First Things First — The Order of Creative Operations

I want to tell you about a mural I painted on my bedroom wall when I was fifteen.

It was ambitious. Of course it was — I was fifteen and I had a wall and paint and no one had told me yet that there was a right order in which to do things. I started at the bottom of the wall, which felt natural. The bottom was right there, at eye level, accessible and inviting. And I began painting all sorts of little intricate details — careful, considered, time-consuming work. The kind of small, precise marks that require your full attention and your steadiest hand.

I worked my way up. Detail by detail, inch by inch, up the wall.

What I discovered, slowly and then all at once, was that starting at the bottom was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Every time I needed to paint something above a section I'd already finished, I had to cut in around what was already there — carefully, painstakingly, working around the details I'd already laid down to avoid covering or smudging them. What would have been a simple, confident stroke became a delicate, time-consuming negotiation with everything beneath it. The work was three times harder than it needed to be, and three times slower.

And then came the drips.

Paint from above — the sections I was still working on — would occasionally find its way down the wall and land directly on the finished sections below. On the careful, intricate, painstaking work I had already completed. The work I was now trying so hard to protect.

I had done it in the exact backwards order.

The mural got finished eventually, because I was fifteen and stubborn and had started something I intended to see through. But I have never forgotten the lesson it taught me — not about painting, exactly, but about sequence. About the profound difference between doing things in the right order and doing them in the wrong one. About the extra work, the extra frustration, and the drips that are the inevitable consequence of starting in the wrong place.

Live and learn. And then never paint a mural from the bottom up again.

Why Order Matters

In a creative session, some decisions are foundational and some are additive. Foundational decisions establish conditions that everything subsequent must work within. Additive decisions build on top of what's already established.

The problem arises when we make additive decisions first and foundational decisions second — when we place the focal element before establishing the palette, or apply the final details before the background is set, or commit to a composition before we know what kind of space we're working in.

This is exactly what I did with the mural. The intricate details at the bottom were additive work — the equivalent of the finishing touches — and I did them first, before the foundational work above them was established. So everything that followed had to negotiate around them, work carefully to avoid disturbing them, and occasionally drip on them anyway.

Reversing this order — making foundational decisions first, additive decisions after — doesn't eliminate creative uncertainty. But it makes every subsequent decision significantly easier, because each one is building on a stable foundation rather than working around an earlier commitment that's now constraining everything.

Start at the top. Work down. Let the drips fall on nothing that matters yet.

The Optimal Order

Here is the sequence I've developed over years of making pages, refined from experience — including approximately one ambitious teenage bedroom mural — into something that works reliably.

First: The feeling. Before a single supply is touched, ask what this page should feel like. Not what it should look like — what it should feel like. Nostalgic? Celebratory? Quiet? Lush? The feeling is the foundation of all subsequent decisions. It takes thirty seconds and eliminates enormous amounts of confusion later.

Second: The palette. Choose your three to five colors — the complete color story of the page — before you pull a single piece of paper or ephemera. The palette is the most foundational visual decision you'll make. Everything else will be chosen in relationship to it. The ten minutes spent here are the most valuable ten minutes of the session.

Third: The background. Establish the atmospheric layer before you place anything on it. Paint, gesso, a large base paper — whatever your background approach is, it goes down first and dries completely before you continue. This is the lesson of the mural made plain: you cannot sensibly add the fine details before the broad strokes are in place. The background is the top of the wall. Do it first.

Fourth: The composition plan. Before you glue anything down, do a dry run. Arrange your intended elements on the page without adhesive. Where is the focal element? Where is the negative space? Are the mid-ground elements supporting rather than competing? This placement phase is the moment to make compositional decisions while everything is still reversible. Photograph the dry arrangement before you commit — you'll thank yourself later.

Fifth: The mid-ground. Working from back to front, begin gluing the mid-ground elements. The supporting papers, the texture layers, the secondary ephemera. These go down before the focal element, because they establish the visual context the focal element will live within.

Sixth: The focal element. Now — and only now — place and commit your foreground focal piece. By this point, everything around it has been established. The palette is set. The background is done. The mid-ground creates the stage. The focal element lands exactly where it belongs, in a context designed to support it.

Seventh: The details. Washi tape, stamping, hand lettering, small embellishments, edge inking — all of this comes last, as the finishing layer that ties everything together. Details are not foundational; they are responsive to what already exists. Applied last, they harmonize. Applied early, they constrain.

And critically: applied last, nothing drips on them.

The Drip Problem

I want to stay with the drip for a moment, because it's more than just a painting inconvenience. It's a metaphor for what happens in any creative process when the sequence is wrong.

When you commit to something too early — when you glue down the focal element before the background is established, or make a major color decision before you've seen how all the elements work together — you create a situation where subsequent decisions have to work around your early commitment. Everything that comes after is slightly constrained by what came before, in ways that accumulate.

The page that isn't working, the composition that feels slightly off, the color relationship that almost works but doesn't quite — these are often not the result of bad decisions in isolation. They are the result of good decisions made in the wrong order, each one slightly constrained by the ones that came before it, until the accumulated constraints have limited what the page can become.

Start in the right order and the constraints work for you rather than against you. Each foundational decision creates the conditions in which the next decision flourishes.

The Permission to Stop and Reset

Sometimes you're mid-session and you realize you've made a foundational decision in the wrong order — the focal element is glued down and the background isn't working and everything subsequent is fighting itself.

The temptation is to keep going, to fix it forward, to add more things in an effort to resolve what the wrong sequence created.

I understand this temptation intimately. I finished the whole mural. Stubborn is not always the wrong approach.

But the braver and usually more effective move is to stop. Assess what's actually foundational in what you've done so far. Build from there, even if that means setting aside some of what you've already committed to.

A page made in the right order, even starting over partway through, will almost always turn out better than a page heroically rescued from a wrong sequence.

First things first. In the right order, everything that follows is easier.

And nothing drips on your finished details.

Star Phoenix Studio kits are designed to make the foundational decisions easier — the palette is already chosen, the elements already coordinated. You start at step five. Browse the collections at starphoenixstudio.com.

— Sandy 🦋

Share this with a crafter who keeps ending up with pages that don't come together — the sequencing shift might be exactly what's needed. And share it with anyone who has ever painted a mural from the bottom up. We are a club, and we have learned.