Acrylic Abstract & Mark Making on Canvas - Process

[Music] hi people welcome to the studio today I'm going to create an acrylic abstract on a canvas I'm gonna do some mark making and I'm just starting with my 11 by 14 canvas and priming it with gesso and drying it off and I've selected a limited palette of art as a heavy body acrylics and I'll tell you the colors as we go along I didn't end up using the blue at all but I'm just gonna start covering part of this canvas with lamp mm-hmm excuse me with lamp black and I'm gonna go heavier in some places and lighter in others and I'm just getting a base layer down just starting to build up the color and in some places I have straight paint other places I dip into my water basin and get some water and move that paint around a little bit more and you can see that one spot that just wasn't completely dry so I have a little bit of gray which is fine this is just the first layer going down here just to get me going and then I just took a paper towel and kind of scrubbed through and move it to paint around a little bit and tapped it here and there just to get the paint moving this is just that's your fun process and I took a craft stick and I'm just making marks through that was still wet paint most of these end up getting covered up because it's just the first layer but even if they get covered up they do add to the texture of the overall piece so I'm just making random marks and then I just loaded some more of the black onto a kind of a wet brush and I'm just pushing those marks back just a little bit now I've now I've got yellow ocher in my brush and where it's mixing with the black that's still damp I'm getting this nice grungy kind of olivey green gold color which is one of my favorites I love mixing yellow ochre and black together so again just randomly applying color wherever I feel like I want some going over those lighter areas a little bit and again some heavy and some lighter spots of color and more mark making with that crestock my neighbor's cutting his hedges I hope you can't hear is tool running over there you do have the windows closed but I can hear it and then I grabbed my white gesso and I'm just going to apply some of that and kind of get some gray tones happening just to lighten up the black center a little bit and kind of mix that yellow ocher into it they end up with kind of a grayed out creamy mmm taupe almost just kind of a really nice neutral color there in the upper left and then a little heavier with the white just to bring some brightness in I have absolutely no plan this is totally an intuitive process I just kind of go with what my gut says to do at each step along the way I'm softening everything back with a paper towel there and drying this first layer of colors off and then I stop and think while the paint is still this damp I should make some more marks so I stopped drying and made some marks kind of all over that canvas and I'm just getting a layer of paint on the edges of that canvas before I go any further now I've mixed some yellow ochre and titanium white to get that kind of creamy yellow and I'm just gonna start brightening this piece up a little bit laying it on fairly heavy and it's watered down you can see there as I'm starting to move it with my bowl scraper you can tell how watery it is so I've I've diluted it quite a bit and just pulled it down the piece we love using the bowl scraper to apply paint and to take paint off it's just a really cool tool to use and I'm just picking up some straight yellow ochre on the bowl scraper and pulling that through on top of the water down paint that I just applied and whenever I have even just a little bit of paint left on my bowl scraper I try and just scrape it onto the canvas somewhere and then I'm picking up some titanium white and bringing that in to just brighten up some spots I'm just hitting it with the very edge of the bowl scraper to make more marks and just kind of dancing back and forth with these lighter colors just to brighten up different areas and make some marks as I go along I do like to get into the paint with my fingers a lot I end up with really dirty hands but it's just I feel like I have a lot of control over the amount of paint that I'm going onto the piece with and where it's going and I just feel a lot more connected to the piece when I'm painting with my fingers so like I said it's kind of a dance going back and forth between the darks and lights and just kind of evening things out and getting the color on so I think that the color itself will lead your eye around the piece rather than having your eyes stop in one in one spot and not really see the whole thing now I'm dripping some alcohol into that wet yellow paint I'm hoping for some spots or blooms but it's just not working which is fine we tried so then some more light just bringing some brightness back to this area and smearing it around with paper towel all the marks I'm making are just really adding to the texture it's hard to tell on camera just how much texture there is then I'm bringing in a black China marker sometimes mark making it is about laying down the marks as well as taking the paint off scraping the paint off so just making some light marks here and there with the China marker China marker isn't going to move very much but it plays really well on top of acrylic paint so I really like using it I'm just giving this next layer a dry and now I'm going to mix titanium white with phthalo green to give me kind of a pale turquoise a green color and gonna bring some color here guess it's more of an aqua color as what I ended up with and I started out using pretty straight color there's no water in my brush I just want to get a nice layer down first and then just going on top with some white to lighten it up even more and back with the bowl scraper to just smooth it out make some marks you now I'm dipping my fingers in my water basin and just pulling that color down and watering it back a bit so that I can get some more texture with my bowl scraper I'm gonna have a broken stylus as well as my craft stick that I'm making marks with now I've just dipped my fingers into the lamp black paint my fingers are just damp they're not real wet at this stage I'm just tapping the black paint into that still wet semi wet phthalo green color it's all about the texture for me it's like whatever I can do to add interest in texture that's what I'm going to do sometimes in this experiment and it doesn't work which is fine with me then I know in other times it's a happy happy not really an accident it's just a happy thing that happens that I try and it works so I'm just softening it back with some more that phthalo green and white mixture and then softening it again with the ball scraper and now pretty wet fingers into that black paint and just getting some more on there but in a more painterly look it's very watery just tapping it on and then pulling through it with my fingers and I have this continuous fine mist sprayer that I absolutely love it's actually for hairdressers I got it on Amazon and I've had it for a really long time it just works great so I'm just spraying along that top there where I added the finger marks and just getting some drips happening and