For those of you unfamiliar with Utrecht, they are one of the best places to get art supplies. On top of that they have a great blog on art and design how-to. I found the fantastic post earlier today and wanted to share it with all of you artists and designers that may struggle with overworking a piece. Those of you who don’t struggle with it ever…read it anyway so the rest of us don’t feel so dumb.

A dilemma that many an artist suffers is overworking a piece. It can be hard to know when to stop and move on to the next piece or to scrape down and start over with the current one.

Have a plan. It makes little sense to attack your painting without some sort of process in place. Creating preliminary sketches and studies (smaller versions of the painting) will help you work through a number of the pictorial issues in advance at a much smaller scale and within a controlled number of variables. This will make it easier for you to create the finished larger piece without spending precious time working on problems that may have been solved at a much earlier and smaller stage. [...]