Learn to See the Whole Picture of Your Life
If I give you a task right now to paint a farmhouse on a paper, how would you start?
Do you start from sketching the outline of the roof, or shaping the front porch? You probably want to think about the styles of the farmhouse and the siding and roofing material choices. Some of you would prefer the classic country look of board-and-batten siding, while a few others might want to explore a modern twist on the tradition by introducing brick or stone on the exterior with a unique footprint that is not a traditional rectangular. You might also want to picture the backdrop of the house in your head. Does it a farmhouse situated in a neighborhood and fenced in? Or is it standing in a sprawling piece of picturesque farmland?
There is probably more than one way of accomplishing this task. But most artists would start with sketching the linework — defining the main structure of the drawing before adding details like shades and texture.
You always start from visioning the big and full picture in your head so you can get the basic proportion and composition of the objects right.
The best lesson I learned from my fine art teacher in college.
Before you put too many efforts into delineating pieces and parts of one drawing, take a moment and see the full picture, then dive in.
So you won’t get lost in developing the parts that don’t necessarily add up to the vision of the whole painting.
We can get so focused on the trees that we can’t see the forest. It is so easy to get caught up in the parts of life that are undesirable and overwhelming depressing and forget to see the bigger picture of who we are and what we have.
Originally published at https://2minutesgrowth.com on January 22, 2021.
