How to Paint Abstract Artwork for Beginners

hi everyone thank you so much for joining me for this free mini online class abstract approaches my name is Tracy bedico and I am an Australian artist I live with my husband in a small coastal village about two and a half hours south of Sydney and it's the most beautiful Bay that we live in its called Jervis Bay and a lot of my work is inspired by the beautiful surroundings here in the bay I've put together this mini class for you abstract approaches as just a little glimpse into my teaching style and a prelude to my larger class abstract motor which will take you on a whole bigger adventure into abstraction so I hope that after you watch this class and try some of the exercises that you'll join me in abstract motor as well have fun hi everyone and welcome to your first lesson in this free mini class on abstract approaches I am Tracey Verdugo and today what we're going to be looking at is a method of working that I have come up with called embracing the contrast now one of the best things about teaching I find is that even though I often approach my work intuitively in order to be able to be an effective teacher and to be able to get my ideas across and help other people to understand you know different ways of approaching these painting techniques I often have to sit down and dissect the way that I work with in my own pieces and so you know for quite some time students have been asking me certain questions about my abstract pieces and I sat down one day and I realized that a lot of what I was doing is really pushing the contrasts and I don't mean just between dark and light there are many many ways that we can add contrasting elements to our work and so I began to play with this idea in demonstration format my workshops where we would deliberately put contrasting elements against each other and move our way around a piece using news and contrast as you know our main tool to to make the next move what I found while I was using this technique to help my students is that we were less likely to get actually into those places where we'll be stuck where we wouldn't know what to do next so it quickly became one of my favorite tools to use and I'll be using it quite extensively in the upcoming abstract mojo of course in fact we'll be dedicating devoting a whole week to embracing the contrast in all of the ways that we can stretch that but what I wanted to do today is to work on 15 small pieces to just introduce you to the concept of embracing the contrast so it's not a super expensive sheet of watercolor paper and the reason I want you to work on just regular cartridge paper or just on some cheaper watercolor paper for this exercise is that I really want you to understand that it is an exercise I think one of the things we get stuck on so much is this idea that everything we do has to be amazing or that everything we do has to be you know have some kind of successful outcome when you are learning new things whether you are learning a language whether you're learning to cook whether you're learning to paint you need to give yourself permission to explore and to make mistakes and you know to get rid of stuff but just to learn while you're doing it so you don't have to keep everything having said that I'm not using like a super super lightweight paper because perhaps something good will happen on one or two of the pieces and I might want to keep them and push further into them so before we get started let's have a look at this idea of embracing the contrast and how we can use a list of words to help us make the next move to help us always know where to go next so I have a list in front of me that I've come up with myself you can actually write these ones down you can feel free to add your own words to the list but basically what I want to do is to create a list where we have words that either denote an emotion that we can express through art or words that actually have an actual physical aspect so for example straight as in you can do straight lines or curvy lines etc etc so with this list I've got words like straight big loud expensive transparent contained messy pontius background whoo dark smudged balanced random complex bright outside detailed think loose dry vibrant white textured and curved okay so that's quite a list so I really want you to write those words down so rewind if you need to and then I want you to write down in your mind what are the opposite words that come to you for all of these words that we've written down so for example we've written down straight so perhaps you might write down curvy or you might write down bent or you might write down crooked we'll all have converted a slightly different approach okay which is fantastic which is where we want to get you so for example if you've got the word messy then you know for me I might write down next to it neat or contained something like that smudge the opposite to that in my mind will probably be something like clear or precise okay so you're gonna go ahead and you're going to write down all of the opposite words to the words that you have on this list and we're going to use these opposites to actually move our way through the painting of all of these small pieces okay so the other thing that we need to know is that I have a variety of tools and mediums beside me not too much because I only have a small space right here but I have several inks and they are Daler Rowney really artists inks and I have several acrylic heavy body paints on a small palette with some white as well and I have just a few things that I've picked up because in order to create contrasting elements I need to have some contrasting mediums as well okay so I have a couple of oil pastels I have some charcoal I have a few different brushes and let's see so I have some willow charcoal and then a heavier charcoal as well and I also have these fun haven't actually played with them much but these are play color art sticks and they're gouache solid paint sticks and they are actually they make a great a great mark so let's get started I have no plan for this lesson at all except to follow my own prompts and to visit embracing the contrasts on their small pieces now usually I do this exercise at my workshops across one large piece and I normally do it also on the ground so this is going to be a little different for me working my way across several different pieces and seeing how pans out so let's just take a look to get started and I'm just gonna pick one word and the first word is is straight and so I'm gonna grab a piece of charcoal and I'm just going to start at far left and do a couple of straight lines so the first thing that now comes into my mind is opposite of straight and for me that would be curvy so I'm gonna just continue that line and take it over to the next sheet and then think about what next so if I'm looking at both of these lines they're actually both quite thin yep so this is how my mind is working so thin opposite of thin would be a thicker line so I've just taken a little bit of the charcoal and I'm gonna just pull it across on its side and as I'm doing it in it's skipping I'm realizing that a skipping line or a dotted line is another valid way of making a mark or we could go for a thicker line made up by scribbling the charcoal across the page I'm going to switch over to the heavier charcoal and just play with that still continuing to line trying to make the line just a little bit different