Before painting it is important for you to plan first and make decisions that could impact your painting. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t just paint the Mona Lisa when he saw some girl walking down the street. It took him careful planning and preparation. The same could be said about the various artists during the renaissance period.

Therefore a painting should be planned. It is a great way to express your feelings by being able to work freely, but doing so also gives you no direction or purpose in your painting. You could just be painting a bird in the air, but what will be its background, what other colors do you think will symbolize it better. But the last thing that pans out before you make a decision depends on who you are and your personality.

Among your personality, here are also some decision factors that may help you decide.

Deciding the subject:
Choosing a subject influences a lot of factors such as the type of support, format and technique. It will help further to do small sketches when you only have a vague idea of the subject. It helps because it prevents you from wasting materials if the idea you had in mind with your subject does not end up well. Some people however have problems doing small sketches, because they feel it is only replicating it. If you are one of those people, you may just want to try quick sketches or reference photos.

Deciding on the Format: 
After deciding the subject, it is best to think about the things that can support it. Like the landscape, colors, shapes, etc.

Deciding on the Size:
Think about your subject would look if it is in a small canvass or a bigger canvass. It also doesn’t mean that if you buy a large canvass, you would need to fill the canvass up.

Deciding on the medium and technique:
It would depend on what medium you choose what technique you will use. An example would be painters who would decide to use acrylic paints, are they going to be used thinly or thickly?

Deciding on the type of support:
Deciding on what type of support to use influences the texture of the work. The technique you also decide to use will determine what kind of support you will use.

Deciding on what colors to use:
Having to use limited set of colors to work on paintings helps bring unity, and identity in a painting.  An example would be an artist trying to think about using colors to be portrayed realistically or just select a few colors to make up the palette?

By being able to think more about these factors, it will help bring out an identity on your paintings and not have a painting looking like an abstract, unless you’d want an abstract painting of course.