Anything But the Brush!

well welcome to anything but the brush um and welcome to my studio on protection island the sun is just coming through my skylight so i'm in a pool of sunshine and that's okay we're not going to complain about the sunshine um yeah so you may wonder why i call this facebook live anything but the brush in fact i really like the brush myself i think the brush is one of the most beautiful tools the artist has it's very responsive to our hand it's like an extension of our hand and there are so many different kinds of brushes i have a lot of brushes in my studio and if you look at my work on my website you'll see that a lot of the work looks quite brush heavy and in fact i love to see the brush work on on paintings but i have found in recent years that i i've been learning to work a little bit more intuitively as an artist so kind of um learning to hold off from using the brush until later on in the process in other words using a lot of different materials to try to keep the process of painting a bit more open so i don't shut things down too soon and then that allows a little bit of space for more of a playful because i'm always about play a bit more of a playful and intuitive way of working and one in which um you can create unexpected and random events to me that's part of the fun of art is finding out what happens along the way so to enjoy that you have to start to maybe let go of a few of the pressures that you put on yourself to create a perfect product right away and allow yourself to play play with the process and when you do that you know you're going to have some successes and some failures you're going to learn a lot about your materials so and and i think that you know we really have to learn about our materials before we can make them work for us so the more that we can play with our materials the better so um what i like to do is i'm just going to switch my camera around so you can see my hands and then for the rest most of the rest of the live video you'll just be looking at at my hands as i do some examples of some of the tools that i really like to use to mix up the process and some of the techniques too so what i have here is i have a piece of of multimedia watercolor paper taped in several places so right now it's sort of not looking like it's in coming into focus properly but once i start getting some marks on there you'll see it a little better um so what i'm going to do is is just some kind of a little bead of light dancing around my table but so very i'm going to start um working in these boxes i've created with tape so there's tape here and here and it's taped around the edges so it's a pretty tough paper if i wanted to i could um i could gesso that paper and make it even a little bit tougher but this is the opus medium just mixed media paper so some of my favorite mark making tools include just these are called soft pastels you could use charcoal as well charcoal will kind of move as you put paint over it or water over it sometimes you really want that but i like the scratchy feel of these these these pencils you might be able to hear that scratchiness with them and you know you can work just intuitively mark making but i sometimes like to start with an image so this is a photograph of parrot tulips then actually leave it up in the corner hoping that'll make the camera a little happier about focusing on that plane and i'm just going to take some of the visual language from these parrot tulips and start making marks so here we go they're kind of they've got these beautiful kind of jagged edges here this is the um it is called a pit pastel paper castell pit pastel and i'm just going to move through these different rooms that i've taped off with this kind of jagged they're petals here's the edge of the petal but i'm really trying not to get too literal right now because remember we're trying to kind of hold off give ourselves a break from being attached to our product and and just have some fun and at the same time i'm exploring the essential kind of visual nature of these beautiful parrot tulips in the end probably what i'm going to have here is going to be very very different from these photographs of these parrot tulips but if you're the sort of person who likes to have somewhere to jump off then you know you can start with something representational so i'm just going to take carry on down here with this line and they're running the line is just running between these boxes and another great way to disrupt our sense of being overly committed to um a product too soon is to work in series or tape off sections and that what that does is that it pulls it basically breaks down the boundaries of the piece so that where these boundaries that come around these little places i've taped off um just disrupt the idea of the edge because when we as we work this way you know we're not really working inside a tight composition we're just letting everything kind of flow around which is kind of fun so i really like to find ways to disrupt my process at this stage there's a couple of other tools i really like to use um this is a pasta pen these are so much fun you fill them with acrylic paint not a heavy body paint but you can use liquid paint or i like to use inks i really love the fw inks and more about that later but anyway they're great because they're so versatile this one's got sepia ink in it right now so i'm just going to put on a different kind of i'm adding a different kind of line so this jagged line is part of our visual language now and what we want to do with visual language is play with it so if we have a thin line in one place let's make a thick line in another place or a scratchy line if we have a really smooth line this is the kind of thing that just adds visual interest to the work [Laughter] because really you know paintings we want to be able to give the eye things to play with when we paint and then you can always use an archival pen too um just let me grab my archival pair be right back because i'm going to be using acrylics with these um i you don't want to use a sharpie because the sharpie ink will come pulling up through the paint so you get a something like a faber-castell artist pen and it'll say ink based and india ink waterproof so now this gives us another kind of weight of line and maybe i'll actually even start to add a little bit of dark value in some