across each one here now one of the other words so I'm coming back I'm just feeling then like oh okay what shall I do next so coming back to revisit and the first thing I see is the word scribbling okay so in this one I'm just gonna come in edge and just throw in a scribbling mark right there okay I'm gonna do the same thing on this one but I'm gonna place it in a different area and I saw another wood at the same time as I saw the word scribbly and that word was smudged so I'm gonna just take a baby wipe and just smudge some elements of this line here well I have baby wipe in my hand often I'll look at a tool that I'm using and then think to myself well there's still something on this tool so perhaps I need to Hubble can see what other kind of mark I can make by taking that tool and just wiping your residual off on the piece of paper so just continuing along let's have a look and just see so something like if I look at the word contained so I feel like you know if I did something like this with the charcoal tiny tiny little dots that feels fairly contained to me for you it might be something completely different if I think about the opposite of contained suddenly I just had this kind of idea of jumping over from one sheet to the others of escaping escaping this contained element here I don't really want two things to be the same so I'm just going to take my little baby wipe again and loosen up this one here so now we have to pick two deliberate and kind of random as well or smudgy and precise so you see what I'm getting at here so in the very last one I'm just going to take the charcoal and do something different so now we have kind of a journey of visual elements and marks that have taken us the whole way across the 15 sheets of paper but beginning to look at this idea of contrast what does it mean a very basic fundamental level we've got contrast happening here quite easily because I've started with the black on the white papers okay so what's a move that we could make next so I'm just looking down at the tools that I have in front of me and I'm thinking that I want to try a little bit of transparency so if we think about transparency and the opposite of transparent being opaque it is probably best to work with something like an acrylic ink or a fluid acrylic to actually get some transparency going and just for the purposes of this exercise I'm going to add a little ink and then take a wet wide flat brush and just pull that ink down why have the ink on my brush I'm just going to dip a little bit into water and make a different mark so I'm going to play with the idea of transparency just using a few different colored inks so reaching for the Antelope Brown right now and just in the same way [Music] [Music] feeling it the energy of these mops right now le random I'm trying to just sick this as I move along so for example this mock that I've made just here this one felt like it was more organic around and so I've placed the transparent mark above it overlapping that it's more of a square so I'm thinking about this contrasting thing the whole time let's go for something quite dark so this is paints gray in the ink and let's see I'm not gonna add it on this one because I already have a dark mass here so I'm going to add the Payne's grey to one of the pieces that feels like it doesn't yet have a lot of oomph going on so you can see that this application of the really dark Payne's grey has a lot of strength and that's the thing the contrast will give you a lot of impact [Music] [Music] now you can imagine that when I'm working on the flat I have a lot more control over what the ink does so this is new territory for me and I actually love that I love the fact that when I'm teaching I try to put myself in a similar place of discomfort as my students if that makes sense I try to make it so that I'm not doing the same thing I always do you know where I can predictably get a good outcome I try to put myself in the situation where things might not go quite right for me and then I have to figure out what I do to solve that problem because that's all the creativity is really is just solving problems right so you know what do I do to solve the problem of the ink running down or do I just embrace these drips what new thing will this bring to me alright just dipping that brush is still a bit of pain spray on it so I'm going to dip it into the water and just apply it curly squiggly lines so I'm gonna add some straight lines this one doesn't have a lot on it at all just yet maybe I'll pick up some of the paint scrape from here and do something quite different so perhaps you know I'm thinking well I feel actually like that maybe I'm overthinking too much so sometimes what happens when I do that and I'll just do it deliberate kind of this block you know and just loosen things up a little bit alright so over on this one here and this one here we don't have any transparency on there yet so this is what we were looking at this transparent at this point so I'm going to just at some marine blue ink and add that in [Music] not liking my I'm not cleaning my brush completely I'll have a little bit of the pains Christ alone that that's actually not marine bluing that is rounding blue which is beautiful as well you can see how bringing the ink through the Chuckle actually creates a different color or a kind of a steel blue color which is quite beautiful and then I'm just going to wipe the brush off in a couple of places as well so one of the things I love to do if I have extra ink or extra paint on a piece is to work on the idea of perhaps putting in some smaller detailed elements okay so one of my favorite tools is a bamboo skewer and to use for bats and so I'm just going to kind of move around and see where some of the ink is still slightly wet and I'm just gonna pull it out to get some small kind of drawn elements which again if we look at the words like old and delicate you could see like this being quite bold and then pulling some wet ink or even you know dipping your skewer into the ink and adding in some small dots with the end of the bamboo skewer is bringing in something that is a little more delicate against the holder heel off the previous marks whenever I have something on a tool little bit of ink I make sure that I take that and use it somewhere else I'm just rolling that scared cross-eyed adding another mark to one of the sheets [Music] okay so I feel like we've gotten a pretty good flow and some energy and movement beginning to happen across the whole spread of these small pieces of paper and what I would tend to do now would be to kind of come into individual pieces and to look at the energy or the feel of the individual piece using the word Leslie embrace in the contrast wordlist and then making a move that is opposite to what is on there okay so for example this little piece over here feels like it is quite one-dimensional right now it feels like it's quite flat and so I'm going to add a little bit of texture using a stencil and so I've just mixed up some heavy body paint with it this way some heavy bodied acrylic paint using Australian gold I believe and some white and I'm just gonna pull it across the piece overlapping the other two elements that are already on there which when you do it brings a sense of cohesion so it's actually coming in and overlapping two separate elements and bringing those elements together alright so while I have the stencil in my hand I'm going to use it in