Choosing The Right Size For Your Painting: 6 Things To Help
Producing a painting is hard. The creative process is full of tough artistic choices and decision-making. One of the most important decisions when producing an artwork is made at the very start: what size to make your painting. Before we commit our heart and soul to bringing our vision to life, we want to be confident we have selected the right sized canvas on which to do so.
I previously wrote about the different sizes of Jackson Pollock’s paintings – now as an artist who has started two art businesses, I run through six important factors that any artist should consider before getting started on a new painting.
Many factors should determine the size of your painting; such as your style of painting, the destination of your finished painting, the medium you paint with, your budget and the portability of your painting. There may also be other commercial and practicality factors to consider.
Just why are each of these important to consider? In the midst of a creative urge you may feel the temptation to grab any canvas you can find and just get going (I’ve been there, too) but your choice of canvas size can really enhance – or compromise – the quality of your end result and the overall effect of your painting. I run through each of the above factors below, illustrating these with examples from my own ‘By Kerwin’ art business experiences in order to help you make the best choice and avoid some of the pitfalls of selecting the ‘wrong’ canvas size.
Key factors to consider when selecting a size for your painting
Your choice of canvas or surface size for your painting should be informed by a number of artistic- and practicality-related factors, such as: your style of painting; the destination of your finished painting; the medium you paint with; your budget and canvas cost; and the portability of your painting. If you are looking to sell your painting and monetise your artwork, there may also be other commercial factors and network effects that you should consider at the outset, to ensure the efficiency of your production and alignment with art industry standards and conventions.
There is no right or wrong in art, and most artists are likely to paint on a number of different canvas sizes over their career or even within a series of works. Jackson Pollock’s paintings varied wildly in sizes, not only throughout his life but also across his signature style of drip paintings. However, the size of a painting is key in helping the artist to create the desired effect and best contextualise their subject. Read on to find out why each of these factors is important.
How should your style of painting affect your canvas size?
Recognising your own style of painting and understanding what you want to achieve with your painting is a key part of choosing the right canvas size. Do you want to convey serenity, calmness, or escapism? You may then want to create an open, sparse composition that requires a large canvas size in order to leave lots of empty spaces. Want to portray chaos, intensity and or anger within your creation? Then a more tightly-packed composition – and therefore a smaller canvas size that allows you to bring the elements of the painting closer together – may be for you.
The aim of my action portrait paintings with By Kerwin is to create bold and vibrant portraits with clean, bold lines, therefore making these well suited to medium and large canvases. Moreover, the Jackson Pollock action painting part of my paintings requires a decent sized canvas to allow for the different splattered layers of paint to interact and breath.
My largest painting was my first in the pop art portrait style, The Beatles in 2019 at 150x100cm. Since then, my two main painting sizes are 18×24” and 24×36”, which have proven an ideal size for a portrait. Part of me would like to create more larger pieces in the future, as a larger canvas size could potentially allow for more dramatic paint throwing and more background details to be incorporated into the composition of my portraits. However, other practicality and transport constraints means I will be sticking to my current sizes for now.
The destination for your finished painting
Whether you’re painting for your own walls or looking to commercialise and find a buyer for your creation, it is important to consider the end goal and the size of the space where the finished painting will live (“begin with the end in mind” as business guru Stephen Covey said).
If you have a particular space on the wall in mind, you will want to choose a canvas size that neither gets lost within the space due to being too small, nor overwhelms the space or dominates its surrounding wall décor and furniture within the room by being too big.
If you are painting to sell, then having a good understanding of your typical target audience or buyer may be useful to guide your choice of canvas size. For instance, if you pitch your artwork at a typical family-sized budget, you will want to paint for a typical family-sized wall space. If your goal is to create artwork for first-time art buyers, you may want to keep your creations on the smaller size. If, on the other hand, you have an expansive, abstract style of painting that you feel would be ideal for commercial interior design buyers (think hotel lobbies), then you may need to reflect this by choosing a large canvas size that fulfils your buyer’s spatial needs.
What medium do you paint with?
Different paint mediums sometimes suit different painting sizes. Watercolours, for instance, are typically used on smaller canvas sizes, as this medium lends itself to capturing intricate, fine details which can be time consuming to create and therefore not suited to doing so over a large canvas area.
Oil and acrylic paint, on the other hand, are denser and more opaque mediums that can be used to create more vivid and higher impact paintings on a larger scale. These paints can also be applied with a larger brush, paint roller or palette knife, making them more suited to painting on a larger canvas size.