of these negative shapes it's nice to get some real chunks of dark value in in the beginning because sometimes we um are a little bit hesitant about getting dark value in especially if you come from a watercolor background like i do we're always taught oh you don't get your darks in until later because we have to protect our lights but then we have to build those darks in to create a nice an interesting and strong value composition and so i'm just going to put a little bit of this kind of dark in now to make sure i've got some nice dark chunks they don't look much like tulips now and that is okay another way i really love to make line is to transfer it in a kind of a monoprint way so to do that just take me just a sec to set up i have rolls and rolls of wax paper in my studio i find it the most useful thing to have around so i'm going to use this as a palette and how about i put some cadmium red light on this i love cadmium red light i think it is my favorite color and i'm going to use a a brayer another really essential tool in the studio so i'm just going to gray some cadmium red on the wax paper and then we're going to do something it's almost like a monoprint kind of technique i'll take in order to get a negative transfer of line i'll scratch in here and then press it down and the amount that you press will will influence how that transfers so i'm just softly pressing when i pull it up i get the negative line and i'm just going to pull it up a little closer to the camera so you can see how the negative line transferred but we can also put this down and draw into it to get a positive line like this and i really love the kind of distressed look that this kind of transfer creates i'm going to just scatter this around to some of the other pieces here so what about if we put it down and then use another tool like a squeegee to just try to transfer a little bit more of the paint down there's still wet paint on there you get a little bit of a kind of feathery look there so i'm going to do that a little more i'll get some fresh paint cadmium red light so this is golden heavy body paint i find that i use all kinds of formula of the um acrylic paint heavy body fluid like these and um and inks like the one i showed you before just because they're you know you can you can um thin down a heavy body paint but you get these really like the fluid paints here are so intense so if they're more intense and if you just added water to heavy body paint so i like to have all of those around in my studio let's just do this one more time so you get this technique so this is really kind of a monoprint technique and i'm going to scratch into it again just at the end of a paintbrush see i do have brushes in my studio and press it down to get that negative line and draw on it to get a positive line transfer just do another couple bits of this [Music] and you know you can just put down transferred as a solid too so i'll just transfer a little bit of solid paint sort of taken up the print of my hand there okay so that's the um transfer via wax paper um so i'll just give this a very quick dry with my blow dryer because i want to put on do some move on to some other layers here and these need to be really dry [Applause] okay now another way say i just felt like i didn't have quite enough color on there in kind of a solid way i might take another heavy bodied paint like a payne's gray and just put it on right out of the tube and i really just i love the squeegee as a tool and this is great because you get some big kind of architectural darks now remember that these are actually all taped off so some of these solid spots are actually running over tape which is part of the oh boy what kind of surprise are we going to find when we lift the tape off so now this has kind of added a very linear kind of uh element visual language to our to our composition sometimes on certain kinds of paper and if i have time i'll show you on bristol board you can actually spray at this point just add a little water to just to see if you can distress that line a little so i've got some spots of water on that and then you can well it's wet you can pick up paint it doesn't work so well on this paint on this paper but it would on a piece of illustration board it's really a fun technique all right so um now i have a lot of things that i like to print with and in fact i have a huge tub full of them so i pulled some of them out for you but i'm just going to kind of lay them in front of us so you can see some some of them are things that i've bought and some of them are just things that i found around the house like this is a meat tenderizer i kind of like the kind of little aggregations of spots that it creates i really like forks this is great for just drawing into wet paint you can buy these special rubber tools places that art stores with that give you you know different kinds of line if you pull it through fresh paint this is for preparing the glue underneath tiles when you're laying tiles this i think is for cake decorating anyway so lots of things for just making marks and wet paint but i also have a lot of things that i print with so i'll just grab some of my print stencil and again some of them are bought and some of them are just things around the house i i really so love bubble wrap i also really like anal glitter wallpaper it's textured wallpaper it used to be very fashionable i think it might be coming into style again i ordered a whole book of it from a designer and so it's a wallpaper with a raised kind of an embossed pattern on it and then you can buy commercial all kinds of commercial stencils um the thing with them is once you introduce a visual language then you do have to kind of respond to it in your work so for instance some of them can be quite overwhelming like the floral ones so some of them have got a really strong visual language i tend to use the ones that are more um just pure pattern like this one with the little spots why don't i try that one now so i'm going to get my wax paper again and i think i'll um let's see we'll do some black heavy body just because it'll make it'll be easier you for you to see as i do this printing with the black i get a fresh sprayer and so i'm just this one's sticky spraying the paint so i get it evenly distributed on the brayer and i'm sure i'm sure a lot of you have used this kind of thing before there's