What you need to do is just close your eyes and just let the picture and what you want to draw or paint come to your mind. Sometimes it can take a while. It might come to you in a dream. Once you have an idea of what you want to paint or draw. Take a sketch pad and spend a little time doing a rough sketch of what you want to do. Yes this seems kind of high school like, but the skills they taught you in high school really do work and you can use them in the real world! (I can't believe I just said that lol). Anywho... Once you have a sketch made up..sit down with your canvas or drawing paper and have at it. If you find along the way you don't like what is infront of you...scrape it...erase it...start over...or just alter what you have infront of you.
I recently just had this same thing happen to me. I was painting this woods river scene and I wanted it to be fall. With all the leaves and colors on the trees and have the water reflect all the colors. Well lets just say it was a bad choice. Luckily I caught this while the paint was still fresh and was able to use some water and paper towels and some of this magic little idk brushes? to wipe up all the bad paint. Once I did that I reapplied some of the background color to fix it up a bit. Then I walked away from it for a while. I was stuck. The idea I originally had was an EPIC FAIL! Then a few days later I decided to make it a winter scene. And I just kept trucking along. And low and behold it worked out. I still had the same scene on my canvas...just in a different season.
Sure it took a lot more work than I would have thought and it wasn't my original plan. But it all worked out in the end. I imagined up my own picture, my own idea, my own painting and I created a decent work of art :) I think we all should try this more often with your artwork. To branch out and become our own painter...be YOU so go on....close your eyes...and dream...dream big or small it doesn't matter just as long as you dream!
Happy Painting!
