One of the most common questions I hear from people who want to learn to paint is some version of this: how do you know where to begin?

It is a fair question. A blank canvas is an intimidating thing. And the assumption most beginners carry — that accomplished painters simply approach it with confidence and start — is one of the most discouraging myths in all of art instruction.

Here is the truth: I have completed over 100 oil paintings, and I almost never begin on canvas without sketching first.

Not because I lack confidence. Because sketching first is how confidence is built.

Over the years I have developed a consistent pre-painting system — one that changes its tools and timeframe depending on the kind of work I am about to make, but never changes its fundamental purpose: to answer the most important questions before the most expensive mistakes.

For landscape paintings — whether working from a photograph, a scene observed in person, or pure imagination — I begin with a pencil sketch on a standard sketchpad. The goal is simple: test the composition. Where does the eye enter? Where does it travel? Where does it come to rest? Is there enough depth? Are the major shapes balanced?

These sketches are loose and fast. They are not finished drawings. They are thinking made visible — a way of asking compositional questions with a pencil so I do not have to ask them in oil on canvas. A pencil sketch takes me roughly twenty minutes. It has saved me countless hours.

Critically — I do not simply copy what a reference photograph shows. Even when working from a photo, I use the sketch to make decisions the camera did not make for me. I might move a tree. Eliminate a building that clutters the middle ground. Shift the horizon. Borrow a sky from somewhere else entirely. The photograph is a starting point, not a blueprint. I learned this in 1974 when I moved a building across the Moldau River in Prague and used a Pacific sunset I had photographed from a Vietnam-era aircraft carrier for the sky. The painting that resulted never existed anywhere except on my canvas.

For abstract paintings, the process is different — and the difference is instructive.

In an abstract, color is not incidental to the composition. Color IS the composition. So for abstracts I sketch in pastel — which allows me to work out both composition and color relationships at the same time, quickly and revisably, before committing anything to canvas. These sketches take up to an hour, because the questions they are answering are more complex.

Same discipline. Different tool. Different timeframe. Because the work demands it.

This system gives me something that no amount of technical skill alone can provide: it separates the thinking from the making. When I finally approach the canvas, the fundamental questions have already been answered. What remains is the act of painting itself — and if the preparation has been thorough enough, that act can happen in a state of flow.

I know this state well. I found it in the operating theater for fifty years. I found it on ski slopes for forty years. I find it at the easel in my living room. The sketch is the preparation that makes flow possible.

This is the first practical system I teach in my landscape painting course — before color mixing, before brushwork, before canvas.

We sketch. We test. We make the decisions that need to be made before the painting begins.

Because a great painting is not rescued at the canvas. It is planned before you ever get there.

My course begins July 25, 2026. Visit gordensoilpainting.com.

Gorden McMurry — The Painting Physician

Oil Painter·Landscape Painting Instructor·Ear Surgeon (Retired)

Kore Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky

gordensoilpainting.com·[email protected]