so many in the stores now it used to be really hard to find great stencils and it might still be a little hard to find these um analytical wallpapers but you could get them at your local oh paint store or something like that so i'm just pressing down lightly and then we get this kind of nice scattered pattern i'm going to scatter some of that around as you can see these have nothing to do with tulips anymore but that's okay it's just a way and sometimes we need a little bit of a a way in and as i get towards the end of the demo here i'll talk to you about the way out because the way in can often be a lot more straightforward um than the way out that is how do we finish what do we do with all this activity that we've created and that's um that's uh the finishing parts and they can be that can be a little bit challenging often for me it means many layers of processes and materials and painting note sometimes i'll take a failed painting and just completely redo it and if you go to my website my blog post i have a brand new website so i just have one blog post it's called creative destruction and it's something that i really actually love to do with um paintings that fail in quotation marks it's just a way of finding a new way into a painting that you've worked on for a long time and you haven't been able to find a way out of so um now i'm going to introduce you to another of my favorite tools for just introducing random elements i really like to work with masking fluid and i use it in a big way in creative destruction so this is my favorite masking fluid drawing gum pbo drying gum it's very very liquid it doesn't get sticky like some of the other ones and it's um it's very easy to lift so i've got a little jar of it here a little container better to work from a small container than a whole big jar because it's kind of easy to tip over and then if you get it in stuff it's really hard to get out so i'll just grab a brush here's a flower and i'm just going to kind of lay it down in places and i'm you know i'm thinking about a little i'm trying not to think too much at all actually but i'm um i'm keeping sorry i find it hard to paint and talk i'm i'm keeping some of the whites and lights in here when i put the masking fluid down because when i put in some new colors on top of this whatever is under the masking fluid of course is going to be protected and but as i said i'm trying not to over think it too much and i'm working with the flat just because it's fast and i want to more than anything i want to work kind of quickly here because we don't have a lot of time and i really want to share some of my favorites things with you maybe do a couple of spots now i'm introducing well i'm actually not introducing a new visual language with these spots because they're here with these little guys here so this falls into the category if you have a visual language use it in another way with another material express it is an in negative form rather than a positive form if it's a thin line make it a thick line or a scratchy line play with your visual language okay now i'm going to give this a quick dry and then we're going to do some glazing and see what we come up with underneath and we pull up the masking fluid this shouldn't take long to dry but sometimes these juicy spots you put in can take a little longer okay quick to dry with the blow dryer [Applause] shouldn't take that much longer than that to dry so i've got some bright spots of sunlight on my on my paper here now i'm going to glaze with acrylic ink which i really love because it's so intense oh but before i do that um i want to talk about another mark making tool which i really love and that is oil pastel and and actually i won't put any on right now because well maybe it'll be okay i don't want to lift any of this glazing fluid but again the um the colors of oil pastel are so intense this these are actually oil sticks that i got from a company in montreal called cama pigments they make their own oil sticks and i just love the really intense hits of color that you can get with oil pastel so i tend to always go for these kind of very brights like the bright oranges and bright pinks the kind of fluorescent colors and you can't really get to i don't know picky with them because especially these big ones they don't have a lot of you can't get a lot of detail with them i'm just tucking them in between the drawing on here maybe put a little on there all right so but this is my box of oil pastels it's a treasure box so we were talking about the acrylic inks so here's some colors um i'm going to go with the um maybe the marine blue prussian blue let's try that it's going to be quite dark but we've got a lot of light protected with the masking fluid so if i grab some fresh water a slightly wet brush i'm not going to use a lot of water with the ink but we do need a little sometimes to just help it float around so there's the prussian blue and as you can see it's very very very intense now i could just leave that like that very intense sitting on the paper or i could rub it it's nice to rub it because it leaves whenever i was talking about opening up the process it leaves the process open a little longer to rub it so we're not moving into like shutting down the light right away so let's do another couple of those and then we'll try another couple of colors i'm really liking what that's so the blue is interacting with the this would have been bear paper that's so there's the prussian blue color it's just making hardly really interacting with the paints gray much because the painting's great it's so dark already so here we go another one now i know i am using a brush but only only very loosely so let's try another couple of colors how about the indian yellow and this should turn the payne's grade black basically because you're neutralizing it with the yellow slightly slightly greeny black that's nice again let's just rub it back and give some of the light a chance to show through there um and one of my favorite colors is antelope brown so i'm just going to put a little bit of this antelope brown on here let's have a look how that interacts with what's underneath put some over here too and we'll leave one open for now just for fun i really like the pink and antelope brown so that's this piece here i'm just going to hold these up so you can see a little bit better this this is the