Name: Why Most Painters Stop Improving
Uploaded: 2026-03-09T23:39:41.000Z
Duration: 13 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There's one big reason why most people who try to learn to paint end up getting stuck.

You could be painting for years and never progress if you don't figure out this one thing.

To get better at painting, we need to get better at seeing.

And to get better at seeing, we need to find new ways to look at the world.

But how do we actually get better at seeing?

Well, when we're painting from observation, I think that there are three levels of seeing.

And there are many different mental models that can get organized on any of these levels.

A mental model is what I would just call a tool.

And it's a tool that we use to see the world.

An absolute beginner will approach the world naively.

They don't even know what they're looking at, can be organized into shapes of color.

They don't even know what a plumb line is.

They just look at the world and they draw it without any sort of understanding of how to actually organize it visually.

Because what we're seeing is fundamentally visual information.

The challenge when we're painting realistically is to take this visual information, to be able to understand it, and

then to restate it on a two dimensional surface in hopefully a nice painting.

When we're painting from observation, there is a naive level, which is just the level of being an absolute beginner that doesn't know up from down or blue from orange.

Then there is a pretty wide intermediate level, which most people get stuck at.

That is what I consider to be the analytical stage.

The analytical stage of observational painting is when you can observe what you see and you can ask and answer simple questions.

Is this value darker or lighter than this value?

Does this shape look like the shape I'm drawing?

These are all very simple tools where you can analyze small bits of information at a time.

Shapes of color, plumb lines, comparative measurement.

All of these things probably sound pretty familiar because they're pretty common tools.

Adjacent to the analytical stage is conceptual painting.

I want to make a distinction when we're painting from observation or when we're painting conceptually.

Painting conceptually would be conceptually understanding how value turns with a sphere, how value turns with the form, and

Conceptual painting would be understanding the construction of simple shapes in a still life or the construction of perspective when you're drawing a building.

These are ideas that we understand more abstractly.

These conceptual ideas are useful in as much as they make us understand and see things a little bit more.

But I would say that there are some people at different styles of art who they take these conceptual ideas and then they run with it.

They run so far that they end up making paintings that don't even look like anything that they're doing.

So you got to be careful, or you just have to know what type of painter you want to be.

However, I think that there is a level beyond all those analytical tools.

The analytical tools are generally very simple questions and answers.

The widths, the values, hue, saturation, value.

Those types of tools, those types of mental models are all very, very useful.

We can only be so efficient at taking that information in and then translating it.

People get stuck at painting because they are only thinking about what shape and what color am I looking at?

And when they're stuck at that stage, their paintings never get this deep, refined look to them.

That you see when you look at master paintings.

But you still wonder, how do you even get there?

This next stage after the analytical stage of painting.

Is what I would call the intuitive stage.

It means painting from observation more by feeling rather than measurement or analysis.

That feeling that you get when you're looking at your painting and something's just not quite right.

And hopefully, over time, we can become more sensitive to it.

And we can let that guide us through our painting.

But we need to do it through observation.

We need to do it by becoming more sensitive to what we actually see and what we actually look for.

For example, if we are drawing a landscape.

And there is a certain type of foreshortening.

A certain type of perspective within the landscape.

We could try to get that landscape with a bunch of shapes.

Or if we're more advanced, we get through that shape stage.

And we're now talking about smaller and smaller refinements in the drawing and the value and the color.

All these little tiny things that would be really hard to pick up on.

On these, like, more cumbersome shapes, angles, these types of analytical methods of drawing and painting.

However, if we can look at the landscape and we can really pay attention to just exactly how the fields are starting to roll over.

And how the trees are starting to recede in the distance.

And we're looking very closely and very carefully at what we're seeing in front of us.

Then we switch to our painting and our painting.

It's gotten pretty far because we have to get through the blocking stage, the analytical stage.

Of the general relationships of color, the big impression working large to small, and so on.

But it's not all just work large to small.

At a certain point you have to capture a specific structure.

And if you can't observe that structure in nature, then you're not going to be able to recreate it within your painting.

This is all about looking closer and looking deeper and trying to take more information in, in a different way than just these haphazard, choppy tools of measuring and shapes and alignments and values and hues and all that stuff.

That stuff is great for the blocking stage, but it won't take you far.

Well, in portraiture, in the naive stage, we get stuck at drawing stick figures.

We get spaghetti hair, we get football shaped eyes and like a triangle shaped nose.

We basically draw like a 5 year old because we have no idea how to even describe what we see visually.

We figure out shapes of color, we figure out alignments, we figure out positive shapes, negative shapes.

Trying to think of things sculpturally, that's starting to transition from the analytical into the intuitive.

When we can start thinking three dimensionally, we start asking ourselves, does the form feel solid?

Do I feel the same solidity within the model, within my picture?

There is a really great quote by John Singer Sargent and it's from his biography two years after he died.

This line describes Sargent when he was teaching at the Royal Academy for a short stint.

On one occasion in the Evening Life School, I well remember Sargent complaining that no one seemed concerned about anything more than an approximate articulation of the head a upon the neck and shoulders.

Sargent didn't just care about making juicy brushstrokes that were just the right shape in the right spot.

He actually cared about the structure and the construction of a sitter and the head, how it fits to the neck and onto the shoulders.

And beyond Sargent, when I look at other old masters like Velasquez or Ribera or Van Dyck, when I look at their paintings, the sensation that I get from those paintings is a feeling of flesh and bones.

I think those people were actually looking at how a person's face connected into their bones.

How the paint that they were putting on their canvas, did that actually recreate the sensation of living flesh in front of them?

This can be applied to painting anything.

When I start a painting of a marble sculpture, I'm looking for the initial analytical stuff in the beginning, for the block.

And of course, I'm blocking in the values.