A painting goes off track and I often hear,”How can I fix it.” Sometimes we can. Sometimes, no matter what you do, you have passed a point of no return. It will never be a good painting. People are reluctant to give up because they don’t want to waste all of that time they invested so they keep flailing away, hoping to save the painting. Does this sound familiar?
What I would like to suggest is, when a painting goes off track, stop and study it. Try to figure out why it is no longer working. Often we can’t tell what it SHOULD look like until we try it once on the paper. Then we see …. this should be larger, that should be eliminated; the colors are wrong; or it is simply overworked. Consider it your first draft.