What Is a Painting Process? (And Why Technique Alone Will Not Give You a Style)

A painting process is the repeatable sequence of decisions that takes you from a concept to a finished piece. It's how you start. How you revise. What order you do things in. What you focus on and what you ignore.

Style is a byproduct of that process. Not the goal of it.

Don't chase an aesthetic. Build a process that's true to how you think, and a genuine aesthetic comes out of it.

I'll say that again, because some artists never hear it said clearly.

You don't want to imitate an aesthetic. Who you are, and your approach, eventually informs your process. How you do things, in what order. By adjusting your process, you eventually create an aesthetic. The other way around doesn't work well. If you try to be an impressionist, you build a process to imitate that aesthetic. That's backwards. Build a process true to who you are, and it creates its own aesthetic.

That's the whole premise of this journal. It's also the whole premise of Methods.art.

Process is not technique. And style is not process.

People use these three words like they're the same thing. They're not.

Techniques are skills you develop through study and practice, what you can do with a brush or a knife. Form, tonal relationships. Glazing. Scraping back. Wet into wet. Lost edges. It's a set of skills. If you study long enough, you can acquire most of them.

Style is the look of a body of work. It's what a stranger sees when they scroll past one of your paintings and know it's yours.

Process sits between the two. It's how you actually use your techniques. In what order. With what revision rules. On what kind of surface. For what subject matter.

A painter with a large amount of skills and no process can paint many things once. A painter with a clear process, even with less technique, produces work that holds together. And keeps getting better.

Chasing style backwards doesn't work

Most painters, when they want a style, pick a painter they admire and try to copy the surface.

The surface is the end of the process. Not the beginning. If you try to copy it, you skip everything that made it.

You end up with a painting that looks like someone else's. The moment you try a second piece without a reference from that artist, it falls apart.

I went through this. When I was studying I could paint in a lot of different styles. Brushy and thick, or polished and smooth. I got tired of everyone defending their camp. This is the most rigorous, this is the most traditional. I didn't want to be an impressionist. I didn't want to be a classicist. I wanted something that came out of me.

What got me to my own aesthetic wasn't looking at more painters. It was the opposite.

I spent two years cataloging every image that made me feel something. Film stills. Photographs. Sculpture. Dance. Anything. I didn't try to figure out why in the moment. I just built the catalog. Then I looked at it for patterns.

That's where my love of muted color came from. That's where the textures came from. I realized I'd been avoiding the colors I actually liked because I thought paintings were supposed to look a certain way. Once I noticed, the aesthetic started to make itself.

The parts of a process most painters never define

If you can't answer most of these questions about your own work, you don't have a process yet. You have a sequence of reactions.

Surface. What are you painting on, and why. Panel, linen on panel, aluminum. How absorbent. How smooth. The surface and the tools work together. The same brush makes a totally different mark on a rough surface than a smooth one.

Ground. What's under the first layer. Warm or cool. Toned or white. Acrylic or oil. The underpainting plus the glaze on top creates a third thing. If you know the effect you want, you figure out how to cause it.

Drawing. Transfer, grid, or freehand. I do mine freehand with a tape measure for a few anchor points. I like the spontaneity. The first brush stroke I try to make is the longest one.

First pass. Do you block in broadly, or work part to part. For me, the first day is the most freeing day of the painting. Music on. I run back and forth across the studio. I'm not fine-tuning. I'm throwing paint. If I fine-tune at the start, the piece never recovers.

Second day. The paint is tacky but not dry. You can move it. Remove half of it. Scratch into it. Your options are bigger on the second day than any other day.

Revision rules. When do you stop adjusting. I finish most pieces to about 85% and walk away for weeks. I come back with fresh eyes, call it done, and suddenly see the three things I wish I'd done. Then I do them.

Stopping conditions. How do you know it's finished. I find issues. By the time I've torn the painting apart and found the last fault, it's done.

None of these answers have to match mine. They have to match you. That's the whole point.

How process becomes style (my own example)

My aesthetic came out of charcoal drawings.

I was teaching weekly for years. Almost every class had a demo. Fifteen years of demos. At some point I looked up and realized I preferred my drawings to my paintings. I liked the drawings significantly better.

So I asked myself: how do I translate what I'm doing with charcoal into paint.

That question is where a whole body of work came from. The straight-line construction. The aggressive scraping. The tooled surfaces. The way I pull paint across a panel with a rubber wedge instead of pushing it with a brush. All of it is a translation of how I draw.

The style wasn't borrowed. It was a distillation of how my brain already worked, converted into a painting process that could deliver it.

This is what I mean by style as a byproduct. I wasn't trying to invent a look. I was trying to make paintings that had the quality my drawings already had. The process I built to do that is what produced the aesthetic.

If I'd started from the aesthetic, I would have ended up with a hollow version of someone I admired. Probably still stuck there.

When to change your process

Process isn't sacred. It's a working model. It should evolve.

Two signs it needs to change:

You're not curious or surprised anymore. If every painting comes out the same but without clarity and intention, your process is probably accidental and closed. Open it back up. Change a variable based on personal interest. Surface, subject, light, the order you work in.

You're producing more of the same, and you're bored. This one is subtler. The paintings might be competent. You just don't care. Boredom in the studio is often a problem with your process, not a problem with you.

The year I spent painting no figures at all was a big process adjustment. I realized I was treating the figure as the painting and everything else as an afterthought. To fix that, I removed the figures entirely for a year. Animal paintings. Gold leaf. Silver leaf. Different mediums and tools. When I brought figures back, the environments around them were alive in a way they hadn't been before.

You don't need a crisis to change your process. You just need to notice.

FAQ

What is a painting process? A painting process is the repeatable sequence of choices and decisions you make from concept to finished work. Surface prep, ground, drawing, first pass, revision rules, stopping conditions. It's different from techniques (what you can do with a brush) and style (the look of the finished work). Process is the bridge between them.

Is style the same as painting process? No. Style is the outcome. Process is the system underneath. A strong process produces a recognizable style over time, because the same decisions made the same way across many paintings leave a consistent signature. Style copied without its process tends to look hollow, and it's hard to repeat.

How do I develop my own painting process? Notice what you actually like, not what you think is supposed to be good. Catalog imagery that moves you from any medium. Film, photography, sculpture, dance. Look for patterns. Then experiment with surface, ground, tools, and sequence until your paintings start feeling closer to your own patterns than an artist you're trying to copy.