My own paintings are all acrylic, which is an ideal medium for my canvas sizes, or for even larger paintings due to the ease of application and fast drying time of acrylic paint. Also, the relative affordability of acrylic over oil paints and other more expensive mediums means I could cover very large canvas size without breaking the bank.
Cost and budget
Unsurprisingly, cost is often a key factor that is likely to influence many artists when selecting their painting size. If you are a hobbyist looking to get into painting, or an artist experimenting with a new technique then you may want to start out with a moderately-priced canvas.
While canvases do come in different materials and levels of quality and price points, meaning there are many options to suit all budgets, a good quality canvas is usually not cheap.
However, if you are looking to sell your paintings commercially in some way then you may feel that larger canvases are a worthwhile investment – as the canvas size ultimately represents a relatively small percentage of what you may be hoping to generate with the sale of an artwork.
Also, it’s worthwhile remembering that the larger the canvas area, the more paint that is required to fill it!
The portability of your paintings
Large paintings can be tricky to move around and transport. If you are looking to become a professional artist and plan to exhibit your work, consider how you will be getting your paintings out and about, and what methods or vehicles you may be using to transport these.
My paintings all fit in regular passenger cars (even The Beatles at 150x100cm, although this usually requires a journey of its own!), so this is definitely something to consider from an exhibiting point of view. Unless you have a large team or large budget to help with your transportation (I have worked with some excellent art courier services, but they are definitely not cheap), or access to a large vehicle of your own.
Also, if you plan to sell, consider how far and how you may be transporting your paintings to a buyer. What packaging will be required for each size; will the paintings require a large amount of postage & packaging, and will the customer be happy to pay for this too? These are all useful considerations when planning a range of paintings.
My own main 18×24” portrait painting size was actually decided when I was in Singapore for a specific reason: I had to find a canvas size that fitted in my suitcase so they could be flown back to England! 18×24” was the largest size possible I could fit in a suitcase, so this ended up being the main size for my whole range of By Kerwin paintings. Fortunately, this also happened to be a painting size that is replicable as prints in several different sizes (I offer four sizes of prints of all 18×24” paintings on bykerwin.com, which provides lots of choice for customers).
Other factors and network effects
If you are planning to produce and sell your paintings commercially, there may be various other factors to consider, many of which may not be obvious until you first encounter them. I like to refer to a particular type of these as network effects (a term I was introduced to when studying at business school at the University of Manchester), which is essentially the idea that your product needs to align and fit in with industry conventions and logistics frameworks within your industry, in order to get your product to market.
For instance, when planning my range of By Kerwin paintings – and knowing my main business model would be print editions – I made sure to choose two popular painting sizes (18×24” and 24×36”) for the bulk of my paintings, which also happen to be two popular dimensions (3:4 and 2:3). This means that most print suppliers can produce prints in this size, and crucially that frames in these sizes and dimensions are widely available. Without this my prints may not have achieved ‘product-market fit’.
With my first art business, Kerwin Art Collections Ltd aged 18, I deliberately produced paintings in all different sizes and dimensions in order to provide variation, but ended up accidentally producing paintings in sizes that weren’t very practical for reproducing as prints, limiting a customer’s choice.
Also, producing a series of paintings in lots of different sized canvases and dimensions may be more time consuming when making website edits and uploads, and cause other inefficiencies – even down to small things like stacking paintings together when transporting or exhibiting them.
One other thing to consider: canvas depth
One final point an artist may want to consider is the depth of their canvas. There are typically two standard size depths for stretched canvases (canvases that are wrapped around a 3D wooden frame): regular (usually 16mm or 18mm) and deep, or ‘chunky’ (around 1.5-2 inches). The choice of depth is usually a matter of preference, and how much an artist wants their work to stand out from the wall.
The larger a painting, the smaller the depth is as a proportion of the overall canvas, so deep canvases are often more naturally suited to larger canvas sizes, and vice versa. Other canvas types and painting surfaces can also come in a variety of depths, so this is another factor to consider when plotting your painting.
Did you know, my first six paintings in the 18×24” size were all on 5mm canvas board rather than stretched canvas; to make these as light and as narrow as possible when flying them to the UK from Singapore!
What other factors help you decide what size to make your paintings? If you have any other quirky ways to help you choose, I’d love to hear them!
My full range of handpainted, Jackson Pollock-inspired pop art portraits can be viewed at my homepage, www.bykerwin.com. All of my paintings are available as luxury canvas prints in several sizes, with fast worldwide delivery.
