That was so stressful – The Most Stressful 50 Minutes I’ve Ever Been Through

Speed Comes with Practice and Familiarity, So Don’t Rush Yourself

Okay, so you guys know how I always put a time stamp on my paintings, and they’re usually an hour 15 minutes to two hours long. Well, today we’re gonna try to break through that. We’re gonna try to do a full-on painting in 50 minutes. I’m gonna try to crack that one-hour mark and see if we can do it. It’ll be like a time challenge, it’ll be fun. But before we start, as a disclaimer, please take your time with your paintings. Do not feel the need to rush them because the speed and efficiency come with a lot of practice. It will build up over time, so you don’t need to rush that process. Anyways, let’s jump right in.

I’m going to set a timer for myself. I’m going to start in three, two, one, go. Okay, okay, so I forgot to record my screen. We’re gonna start that over. I’m just stupid. Oh my god, I’m already stressed. I wonder if you guys can see the panic in my eyes as I paint this. This is fast. This is very fast. It’s been about six minutes, and we have a sketch down. I’m gonna start the coloring, I think. Actually, you know before we do that, we’re gonna flip the canvas to see if it’s okay. Please, I think we’re good to start coloring. It’s been about eight minutes. We are not on a good pace right now. Oh, this is so stressful. We’re almost at the 10-minute mark, and I’m just going in with the color blocking right now. I want this to be really fast, so I’m using a fully opaque brush. Okay, it’s been about 15 minutes now. Might be a good time to start color-blocking the character a little bit. 20 minutes in, we’ve got 30 minutes left to go, and I’ll try my best. I don’t know. Like … sometimes I wonder, like, why do I do this to myself? So much pressure.

Okay, 20 minutes left. No, we’re not getting this done. I don’t think I’ve ever been distressed while painting. What an experience. 15 minutes left. Yeah, there’s no way I’m gonna be able to finish it. I’m gonna have to go back in later. Mmm. You know what, guys, so far, I really wouldn’t recommend trying this at home. It is very stressful. Less than five minutes to go. It’s definitely a very rough-looking piece. I’m surprised we actually made it this far. Three, two, one. Okay, so that was 50 minutes on the dot. I’m surprised we made it this far, and that was actually one of the most stressful things I’ve done in a while. But obviously, this is not a finished piece. There are a lot of things in this painting that I think still need to be worked on. But at the same time, I think there are also a lot of things that are actually working right now. The overall color scheme, the color blocking, proportions of the car and the character I think look relatively good for 50 minutes. I think we’ve come a long way, and I think it’ll take another maybe 20, 30 minutes to finish this piece up. So what I’m thinking of doing right now is I’m gonna actually jump back into this piece, take my time with it, and come back and check back in with you guys so we can compare the two results and see how we do. Let’s go right back into it.

A Lesson Learned – Take Your Time with Your Paintings

Now, I get to really take my time, take some deep breaths, calm down a little, and observe things at a slower pace. So, really, most of what I’m doing now is just polishing things up so that they look refined. During the first 50 minutes, I was kind of rushing a little bit. I didn’t take my time to actually render out a lot of the different textures and things like that. Now that I can take my time, I can really pay attention to a lot of the smaller details that I might have missed the first time around.

Whenever you’re painting, I think it’s really important to go at a pace that you’re comfortable with. You know, going into it with the mindset of finishing it in 50 minutes, I felt really rushed, it was really stressful, and as a result, I don’t think I would have been able to finish it in 50 minutes no matter how hard I tried. There’s a certain pace that I like to work at, and going as fast as that is not it for me. The less time you spend on the painting, it usually means you’re gonna put in less detail as well. So, the time that you spend on a painting depends on how much you want to refine it and how comfortable you are with the subject that you’re painting.

Painting over this painting now is making me realize just how many details I actually missed. Honestly, I think this just goes to show that you should always paint and draw at your own pace.

Reflections and Comparisons

Okay, so we’ve been building on top of this piece for about 20 minutes now. We just need to add in some smaller details, refine a little bit, and we should be good to go. You can see I’m covering a lot of the ambient lighting areas that I kind of missed and some of the bounce light on the skin as well. Just things that I didn’t get around to in the first 50-minute run.

We’ve been working on this piece for a total of now or 20 minutes now. So, if you put the two side by side, you can see there are some pretty good differences. I mean, there’s no huge changes in terms of the composition or anything, but overall, I think the piece that I did in one hour 20 minutes, which I kind of took my time on, is a lot more refined than the one that I did in 50 minutes, which I kind of just rushed. I think it was a good challenge to try to do it in 50 minutes. I mean, we didn’t really get there, but I think a really valuable lesson to be learned from this process is sometimes you really gotta just go at your own pace. Don’t rush yourself and take your time with your paintings. Even though I paint fast all the time, I think it’s important to slow down every once in a while and really just observe carefully every single brushstroke you’re putting down. Take note of the process that you’re going through and analyze everything that you see in front of you. So, yeah, we tried our best to get it done in 50 minutes, couldn’t do it, and I ended up taking my time going back in and polishing it back up. And I think this is a piece that I’m really happy with now.

So, you know what, guys? Take your time with your paintings. There’s no need to rush yourself. The speed is going to come with more practice. If I keep putting in the work, if I keep practicing and getting better at my craft, maybe one day I’ll be able to crack that 50-minute mark. But I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet, and that’s okay. I’ll just keep going at my own pace, as you guys should as well. There’s no need to rush yourself. Hope you guys enjoyed seeing the process for this piece. Thank you so much for watching this video. If you want to see more digital art content just like this, feel free to subscribe to my channel. But other than that, I’ll see you guys in the next video.