How To Overcome Painting Challenges

Slawa Radziszewska discusses her painting process and how to overcome painting challenges.

What I would like to share about my painting process is not as much about how I paint, although that is addressed in the next section of the article, but how to keep painting despite difficulties all artists are facing in creating art. There is a lot to learn in the area of representational art, but what an artist really needs—besides some talent, good creative skills, willingness to learn and a lot of practice—is encouragement.

You have to encourage yourself to keep going in spite of all roadblocks and difficulties you will face in the process of creating a good painting. Otherwise, you would throw your brushes away and use your free time to do something less challenging and maybe less fulfilling in the long term. The encouragement may come from others, but even more importantly, it should be coming from inside yourself.

As children we created art freely and joyfully, but after becoming adults many of us turned creativity into competition, hard work and lots of struggle. Or we stopped doing it altogether. Instead of encouraging ourselves to try again, make mistakes and learn from them, we started to criticize each step along the creative process and compare ourselves with others unfavorably.