a couple of other areas so coming over to this little one here the same way pulling the stencil over a couple of the elements that are already underneath I'm not going for an exact stencil I'm actually going to just grab a little bit of turquoise now so I can change the color up a little so just mixing that kind of mustard color with some chalk boys so that should get us a nice green you can see that I'm limiting my palette somewhat I haven't bought out every color Under the Sun because I think I feel like it's already going to be enough complexity for us to try and work with so many different energetic words without bringing in the whole spectrum of color at the same time so then it come up to this one here and bring in a little bit of stenciling texture with the green so basically the colors I've chosen are in and around Green's goals and blues the Antelope Brown is kind of a greenish Brown and then of course the blacks and the whites for that real contrast and light and dark let's take a little bit up here as well and I'm not going to do this same repetitive element on each one so what I might do is just put that stencil down for now but while I have the green still on my brush as I said before I'm gonna use that I'm gonna take a little bit of white with the green and I'm gonna apply some of this heavy bodied acrylic paint in different ways to several of these pieces okay so where where is that contrasting why is it contrasting because so far we have transparent and we have a line we don't have any kind of opaque blocked in color just yet okay so there's another contrasting element for us to add to the piece so what about if I just take this one for example which has straight line straight line straight line Koberlein kobena and covilhã and transparent and then we just add in a block of opaque color so suddenly you have a new element in your abstract piece well I have to paint on my brush take a little bit more white and I'm going to look for another piece that needs something more opaque so coming up here we have a skipping line and we have some kind of splat brush marks which were quite random so I'm going to connect those with an opaque circle and I'm going to leave a little peek through to the underneath so can you see what I'm doing I'm just nipping for ways in which I can add contrast a contrasting element to whatever is already on the piece still have some on my brush so I'm gonna come over this one especially feels like it needs a little something so I'm gonna take a little bit more of the turquoise and that's too kind of cradle here and you shape that's cradling the other elements and then just to kind of get rid of the rest of the paint that's on this brush I'm just going to come in here add elements take the paint off the brush now when you're adding an opaque color one of the other things that you can do which I love to do is to take your bamboo skewer again and to just scratch through and bring an element of scruffy tea into the work so this one has curvy line curvy line pretty line and then I'm gonna bring some straight small straight lines scratched into that lighter opaque paint and then scrape that white paint off and continue that repetition of that line down into the other color aright it's starting to look good so I'm going to pick up one tool and sometimes that's also a strategy so that if you're starting to get overwhelmed with the piece that you're working on pick up a tool and then let's see where we can actually use that tool using our contrasting list so this one is one of those gouache play cover art sticks and this one is kind of a turquoise color and so just opening it up I'm gonna have a look around and just see where I can actually play with this color so first up looking at this piece right here I feel like it has a lot of Kirby or swirly or undulating and it doesn't yet have a lot of straight so I'm just going to right over the top and just bring in some small straight strokes so just one move at a time so I'm going to look further along and to see where I can bring in some more of the same element but in a different way so this piece right down the bottom here it feels like it just doesn't have a lot going on yet okay it's fairly blocky it's just one transparent blocked area and one scraped charcoal blocked area so I'm going to take the line for a little walk around connecting those two areas okay so there's a curvy linear element now introduced which is different than everything else that was on that piece this one here I feel like this would give us a nice contrast just in the color between this beautiful gold with the background of the Antelope Brown so I'm thinking or maybe just we already have this kind of mushroom going on maybe this one it's several straight lines all the way through it okay just looking around more this one feels quite contrived it feels like you know I have these thick lines thick straight lines going up and down there's a dotted line which was just a drip of the ink from above and then this is jumping I feel like there's nothing on here that is scribbly or accidental so I'm just going to come straight in and just scribble on this okay feels really good when you scribble okay this piece here doesn't want to have a lot going on either it feels like there's two disjointed areas so maybe let's see just join them up with a line and then this one here just gonna bring in some succulent elements and then maybe on this one a repetition of the circle but using a different material so repetition is also another important element of an abstract piece [Music] now when we're looking at contrast our abstract works I want you to never be afraid to make a bold move a bold choice okay because sometimes those are the leaps of faith that will just take you into another whole arena with your work so even if you feel attached to something even if you feel like something is really working sometimes it's a good idea to just like do something completely different to just like change it out change the energy out so I'm just kind of looking at my palette here and I have this beautiful lush midnight blue acrylic paint and I haven't yet used my finger as a tool so I'm gonna actually come in and just bring in some really large contrasting areas on some of these pieces just using my finger and changing the energy up completely don't be afraid of really pushing the docs because you can always bring light back over the top of the dark and sometimes that's where you'll find a lot of women a lot of contrast [Music] try not to judge the work as you're creating it when you're making your pieces they're exactly that they are work in progress they're not actually meant to be judged it's time to kind of judge them at the end that's when you're going to be making the decisions about what you might need to add or take away in order to call the piece finished but the making the process of it is not the time to actually be judging it [Music] pay attention to the energy that you're actually feeling when you're creating as well so if you get to a point where you're feeling frustrated or you feeling unsure that's probably a good time to walk away what would be the opposite of frustrated or unsure so the opposite of being I'm sure would be to have more clarity so sometimes what you need to have heard clarity is perhaps a break cup of tea or to go and sit outside in nature go for a little walk then to be able to come back in with fresh eyes and clarity to make