7

Stopping Too Early

Stopping too early leaves your
painting looking unfinished
and not professional
artist
mistakes
7 mistakes that make your paintings look amateurish and why some people
don’t even know their paintings look amateurish

Using Black as
Shadows
Black is rarely the correct
shadow color, plus it dulls
down the color on your
painting
Paintings that look
Cartoonish
No variety of edge work
or depth of color can cause
paintings to look cartoonish
Amateurish
Paintings
Learning the same way every-
one learns leads to consistent
looking art. This art doesn’t
stand out from “the pack”
Using Too Much
Color
The intensity of the color or
chroma is important to con-
trol to keep paintings looking
believable
No Range in Val-
ues or Edge Work
By having a system to ensure
a nice range of values, your From Daniel Edmondson’s
painting won’t look amateur-
ish. A painting may look cut
out and cartoonish if there
OilPaintingWorkshop.com
isn’t an appropriate relation-
ship of edges
Bright Does NOT
Mean White
Commonly artists use straight
white out of the tube to paint
bright areas. This causes the
painting to look unbelievable
and amateurish

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 Amateurish Paintings

What makes a painting look

amateurish?
How can we always tell an amateurish painting from a masterful
painting? I think the reason for this stems from the fact that most
people that go on and want to learn how to do representational
painting will generally go through pretty similar steps as they learn
to paint. When everyone is going through the same process they
create similar looking paintings in terms of style and how resolved
the painting is. That’s what makes them look amateurish. As they
get better and better or progress further and further towards their
goal at mastering representational painting they start to refine their
values, edges, colors. Then their art starts to pull away from the pack
and stand out as a more professional and masterful painting, no
longer amateurish.

So this is how we can identify and illustrate that there are amateur-
ish paintings. For these same reasons we see many of these paint-
ings because this is how everyone starts. I’ve got a closet full of
amateurish paintings from my early years because I started from the
same spot you did.

Right Image:
This painting is one ex-
ample from Daniel Ed-
mondson and Oil Painting
Workshop’s starter course.

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 Cartoonish Paintings

What makes a painting look cartoonish?

Before we have a discussion on what makes a painting look car-
toonish, what we really have to discuss is what makes a cartoon
look cartoonish. What it really boils down to is that when a car-
toonist creates a cartoon what they generally do is draw an outline
in black and then they fill it in with just one or maybe two colors.
By that I mean one value and then another value of the same color.
The resulting cartoon has a very flat look to it meaning it doesn’t
look dimensional. It looks flat, 2 dimensional or like a cut out.

So if a painting looks cartoonish and there’s no 3 dimensional feel

or look to it , the normal causes of this are
not enough value range and the edges are all the
same and usually very sharp.
These are the two leading factors
that make a painting look
cartoonish.

Above Image:
In this painting it is evident that their are cartoonish features. You may see the black outlines and the very little variety in the
value structure which doesn’t give the painting much dimension to it.

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 How To Solve Cartoonish Paintings

Having a Range of Values

There’s a lot of different ways that you can solve this. The easiest way is to make sure you
have full value range in the elements of your paintings. When you’re looking at your subject
matter, whether from life or a photograph, try to see all the value range on a particular object
as well as in the full scene. When first laying in a new painting, artists will place the dark-
est dark in the painting and the lightest light and then they have something to compare
to. Then within each element they may place the lightest light and the darkest dark of that
particular element. That way you have a reference range for that object and compare values.
Then they make sure that they use that full value range when they paint it and that’s what
makes the painting look dimentional and professional.

Soft AND Hard Edges

The final part to address is edges. If the
painting looks cut out and cartoonish it’s
because there isn’t an appropriate relation-
ship of edges. We need sharp edges but
we also need soft edges. It’s really the soft
edges that make the sharp edges look good
and the sharp edges that make the soft
edges look good. So keep in mind that you
want a full range in values AND edges and
there are systems you can put in place to do
that.

Above Painting
“Zinnia and Peaches” by Daniel Edmondson
shows a variety of edge work as well as value

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 Using TOO MUCH BLACK
How Shadows Work

One common problem that makes paintings look amateurish is that

artists use black for their shadows. It isn’t black that is the problem,
it is that the color is too cool a color for most shadows. When you
go outside and the shadows are cool because of the blue sky versus
the bright sun, cool shadows are completely appropriate. But when
most people paint still life’s, figures, portraits or other indoor paint-
ings they tend to use either black or blue for shadows. It is inappro-
priate because it is not the right color temperature so the painting
ends up looking dirty and amateurish. So try avoiding cool colors for
shadows indoors unless it’s appropriate.