we dried that off and as you can see it kind of fades into the background after I dry it then I decided to go with some titanium white in a fairly big area and sometimes I mean you're really liking it it's getting to the point where it's like ooh I really like that I like those marks or I like those finger marks or whatever but you know it's not done you can't just stop so you know certain things are gonna get covered up you might be able to bring them back you might not it's just kind of part of the process of building an abstract but I'm going pretty heavy and pretty wet with this white because I'm gonna try the alcohol again well I got pretty big drops that I'm putting down and you'll see in a minute here I think I probably should have waited longer before I pulled through the alcohol but sometimes you get really cool spreading drips when you dip drip alcohol into wet acrylics what it just it wasn't really happening for me so I just decided to pull all the way through it and you can see there's just some faint spots where I dropped the alcohol but nothing too exciting so sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't and then just spread some of that white across there so I don't have such a hard line and making some more marks circles are kind of my things so you'll see a lot of circular mark making in my pieces and then I'm just bringing some dark back in again with my fingers this is one of those processes where you just kind of work on it and work on it and add a layer and add a layer and make more marks until the piece kind of speaks to you and says okay I'm done and you're satisfied with it and you like it and and that's the end so you never know when you're gonna get there but when you get there you know so I'm just bringing in little spots of the phthalo green and the yellow ocher then I decide I need some circles of lampblack so I just put that little series of three circles on I was hoping to get the paint to move and it wasn't moving so I dip my bowl scraper into my water basin and got it to move just enough and made some little marks within those circles I really like that and I'm just trying to decide which way did these go I don't know does it go this way is it go upside down right side up so then I decided I would get a load of phthalo green on my brush and I'm just dragging it across the edge of the canvas and then I'm gonna spray it with that fine mist sprayer again pretty pretty close to the paint and get some drips go in the other direction and when it's this wet I will mop some of it up so that it doesn't go where I don't want it to go but they like to keep some of it fairly wet and puddly because I can chase that paint around with my heat tool then and get some kind of cool effects which is what I'm about to do and I'm sorry it's kind of on the bottom edge so you're not really seeing it too much but you can tell there that's kind of cloudy and then just through that semi damp paint and I'm making some remarks that's a broken paint ball stylus there's no ball on it anymore there I am just kind of chasing the paint back and forth with my heat tool and getting some kind of cool effects doing that just some titanium white on a little palette knife and very very lightly touching the canvas and getting some texture there along that edge you and I will just mention here I updated Windows 10 and it added some kind of sound profile things so as I'm listening to this back it almost sounds like there's a bit of an echo to it and I hope that doesn't come across when I upload this video I'm thinking it's to do with my speakers more than it is my microphone but let me know if the sound is odd to you so that I can make some adjustments or figure out what's going on always an adventure with Windows 10 I'll tell you so I added some lampblack with that palette knife too on the opposite side to just kind of balance the white a little bit and I'm going to dry that all off now you so I'm bringing some of that yellow ochre back to brighten things up again just light applications here and there with my finger just to spread that yellow color around the piece a little bit more things get covered up and brought back and covered up again and then I just tapping in some white on my fingertip a little bit of texture in that corner and I have a fineliner with carbon black high flow acrylic in it and I just decided that I wanted to make some circular marks and then I kind of drugged it down to that corner and I'm just looking at it trying to figure out which way should this go and what else do I want to do and then I decide that I'm gonna put some little drops of black along that line that I drug up to the corner and I really like that I think it's interesting it's my circles again but it just wasn't finished so I have a second fineliner with Titan buff high flow acrylic and I just decided to kind of overlay that across the black and through those dots a little bit just for some more added interest and I spent some time to writing that off because the high flow acrylic does take some time to dry and I keep switching it around to try to figure out which way I like it the best if I like it that way or if I like it better turn the opposite way and coming back in again with some more yellow ocher making some more marks we're getting close to the end here I'm really liking it get to the point where you like it well enough that you think okay if I do more I could maybe not like it anymore maybe I'll totally mess it up so did just tad more of the yellow down that edge to brighten that side up scraping it back with that craft stick and I decided that just a little tad of white on the end of that broken stylus and it was done so to finish it off I'm just using my finger and dipping it into the lampblack and putting a final coat along the edges to cover up the paint that you got on the edges as I was working so I decided it's done I really like it I hope you enjoyed watching the process if you do give it a thumbs up just a little artists tip for you beginners out there don't waste the paint that's left over on your pallet at the end of a project I just took a couple of deli sheets that I have used already to mop some stuff up and just laid it in the paint and spread it around with a baby wipe and now I have a couple of papers that once they're dry I can use in my art journal and in collaging so don't waste paint people less going down the drain - which is good for the environment okay that's it I hope you enjoyed watching me create this abstract painting if you did give it a thumbs up and share it with your friends if you haven't subscribed to my channel yet I'd appreciate it if you did that and the meantime go make some art bye [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Sally Van Nuys, Mixed Media Artist

Views: 4,236

Rating: 4.9808612 out of 5

Keywords: painting, intuitive art, acrylic painting, art journal, art techniques, Sally Van Nuys Mixed Media Artist, intuitive painting, art tips and tricks, artist tips, acrylic painting on canvas, abstract painting, abstract with acrylics, Arteza acrylic paint, mark making on canvas, mark making with acrylics, making marks in art

Id: Fjr2PF-1ELE

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019