the next move so I'm gonna have a little break have a cup of tea because I'm just feeling a little bit unsure about the next move and there's always of course a lot more pressure on me when I'm actually trying to teach you something that's like well hopefully the method behind the madness is coming through so I'm just gonna head outside have a little break and then come back in the standing back and kind of looking and assessing it's also a part of the process so give yourself time to do that as well it's interesting working in this way as I mentioned before usually I would do this whole demonstration on one sheet and I'm noticing that having so many smaller pieces is it's a whole different kettle of fish it's a little trickier because my mind is like trying to solve multiple things so which is fine but what I'm going to do is just step back for a moment and then I'm going to have a look at which pieces I feel are actually looking like they are more successful even though we're not needing to actually have you know complete successful piece we are just playing around with these ideas of emplacing the contrast it's nice to actually be able to look at together which pieces are working and which pieces would need more if we were to push forward with them so what I want to do right now is just stop where we are and I'm going to use a tool that I love to use to explore whether a composition is working or whether it needs to have something else added to it so this is just a simple viewfinder made from two L shapes and basically I use this on larger pieces as well I'll use it around a canvas to see which parts are working well and which parts are not and I'll use it on these smaller pieces as well to kind of give me some clarity about you know what is working as a successful composition and I really feel like something with this one is actually working quite beautifully and it could be that it doesn't need anything else so I'm gonna kind of refrain from adding to this one the one next to it this one here I feel like it's definitely gone too heavy on the dark and that I probably will need to come back over some of that dark with a little white and how I do that will be a decision possibly I may come in with some white gel pen some specific tightening because everything that's on there right now feels fairly random except for the stenciling but even that is not it doesn't feel deliberate it feels kind of accidental so I may come in with just some kind of deliberate mark right in this in this piece here this one I feel like definitely is lacking in contrast you definitely use a little more umph in the dark this one I feel like has a long way to go for me something simple about this one is appealing and I'm enjoying all of the the different elements and how they're working together it doesn't feel like me but that's okay it's okay to stretch yourself as well and to do things that don't feel like you just to kind of experiment and push your own boundaries this one I'm actually really enjoying I feel like for me it might need a little bit more contrast so look at that this one something doesn't feel right for me yet with this piece nor that one something about this line I kind of don't mind the simplicity of that one this one for me definitely needs something more and this more light moves in here and definitely more in here as well but again you know these are all personal decisions that I'm making about my own work so you know coming back to this list can be a great way to just keep moving forward so I think on a couple of them I mentioned that I would like to add a little more contrast okay so if we look at this one up here I'm going to take just a piece of foam core it's called scratch foam but it's just basically you can buy it from Dick Blick soar from art supply stores it's basically a thin sheet of foam and it's um very much like the foam that you'll find on the bottom of a meat tray or the bottom of a pizza tray and you can actually etch into the foam and create a pattern and then dig a little deeper so that you in it essentially you're making your own stamp so I'm just gonna add in a little element of pattern using the scratch foam and at the same time I'm going to push the contrast in this little piece above here so just going to paint it some white paint onto the phone and just going to push that paint down and pull it off and you'll see this little kind of pattern the contrast beautiful contrast area happening there so while I have that in my hand I'm gonna look for another opportunity to use it [Music] [Music] well I have the turquoise on my brush once again no look for an opportunity to use that it's actually being sitting in the water and so it's now a mixture of heavy bodied acrylic paint and water you're just gonna add a circular element to this piece and kind of enclose or unite some of the elements underneath bringing that watered down acrylic paint and you know there's nothing wrong with if you actually try something or make a move as in this circular element that you feel really works well then try it somewhere else try it on another piece and see how it feels there for me adding that kind of artful social element to this piece actually works even better than this hurt so I actually feel like it just really made this piece here and it may be that this one is done I still have the paint on my brush let's try it one more time [Music] so oftentimes you need to give yourself some space between one session and the next especially when you're dealing with multiple pieces so depending on how you're feeling sometimes the best thing to do is to walk away often though you'll have some paint left on your palette and acrylic dries very quickly so one of the things I like to do just at the end of a session even if I'm not quite sure where some of the pieces are going is I'll just add some white to my palette and I'll just play with deliberately creating some more neutral colors by mixing some of the colors that are actually left on the palette so I'm just bringing together a little bit of white and a little bit of that kind of gold Australian gold a little bit of turquoise and I'm gonna play around with that color almost as if I'm just creating some little swatches but as you can see in doing that I'm adding another element to the case playing the application I could scrub I could scribble coming back in grabbing a slightly different mixture signing different elements adding a little bit of the midnight blue so we get some grays happening the gray can be a beautiful unifying element of peace beautiful gray green happening there [Music] just adding a little more white this piece is getting slightly smoky so pushing that light coming in with a bold move over here just change up the energy on this one because it really wasn't doing a lot for me and you feeling a certain freedom with this white on my hand so kind of coming through and adding that some other areas also what is often the very last element that I will add to a piece [Music] [Music] [Music] moving across my palate and really just using what is left on here to make some moves before I finish up this session for the day [Music] so I'm really happy with how some of these small pieces are coming along some of them again feel more successful than others I feel like I need to take a step back have a break and just come back into the studio again tomorrow with fresh eyes and then you know reassess where I feel pieces are balanced