Left Image:
In these hands you notice
that black was used as
the shadow color. This is a
mistake as you can see that
the hands appear to be
dirty unless that’s what the
look was intended to be of
course.

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 Too much color especially in landscapes
Watch the Color!
One really common problem that makes paintings look amateurish is using too much color.
When I say too much color what I mean is intensity of color or chroma. For example, yellow
ochre is yellow but it’s a dull yellow, its got a low chroma. Whereas cad yellow medium has a
lot of yellow, its an intense yellow, a higher chroma. Often times new artists over use intense
greens, particularly viridian in landscape paintings. Sure, there’s times that you may want to
experiment and add a little more color but a typical error occurs that makes paintings look
amateurish when they have too much color. It’s common to see water that’s too blue or trees
that are too intense of a green or a face has too much color and looks cartoonish and un-
natural. Unless it’s a specific style affect that you’re going for, really try to minimize the use of
those intense colors.

Right Image:

In this particular painting, the chroma is quite high

in many of the colors causing the painting to look
oversaturated. Of course, if this is the style preferred
by the artist, then it’s okay.

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 Bright Does NOT mean White
White is TOO Bright
A common thread in amateurish looking paintings and cartoonish
looking painting is overusing white or almost near straight white
from the tube. This is a super common error, because white very
rarely occurs in nature even in white things (like a white picket fence
in a landscape) a very pale blue, yellow, or green. Often we’ll put it
down on a painting because we’ll see something super bright. If it’s
a small highlight it’s probably ok, but if we’re representing a bright
area, especially on something dark like a fabric or on a car where the
fabric is red as in the painting above. If you mix white into it, it will
just not read right. It will look like white on top of it whereas if you
just mix an actual color and apply it it will feel much more natural
and then on top of that use a bit of highlight. It is a common mis-
take to use just white or straight white for paintings that have a lot
of light intensity to them. You can spot one a mile away because it
just won’t stay on a canvas because it advances and doesn’t become
a part of the actual object that you’re trying to represent. So don’t
use straight white and when you need to paint something bright
and be careful to mix a distinct bright color instead.

Left Image:

This painting shows

the extreme amount
of bright white col-
ors which makes the
paintings look ama-
teurish.

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 Stopping Too Early
Finish Your Painting
Another very common problem with developing your art to become
more masterful is actually a twofold problem. Number 1 is that Images Below:

artists often quit their paintings too early before they have really Other FINISHED paintings
gotten the painting resolved to a finished painting that looks profes- from Oil Painting Work-
shop’s Starter Course
sional. This is because of a couple of reasons. The more common of
these is that they are just kind of “sick of it” and they have an idea for
a new painting and want to move on to the new painting because it
sounds fun. Secondly, the painting, often times, becomes difficult to
get through because of a lack of experience and a lack of knowing
what to do.

What ends up happening in the end is that the piece looks like a
painting that had a good start but was really never finished. This is
truly a discipline that you develop over time. Finishing a painting is
kind of difficult but once you understand the foundations and prin-
ciples of painting, taking it to a nice finished product is really easy
and quite enjoyable. It also takes you out of amateur status and
brings you up to museum or profession gallery artist status.

The solution is to keep painting and to take some classes and get
the “know how” of what you need. Particularly try to find people
that explain the whys of everything you do so that you can really de-
velop your foundation as a painter. You won’t need nearly as many
classes because you’ll have a deeper understanding of the whys of
what you do. Getting through the problem on your own is a slower
process but it is valuable to do that. So if you want your paintings
to look professional and masterful keep working on them and refin-
ing them until you take them to a place where they look masterful,
deliberate and reflect your unique vision as an artist . You owe it to
yourself and your art.

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 Love The Paint,

-Daniel Edmondson

Daniel Edmondson
www.OilPaintingWorkshop.com

© Daniel Edmondson
All Rights Reserved
Please do Not Reproduce, Redistribute or Reprint this without
written consent from Daniel Edmondson

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