oil pastel so they create these really beautiful this is oil pastel here oil stick they create these beautiful little dashes of color all right so i know you're all dying to see what happens when we pick up the masking fluid so let me dry this very briefly [Applause] you really want the paper to be very dry before you start to pull up the masking fluid otherwise you get paper kind of lifting the wet paper lifts up so there's a special little eraser you can get called a crepe eraser or a rubber cement rubber cement masking lifter or something like that or you can just do with your hands i can feel where the masking fluid is but it's faster to do with this this will just pick it up oh look at that pink the pink acryl pastel so beautiful so all the light that's coming up here is what was masked in that second step and i really just love the kind of surprise element of that so you can see how there's form emerging here now um let's see what's happened with some of the other ones so it's important you can see how important it is to keep some light in there i mean you can always paint it out but it's great to have it because already since we've got so much dark in here we've got the two bookends of the value bar so the lightest light lightest light and the darkest darks and then everything else in between is a breeze so um let's have a look at this one here there's one more technique i want to show you uh although you know i could keep going forever on the surfaces but there's something that i i want to show you that's another kind of another layer of fun so one of the things that i like to do is to collage my own collage papers so to do that i take just some tissue paper now if you want to work archivally you can get archival tissue paper so i'm just going to move this over here go back to the wax paper and i'll do maybe another i'll do some more red another layer of red and we're going to actually create our own tissue paper by print our own our own collage papers by printing right onto tissue paper so get my brayer again so you can see what i'm doing here is i'm spreading the paint evenly on my brayer it doesn't really matter what it's doing on the wax paper here i'm just spreading it evenly on the brayer and what about if we go back into this and then print it onto print it onto tissue paper and now you have another way of playing with your visual language you can when that's dry i can tear it up i like to tear it i'm just going to bring it up closer to the camera so you can see it a little better i like to tear it because again there there's the there's what i got again if you tear you're kind of interfering with your own our own tendencies to over control um think too soon about how everything's all coming together uh just hold on i've just gotta make sure i put my computer in here we don't want the computer to dial us there we go so um i happen to have some pre-printed tissue papers handy so let's see what happens when we take some of these now this is what i've got actually i've got some whites pieces of whites some printed with a floral pattern and some spots in black here's our bubble wrap here's this this pattern of the anal glypto wallpaper again so and here are just some more gestural marks now these have been made with um just an india ink this this india ink has a bit of gold in it it's very important before you collage them to dry and then they'll smear so let's grab a couple of these and again tearing just kind of messes things up and creates random events so i used a couple of different kinds of brushes here one was quite scratchy and just to show you how this works you know as i get to medium medium golden or opus matte medium and i'm going to lay some medium down and spread it around it has to be if you're collaging on to your work you really have to make sure that you get a nice even layer of matte medium underneath as well as on top of your cut whatever it is you're collaging on so the other thing i really like about this process is that it creates this kind of veiled look so we've introduced a new mark here i'm just new mark making i'm just going to pull it up here and get this i did yesterday and it's still pulling out a little bit so you know it should you really need to let them dry really well but you can also see where the tissue lies over something else it kind of creates this veil almost like adding zinc white to it all right let's do that in a couple more places so i basically have these kind of the visual language here is linear a couple of spots so there's a spot language again and we could put some down over here so now we've kind of broken up whatever was happening that we created with the the squeegee pulling the payne's gray down over here now we're kind of interfering with that so we're creating a little bit of i don't know break breaking up what the eye expects to see and that's how we can make more interesting work like nicholas wilton talks about as it as adding difference continuing to add difference and that's because you know we look at a piece of painting at a piece of art and one of the things that delights us is so grab some of these maybe this red one is dry now remember the little the piece of red printing that i did i'm going to rip this thing about paper is that it it rips well in one plane and not the other so sometimes it's easier to grip with the grin but not too much across it but that's okay because we're trying to mess up our control that element of control so let's see what happens when we put some on here here's the matte medium going down here's that little shot of of oil pastel that gorgeous gorgeous pink i'm just going to bring it up a little closer and now i'm going to oops need to clean my brush get some matte medium on the top too and get rid of all the bubbles so we have these these spots now kind of interacting with the layer underneath in interesting ways and just i'm going to stick in this in this square here because i quite like it and maybe i'll just pull this tape up so we see it more distinctly oh that nice that nice crisp line is so great and i'll just pull it off of well keep i'll keep it taped here because we don't want it to come right off the core blast that it's taped to so let's have a closer look at that what's going on with those areas i just want to make sure that i really get that tissue paper soaked i really don't want dry bubbles