within those contrasting elements I think it's important for me to let you know that when I talk about having a balance of contrasting elements it doesn't mean having 5050 like half dark half light there's always going to be more of one contrasting element than the other if we think about the rule of thirds then you're probably more likely to have two thirds of the piece feeling dark and one-third feeling light there's going to be feel more of a balance within that than just having a straight half half or another example would be to have a look at how many of the marks are bald marks and how many are delicate marks if there was exactly half and half was bald and delicate it probably wouldn't be as successful at peace as if there were more bald and less delicate or more delicate and less bald so yes let's leave it here and we will come back to them and I'm excited to see where we go next hello and welcome to the next segment of abstract approaches I've decided to actually change approaches this morning and that's something that I do a lot in my teaching and in my work so I figure that if you're new to learning with me I may as well just lay it out on the line right now that I often work very spontaneously and I work in response to the things that are going on around me so if that's in an in-person workshop then often it'll be like the energy of the group or a particular person that I sense needs something so that I will actually you know create a demonstration or a technique right there on the spot to help that person get through whatever it is they need to get through and in turn that then helps the rest of the group so it's kind of how I work I don't really plan things out I have a basic loose structure of what I'm going to be teaching but then I'm really open always to just wherever the energy takes me spontaneous happenings accidents that can turn into amazing discoveries just inspiration from the environment is really important so these are all things that we're going to be talking about when I release abstract mojo which is the huge class that's going to be covering so much more than what we can do in these two lessons but this is just a little taster for you all and so I hope you're enjoying it so here we are out in my garden it's springtime in Australia right now so you'll hear lots of birds and we have beautiful bottlebrush flowers in bloom and I just thought it'd be lovely to sit out here and chat with you for a bit mmm so we finished up in the last segment with a whole wall full of small mini abstracts and we were working through the embracing the contrasts ideas of you know looking at the flow and energy of what we have already going on in a piece and then seeing if we can add in something that was a contrasting elements so for example we looked at whether there were too many bold lines in a piece and then added some delicate lines so we looked at if the energy was flowing or too loose then perhaps we might need to add in a little bit of structure so I hope that you got the gist of what what I was coming out with that and I will be exploring it a lot more there'll be a whole week devoted to embracing the contrasts in the new class so what I decided to do this morning coming out and looking at all of these pieces on the wall was to actually take them off the wall because I didn't feel like I could resolve every single one of them in a mini class we just take a whole lot more time I think but what I wanted to do and as I mentioned to you earlier this exercise was not really an exercise to get us to a point where we had 15 successful pieces I really wanted it to just be a way for you to explore this idea of embracing the contrast and as a new idea to work with and then just to see where it would take you so to not be so attached to everything coming out you know as a magnificent success so I'm happy to leave these most of them where they are but I want to pick just a couple of them and I want to take them one step further for you so just to show you a few other techniques that I might use to either bring a bit of cohesion to a piece that's lacking in cohesion a bit of unity or perhaps just to take it one step further or to actually transform what is on the piece at the moment so and that's something I love to do because you know you sometimes we get stuck often I think that's one of the main things that students will tell me is that they get to a place with their work and they just get stuck they don't know how to take it any further and what happens then is that stagnation sets in right and you lose your momentum so you just can't keep going because you're actually falling into this pit of stagnation it sounds terrible but that's what happens and then you're like ah you know I'm just gonna stick it in a corner or put it in a draw and I just don't know what I'm gonna do with this piece often that happens on large canvases because of course there's a lot more space to fill there's a lot more to figure out a lot more problems to you know work out and resolve so I think sometimes just working small on little pieces like this is a really helpful way to move through and develop different strategies to kind of deal with similar problems that will come up even in your larger pieces if that makes sense I hope it makes sense so what I'm going to do is we're gonna head back into the studio and I'm actually going to work on the flat now because I want to have a little bit more control over some of the techniques that I use so I'm not going to be working on the wall you won't see my face but you'll hear my voice and so we'll actually be working on several of these pieces on a table and I'll be taking you through some of the ways that I could make the next move to resolve some of the issues that we've come up with so we'll be looking at transformation we'll be looking at again you know balance and embracing the contrasts and we'll be adding a few more techniques such as looking at glazing briefly and a little bit of collage so let's go have some fun and let's see what we can do with a few of these pieces I will also be taking one of these pieces the one that I feel is the most resolved at the end of this lesson and I will be taking that forward into the new class abstract mowcher and we will be creating or recreating or using that piece as a jumping-off point as an inspiration for a large work on canvas I'm really excited to kind of take this into the the larger class as well so coming over we're gonna head into the studio and I'm gonna have some fun ok so I've chosen this little piece to begin with and this is probably one of the ones that I feel is working in the best way so far and what I wanted to do with this one is just show you how sometimes adding a little bit of a collage element will actually really bring something new to the piece so we'll be adding a little design I'm using some just basic matte medium so any kind of gel medium or matte medium will be handy for this for this part so it just going to use a little bit of the matte medium basically as our glue that's our collage glue and one of my favorite things to collage with is we call them Soviets here in Australia but I know a lot of people call them napkins in other parts so there are lots and lots of beautiful patent napkins that you can get your hands on and all you need to make sure of is that when you're about to collage with them that you actually just have a look and see whether there are two or three ply