.

• Divide a painting surface into eight or so small squares or rectangles.
• Retrieve an apple and light it dramatically.
• Set a timer for ten minutes and paint the apple in the first square.
• Stop immediately when the timer goes off and repeat for each square.
• Rotate the apple or change the lighting for each new square.

The approximate size of each square in the exercise measures 2 to 3 inches.

5. Navigating Artist Block and Photography

Artist's block is not a rare occurrence but a natural part of a professional painting career, manifesting as two distinct types with different sources.

Forcing production through uninspired periods eventually drains the creative well, often leading to deep frustration and severe artist block. Acknowledging cycles, honoring the natural rhythm of rest and work, branching out into new media, and scaling back public posting obligations when necessary help restore creative vitality.

In December 2012, after pushing through minor blocks to stockpile blog posts before a trip, the author experienced a complete creative dry spell, leading her to temporarily consider abandoning painting for another career before connecting with peers experiencing the exact same phenomenon.

The author categorizes blocks into short-term blocks caused by burnout, lack of ideas, or distraction, and existential big-picture blocks resulting from commercial pressures and rigid time constraints. Instead of inducing panic, these blocks should be managed or used as catalysts for positive changes. Liz Wiltzen experienced an existential block after painting for three solo shows in one year, leading her to stop painting entirely for nearly two years. When an artist experiences a dead, tired feeling in their bones accompanied by total disinterest in painting, pushing through is counterproductive.

• Honor the natural ebb and flow of creativity.
• Paint only when feeling inspired.
• Branch out by trying new media, materials, workshops, and subject matter.
• Scale back posting obligations when uninspired.
• Wipe bad paintings off immediately rather than keeping them around to fix later.

How to Photograph and Edit Small Paintings

High-quality photographs of small paintings for online sales and publication can be achieved cheaply using natural open shade and a basic digital camera without professional lighting investments.

To eliminate glare and minimize color correction, paintings should be photographed outdoors in open shade with a solid cardboard backing for stabilization. The camera must be square to the painting to prevent keystoning, slightly zoomed in to avoid edge warping, and braced to prevent shaking.

The author uses a digital Canon PowerShot G12 camera and an outdoor open shade method to provide images for five published books. Digital painting photos require standardized cropping, value adjustments, and file organization to maintain a professional portfolio and web-ready presentation. Editing software allows artists to crop out non-painting areas, adjust histogram levels to match the original piece, fix color balance, and clean up photo blemishes using a clone stamp.

• Find a spot in open shade facing your art toward a building wall with your back to the light source.
• Hold your art out to check for glare before placing it safely against a stable prop.
• Place a piece of cardboard behind the art to stabilize it and block light.
• Sit down and make yourself a human tripod by putting your elbows on your knees.
• Zoom in slightly if using a point-and-shoot camera to prevent edge warping.
• Ensure your camera is square to the painting so edges are parallel.
• Set output to RAW or high-quality JPEG and do not use a flash.
• Open your digital image file in an editing program like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, iPhoto, Picasa, or iPiccy.
• Crop out everything that is not your painting.
• Adjust values and levels using the histogram graph to match the original painting.
• Adjust the color balance if the image is too blue or off-color.
• Fix photo blemishes like dust spots or raindrops using a clone stamp tool.
• Save a large edited version under a different file name.
• Change the image pixel width to between 500 and 1,000 pixels for web use.
• Save as a JPEG with quality set between 70 and 80.
• Number and title all files chronologically and maintain an Excel inventory list.

6. Tips for Better Online Sales

Traditional galleries demand a fifty percent commission and rely heavily on local foot traffic. Selling art directly online bypasses these gatekeepers, incurs expenses of around twelve percent, and lets you keep eighty-eight dollars out of every hundred earned. Smaller and more affordable paintings priced under five hundred dollars sell significantly better on the internet than expensive pieces.

Selling directly online through blogs, frictionless buying buttons, and active community networking bypasses galleries and builds a loyal collector base.

Before you attempt to sell your art, you should evaluate your work critically. You can consult a trusted professional artist to get an honest appraisal of your readiness.

• Are you proud of your work?
• Is the quality consistent?
• Do you think other people will want to buy your work and hang it on their walls?
• Are you motivated to sell because you have a bunch of paintings sitting around or because you actually think you are ready to start selling?
• Are there some paintings you can weed out? Show only your best.

Obscure pricing introduces hesitation and causes potential buyers to abandon purchases. You should make your art easy to buy by removing friction from the process.

• Give buyers a price up front.
• Provide a direct link to purchase the painting.
• Include an email link in more than one place on your site.
• Choose a single selling approach or platform and stick with it.

When the author first started posting, she commented on popular artist Karin Jurick's blog. Jurick subsequently featured her, causing the author's sales to jump from a few paintings a month to selling half her work overnight.

You should maintain a journal-style blog rather than a static website to keep visitors engaged.

• Start a blog if you do not have one.
• Post something new at least once a week.
• Provide meaningful feedback with a question at the end when commenting on other artists' websites.

You can use automated email lists and promotional offers to keep collectors informed.

• Add a Follow by Email gadget via Feedburner on your layout page.
• Allow people to add themselves to your list voluntarily.
• Offer special incentives such as free shipping over $100, free frames, holiday gift-wrapping, or buy-one-get-one-half-off deals.
• Do not donate your worst work to charities or giveaways.

Marketing efforts take time to gain traction. Daily Paintworks took out a quarter-page ad in American Art Collector for four years at $800 a month with only painfully slow statistical growth, showing that targeted online methods often work better than expensive print ads.

• Use demographic filters on platforms like Facebook to target specific buyers.
• Hand out business cards, postcards, and one-sheets with every sale.
• Create annual print collections of one hundred paintings using print-on-demand services like Blurb or MagCloud.
• Commit to the project for a year, two, or more.
• Schedule time to paint, market, and promote yourself.
• Post to your blog as often as possible, aiming for five days a week.
• Keep your blog focused specifically on art rather than mixing unrelated interests.

Online Sales and Marketing

Websites and blogs need to display your name prominently in the header and keep the visual height constrained so visitors can view new paintings instantly.

• Add your name to the header panel.
• Ensure your header is not too tall.
• Keep important content visible above the fold so visitors do not have to scroll down.

10 Key Ideas

1. Painting small formats frequently and establishing a strict studio routine removes emotional pressure and accelerates artistic growth.
2. Equipping your studio with efficient tools and choosing controlled subjects like still lifes provides a solid foundation for daily creation.
3. Mixing specific proportions of stand oil, linseed oil, and odorless mineral spirits creates a homemade medium that extends paint strokes and leaves a varnishing sheen.
4. Mastering values through squinting, balancing limited color palettes, and measuring proportions ensures your small paintings are visually compelling.
5. Mixing colors using a limited palette of the three primary colors plus white and burnt umber creates cohesive paintings by harnessing the power of grays.
6. Mastering proportion through daily sketching and using a viewfinder ensures that small-scale daily paintings have well-resolved compositions.
7. Applying compositional rules and working from the inside out in alla prima painting keeps your brushwork fresh and dynamic.
8. Applying a thin, wiped-off ground color before painting covers white canvas and allows undertones to unify the wet-into-wet work.
9. Artist's block is not a rare occurrence but a natural part of a professional painting career, manifesting as two distinct types with different sources.
10. Selling directly online through blogs, frictionless buying buttons, and active community networking bypasses galleries and builds a loyal collector base.