underneath there so yeah i think that's that's quite fun i like that let's um do one more and then i'll come in here and do a little bit more drawing it feels like i lost the line there these are all these are all kind of uh turning out quite differently one from the other because i purposely use different palettes so that you could see what the different colors do but you know you could work these all with the same kinds of lines mark making [Music] patterning that you're on but let's have a look at the what the white sometimes we lose our white right you can just with paint on the tissue paper and just say we lost say i feel a little like i lost too much white over here in this one i could just collage that back in and then we get a different kind of looking to see which was the side with the paint i think it was this side we get a different it's on it's white like here but it's white in a different way so so let's get that i know i said i was going to work over here but i got distracted by this idea of adding more white because i think that's that does happen we lose our light and remember i was talking about we want to have the full range of light of light to darkest dark in every piece we do that's what gives pieces the the value is like the bones of the work and it gives the work its structure so there's a little bit more wiping reintroduced and it's a bit jagged here but actually that's going to be tight there because it's right along the tape so if you get paper collage paper going onto the tape you just have to take a little exacto knife and cut that off as you go down the side of that so um let's go back here i'll just dry this because the tissue paper is quite wet and then i'll do a little bit more mark making over top of it [Applause] actually while that dries i'll show you some of the other work that i've done using this kind of technique and we can talk about how to apply it maybe to your work because we all have a different art practice so this is um this is a piece that's that it was more representational i'm going to pull it up out of the sunshine pooling on my table so it started off with we worked from photographs of sunflowers and did some printing did some i was used some resist did some glazing with um with uh inks and it's not finished you know if i was going to finish it i'd probably bring in pick up my brush actually and do the final stages with some introduce some opaques like the banner of artwork play has got this if you look at it it's got a combination of this kind of very active surface and then quiet areas and opacity what we get when we use opaque uh heavy body paints especially if they've got a lot of light in them is what you you add to create that that sense of difference so we've got a lot of activity here a lot of transparency and the final stages would be to introduce some quiet flat areas some light and some dark and it's it's in that comparison that pushing one thing up against something else that's different that we get this sense of uh interest what interests the eye of the viewer so this is on paper and this was a made with an analytical wallpaper this um kind of floral you get the kind of the remnants of this floral pattern some of these lines were transferred with the wax paper that i was that i did in the demo um and there's you can see the masking fluid especially here where i've just splattered it on and creates these kind of nice uh drop kind of they've got a lot of energy right and here too so also here's one not so much printing on this one but this is a tide pool also not finished but it's got this negative line that was introduced with a by drawing into the heavy body paint on the wax paper and then pressing it down i've done a little over glazing here with the antelope brown to kind of push some areas back and connect them up but the actual um probably the the composition here is quite a bit smaller than the paper so if i can grab some framing tools and this is the beauty of working on paper right we can crop down and i'll often do that before i actually finish the painting because then i can see how i want the bones of the values to actually work so that's on paper and then finally you can adapt this kind of technique to canvas so again this is unfinished this was from a demo of sunflowers but we did we sort of did a very loose gestural drawing onto the canvas with archival pen i think and then we did printing and both with the there's this bubble wrap and this i think is carpet underlay these little tiny spots here uh and then this was the transfer with the off of the wax paper that you know to create the negative line and then i wanted to show you how you can bring in these opaques just you can carve out shapes and also quiet areas down so i hope that you will find that you can adapt some of these techniques to your own work and um i just grab these again i can isolate this one and you know i haven't worked very much on the other ones but i really like the combination of positive and negative space here it seems to now i can think okay where do the rest of the darks need to go maybe i'd put a little dark up in here and connect up some of this mark making the tissue the pale color of the tissue is showing there and that could be re-glazed once it's dry just re-glaze it with another color of ink or go back into the prussian blue i could also overdraw with white with a gel pen or a chinese marker and pick up this visual language here so here's an example here's a a white line that was created through that negative transfer process and then you could take that and pick it up if i've got something right here with another tool you don't have a white marker but you you could pick that up with a positive white line with a another marker like a as i said a chinese marker or a gel pen white gel pen and uh that's what i have to share with you today about mark making just a few of the tools and processes that i use to create random processes the sense of surprise if you have any uh questions or comments please drop them into to the comments and i can answer them when the video is over and we have time to think about it thanks so much for coming

Channel: Alison Watt

Views: 7,547

Rating: 4.9590445 out of 5

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Id: FzFpelfXLmY

Length: 56min 15sec (3375 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021