to your napkin and you want to take all of that backing paper off so that you're just ending up with the one layer that has the design on it so I've chosen a napkin a patent napkin that has colors that kind of work with they're in the same color family as what I have going on here on this piece and so I also wanted to illustrate that the contrast is also about size so I'm going to apply three pieces of this same patent napkin but I wouldn't go ahead and just apply three large pieces that were exactly the same shape so we want some diversity within the work as well so just to make it easy I've kind of torn three pieces that that are large medium and small okay and then you just you know spend some time kind of moving them around and seeing where they might feel right to you often one of the ways that I'll work is I'll I'll work with the initial large piece because obviously that's going to make you know quite a lot of difference to the piece that you're working on so I'll find my placement for that piece first and then I just use a little thing in my head that I have where I take the next piece and I I just take it somewhere to the diagonal opposite okay so I've got this piece here this piece perhaps somewhere over here and then this little piece somewhere within the mix but not on the same plane as either of these what I mean by that is I'm not gonna have it like coming to exactly the same place as this one or the same level down below as this one I'm going to put it somewhere kind of in the middle another thing I like to do when I'm working with the paper tape with in Atkins with collage is sometimes just find a part where there's like a harsh edge so there's an edge here between the green and this other pants gray ink underneath and just break that up a little bit by placing the piece where the two lines connect then I'm gonna add one more piece of collage and this is just a piece of Chinese script and I'm gonna maybe use this to tie together let's see tie together two of these so just a slight overlap we'll move this around just a little bit and I think I'll overlap in that way so this is kind of a linking element between this piece of collage and this piece of collage so let's see how that works when we pop it on let move this up just a little tiny touch more so I'm gonna use just a wet brush a clean wet brush and I'm going to actually glue down let's see I'm gonna glue this one down first and then I'm gonna overlap the Chinese script and then over like this one on top so just a little bit of the matte medium underneath where your collage is going to go and then take your wet brush that still has a little bit of medium on it and just run it across the top don't press too hard because the napkins will start to tear if you press too hard so I'm gonna actually overlap this one here just adding a little bit of the matte medium placing the collage element and another layout so this is a piece of text from a secondhand book so it's going to act in a different way it's a little bit more robust than the napkin and then the last piece just up here so you'll see that the book page sits on top of the piece whereas the napkins kind of integrate into the piece and you can try those out and just see you know which one do you prefer I think they both have that place in a piece I generally prefer working with the napkins but in this case I feel like this adds a nice little element of difference as well so you can see that's just for a little bit more cohesion to this piece that we're working on no put this one aside for a moment and then we'll come back to it once this collage has dried and we'll add another layer to another one of the pieces alrighty so with this little one I have to be honest and tell you there's not much here that is calling to me at all there's nothing really that feels I can't really find a sweet spot and oftentimes what I'll do when I'm working is you know there'll be a certain element of the piece that's speaking to me and if that's giving me somewhere that I can move forward from so with this little one it's like okay nothing's really happening so sometimes what I like to do when I'm at this point is to come in at and with what I see it's like a radical transformation okay and I find this exhilarating and I I know that it can also be quite terrifying because I've seen that in my students but I promise you that once you've done it a few times you'll catch the exhilaration you'll catch that element of excitement and you know it's about not knowing what comes next so oftentimes what I'll talk to my students about is living in a state of curiosity but being more on the side of playful curiosity rather than anxious curiosity so the two words I often think about it or what if what if I try this what if I just did this what if I added this so in try and be in the state of what-if but have this kind of anticipation that the what-if could bring something new and amazing doesn't always happen but what it does it's fantastic so what I've just put on my pallet here you'll notice has three very different colors than what we already have on this piece so we've been working primarily with cool colors over here so I've just brought in some warmer colors some flame orange and the acrylic ink some quinacridone magenta in the golden fluid and some nickel as our gold also in the golden fluid and I'm going to use theories to radically transform this little piece to give it a whole new feel by just pulling a glaze over and so these paints and inks lend themselves to transparent glazes quite beautifully and a glaze will help to just unify what's going on underneath now if you like you can use water to bring to actually add into the paint and just thin it down just a little bit more so I'm just adding some of the matte medium in so you can use the matte medium or you can use water to do the same thing if you're working on larger pieces especially probably better to use the matte medium so let's just pull over a glaze the magenta in what area the nickel is our gold in another area just noticing you know what what happens when we do this you'll see that as the piece is transforming in front of your eyes it may be that you want to keep a little bit of what was underneath and often that happens so don't just go crazy and like pull the glaze across all at once notice what's happening as you apply the glaze notice how the things and the colors and the shapes underneath change in relationship to what you're doing I think I might just keep a little peek through to a couple of areas just a couple of geometric areas kind of peeking through from underneath and that feels quite beautiful to me now definitely feels more resolved than it did before I might like to intensify the magenta and so you can always add in a little more of the colors that you're using so just bringing in some areas slightly deeper glaze warming it up just that little bit more and even just trying out different orientations to see whether it might feel better one way or the other oftentimes when the color is deeper at the bottom it feels more grounded to me to actually turn the piece around so while we have this one just still in front of us I feel like we could probably bring some resolution to this fairly quickly perhaps just by adding in a little bit of contrast with a white gel pen so coming into perhaps this darker area here and bringing in some small drawn elements and then playing around with how would it feel to leave