Creating A Series Of Paintings

I have one of my favorite painting series hanging in my dining room and love how they look all in a row. After a recent trip to the beach, I was inspired to update my home decor and create a new trio. Here are a few tips I’d like to share to help you create a series of paintings.

Farm Animal Painting Series The Social Easel Online Paint Studio

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Starfish Create a Series of paintings The Social Easel

Choose Your Theme

When creating a series of paintings, you want to have a cohesive idea in mind. For my latest series, I chose a sea life theme. It was honestly hard to narrow it down to three paintings because I love so many things about the ocean!

Paint How to Paint A collection The Social Easel

Select Your Color Scheme

The first thing I decide when working on a series of paintings is my color palette. I have this pretty much figured out in my head before I even start with a canvas. I go through my paints and think about the color scheme that I want, and if I’m designing it to match a room, I look at what colors are in that room to make it all tie together.

Use The Same Painting Surface

The next thing you want to decide is what surface you are painting on. For most of my series, I pick the same size canvas. On this sea life trio, I used 12 x 12 canvases. For my farm animal series, I used 18 x 18. I love square canvases.

I’ve also done a fall series with two tall skinny canvases. You could do the same thing with pallet boards or a rough piece of wood. Basically anything that makes them congruent.

close up seahorse Create a Series of paintings The Social Easel

Use A Similar Painting Technique Throughout

So, we’ve got our subject matter, paint colors, and the surfaces we want to use. The next step is painting!

We know we are using similar colors, but we also want to use a similar technique so that the paintings look like they belong together. If we did one painting in a completely different style than the next, it wouldn’t look like it went together.

I used a lot of palette knife and bold brushstrokes in both the sea life series and my farm animal series.

Series Create a Series of paintings The Social Easel

Color Pallet Create a Series of paintings The Social Easel

Sketch Out A Plan

Before going straight to your canvas, I highly recommend sketching ideas out and little thumbnails in a sketchpad or mixed media pad, maybe even painting some brushstrokes of different colors that you think you want to use together.

Color Mixing

Don’t forget that just because you may have a set number of colors that you can also color mix!

I take my light cream color and mix it with my darker colors to get a completely different shade that still accents the original pallet and can be used throughout the paintings. I can mix my pinks and blues to get different shades of purple, and so on.

You can read my blog all about color mixing HERE.

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The thing you want to remember is the paintings do not have to be identical. They just have to be similar.

The sea life series of paintings had a black background on all of them before I added anything on the surface. On the starfish painting, I decided to finger paint the background instead of using a palette knife as I did in the other two.

Jelly Create a Series of paintings The Social Easel

I used a burnt orange color in both the starfish and the seahorse but decided to go for some brighter colors for the jellyfish. You don’t have to use every single color in each one of your paintings. As long as they have some colors that are the same throughout, they will work together.