those drawn elements exactly where they are well how would it feel to connect through from one area to another so let's try that it's coming down bringing a little bit of that drawn element down and connecting it through to another section of dark below so this is essentially a breaching technique where you're actually joining one area to another using a common element so of course you could take that through to the next section or you could leave it just here or you can actually extend it and have a repetition of that mark in another area so I like the way that's feeling something about this up here the charcoal on that very first layer it's just bothering me a little bit what it feels like it's doing is it feels like it's taking my eye and leading my eye off the page in fact these strips up here also kind of pull in my eye all the way around and off the page if I turn it around it may not feel like it's doing the same thing but one thing that I could do would be to just push that back a little bit that top corner and one of the tools well not really a tool but one of the things I love to use to do this is just to use a little bit of the white ink and just come around with an irregular border knocking that corner back a little bit and just strengthening the white around the edges at the same time that's clean brush sometimes just leaving a little bit about a glimpse through or pulling the white down in some areas or even just a few little pieces to peek through maybe letting go of this corner quite a lot if that's the the corner that's kind of offending me just leaving a couple of little peek throughs to that dark edge that's better already isn't it coming down here just soothing that white around the edges coming into just a couple of areas so that what we have happening around the edges is not completely different to what's going on inside and what I mean by that is we do have some white on the inside but this is the paper it has a different feel and consistency than the white ink which is more like a veil that we've just placed around the outside so I want a little bit of that veil to feel kind of inside the piece as well and it can be quite subtle okay so you can see just with that addition of the white maybe we'll just add a little bit through here this piece feels a whole lot more result already in fact it may even be done let's have a look lots of yummy things happening in there different textures details and expansive areas curvy elements and linear elements rectangular and circular contrasting colors in warms and cools small detailed elements and bolder larger designs at this point I would put it aside to dry and then just to reassess whether there it needs to be any more balanced but I'm really loving it at the moment this little area right at the one last thing hmm not so sure if that's working just yet but I'll let it dry and if I want to intensify the magenta again I can do that with a magenta glaze after the white is dry if I start to fiddle with it now and bring the magenta glaze back in over the top then it's going to turn pink because of the white that I have underneath which actually work as well let's try it why not let's just bring a little bit more magenta over the top and see how the addition of a little pink yeah I think that's working quite beautifully so let's put this one aside and very very happy with where that's at okay so let's come into this little one which this one have a lot of elements to it that I was really enjoying at the end of the session yesterday but it doesn't feel like it feels like those elements are kind of separate from each other in a way and especially this large block of white here with the scratch circle through it so look while I have a little bit more of these colors on my palette I'm just going to go ahead and throw a glaze and use these colors up and just see what happens if I pull a little of these warmer colors so let's just go straight over the top turn that light down you can see how that brings up the texture in fact let's do this let's just bring this nickel a so gold there's a little bit of a magenta left on my brush let's just bring it down across the whole thing and see what happens when you pull the glaze across an entire piece in order to unify at the very least it gives you a place to move forward from where everything in the under layer is now cohesive and sometimes just doing this can actually give you a beautiful piece let's just even let go of the green up here well I actually love the way that's looking now if you wanted to if you feel like you have gone too far ever a couple of ways that you can bring parts back one is to just use a paper towel and just rub back sometimes what you take away is just as important to a piece as what you put on so we can put on the glaze but then we can pull back as well another way to actually pull back is to take some alcohol just some isopropyl alcohol and you can draw into areas with that now this is going to give me some thin lines into that green if you use more water with your English acrylics rather than the glare the glazing medium if you use water you'll get some really beautiful resist effects and we'll look at that in some of the later works as well so I'm going to add one more additional element to this one and it's going to be a contrasting element to what is going on in the center it's looking very tribal at the moment it's looking very que bad and I'm gonna try out a mixture of a brighter Rowney blue and some Payne's gray i John it should be too bright so you can mix these inks and you can mix them with each other and you can also mix them with acrylic paints ok so let's take kind of equal parts Payne's gray and equal parts Rowney blue and just get most of that nickel and magenta off the brush gets your brush we don't want it too watery so we want it to be fairly thick and we're just gonna take that nice rich deep blue that we've created and we're going to pull instead of white this time we're going to pull the darker color around the edges once again I want to bring a little bit of that color into the mix in the center I've added something new to a piece I want to make sure that it's integrated into the piece so I don't want it to like be sticking out as if it's something completely different around the border so you have to be in the spirit of trying things so for me that move didn't really I don't know I didn't resolve the whole thing for sure um to me now it just feels like another move it did something but it didn't resolve or it didn't add anything or enhance anything that's on there so now I have to let that dry and I have to come back in and see what else I could do one thing that I could do just have a look at this let's turn it upside down again one thing that I could do while I have this color on my palate is to see if I can add in perhaps some elements of a lighter blue so you think this blue that I've created adding in a little bit of white ink dry brush mixing it around and seeing what would happen if I bring that lighter element in to the piece so that definitely adds something maybe bringing that lighter element around the edges instead of the dock keeping some of the dock and I think it bit of contrast that feels better already oh you think definitely feels better all right and then what I'm feeling and that this is of course you know we're all different in the way that we approach things for whatever reason I always love to push the light and dark so I'm gonna play around with a little bit of pure white right now just on the edges of this color so it'll be just an almost white I'll have just a tinge of blue to it and I'm going to bring a little bit of that color into the piece it's again kind of leaving some areas peeking through to the underneath you'll see that because the edge is still slightly wet you get a little bit of blending happening just making some organic shapes to kind of give us a little peek through to the under layers making these organic shapes different sizes and shapes as well connect anything through to that a centerpiece that I'm scrubbing that watch that bluish white around that center area so that it becomes a feature but it's also integrated then just always deciding you know how far is enough I could take this pattern and continue it all the way around but then it wouldn't lose a little bit of what what it has whatever the magic is that it has so I'm gonna change brushes take just a tiny bit more of that blue and just bring it down to meet the mid-tone blue here and maybe bring it down to meet this section here I'm just mixing a little bit more why is that darker blue I'm gonna do one more lap around the border and just see how it feels if I lighten it up just a little bit further leaving a little bit of a darker and mid-tone blue and yeah I think I'm liking that contrast a whole bunch more so if you wanted some very small details in this piece you could then grab a gel pen or whatever you have on hand in the same color family have a shop you write here so I'm gonna see how that feels if I just add in just some small details hey Elijah were till the edge there than perhaps tiny tiny little dots through this dark area here so again you've got your contrast light against dark and I'm feeling much happier with this piece now as well so coming back to this little piece with the collage elements what I want to do is just a very simple I'm going to keep the color harmony in this one so I'm going to keep with the cool colors and I just wanted to show you how we can actually use the fluid acrylic so this is the turquoise and the golden fluid to actually pull a glaze across the top of the napkins and just push back the design a little bit so it's still there it's still integrated into piece but it's going to be changed up and pushed way way back so let's just pull this maybe add a little bit of matte medium I don't want to get any hard edges so just pull this glaze around with the matte medium adding a few more drops of matte medium as we as we move around the piece so that we get a softer glaze on one side to the other it's our deepest glaze is where we started over here on this side there's still some paint on my brush moving it around to the other side I'm avoiding the middle because charcoal will always still much okay so if you want your lines to still be clear if you use chuckle then you're not gonna want to push a brush over those lines but I kind of like how this is working now there are some brush marks in this glaze if we come down here you can see that you can see the brush marks okay if you wanted to get rid of those you could let it try just a little bit and I mean they're not offensive to me but you could let it dry just a little bit and then you could bring in just a little bit of paper towel and rub back a lot of the brush marks that you can see are actually the texture of the paint underneath so just play around with that wiping back fills needs a baby wipe to wipe back so you're just going to different feel if you use the baby wipe compared to the napkin you still can see the design but you now have this strong glaze over the top you could also pull that back using a baby wipe so let's just have a look so you don't mind smudging up those lines a little I like that not just for something a little bit different we're going to keep this irregular border and rather than bringing the white around it as I did with the other I'm gonna just bring in a draw an element with a loose scribbly line taking my white gel pen and just letting my hand wander around the outside edges a bunch of time so that we create this kind of meandering line really just releasing the pen to do its own thing and it will skip and it will hit and miss depending on whether you have wet paint underneath areas and let it just do that let it just do what it wants to do just kind of come around a bunch of times here I'm just going to give you something just a different element again and the softer Bordeaux don't you want to scooch it around in one corner create it slightly more design element which is really nice and then if you like you can take a wet brush and you can just let's bring you in a little bit just show you take a little bit of the outer line of the gel pen and just add a little water and soften the outer edges my brush is still a little bit wet oh of course you could bring it a little of the white ink and just clean up a couple of the edges leaving the scribbly border just bringing in a little bit of the ink around the outside edge of the gel pen once again if you're bringing in an element like this where the white is a lot brighter than the white of the page then you're going to want to think about is there anywhere within the piece that you might like to have a repetition of that right or white if at some point you notice as I just have that some of your polish element is lifting it's probably just because you didn't have enough of the gel medium on underneath in the first place so just this little area here is lifting so I'll just let that dry then I'll add a little more gel medium underneath and get that glued down again and then perhaps because we've got such a strong element now of the gel pen around the edges it might be a good idea just to bring a little bit of that jumping into the actual design area of the piece as well in just a couple of areas so perhaps I could bring it through let's see doesn't need to be a law and I think I'm pretty happy with this one as well so I do hope you've enjoyed this lesson we're going to move on to looking at some apps so just a really short introduction to how I work with apps to manipulate images to then create abstractions so I'm really excited about that as well and of course this will be a small glimpse into or will be a larger segment in my abstraction for mojo class so I'm going to leave these three pieces where they're at I'm really happy with how they've evolved so we've got this little one here with the the warm colors over the top of the cool we've got this one here with a more complimentary palette and this one here that have that kind of earthy rusty feel and then we've actually bought in the complimentary blues I hope that I've been able to show you some things that you didn't know before I hope that you've enjoyed the abstract approaches and using the embrace in the contrast and I'm going to add one more class into this this free mini class for you and we're going to be looking at apps and how I use apps to come up with ideas for abstract paintings so this will be a mini glimpse into into those techniques so you can look for more of these techniques in my abstract motor class and I hope you have fun with it

Channel: Tracy Verdugo Art

Views: 175,406

Rating: 4.8816514 out of 5

Keywords: abstract, artist, art, tutorial, walkthrough, australian artist, tracy verdugo, color, fun, relaxing, acrylics, free, lesson, abstract approaches

Id: QdjfHmQ1JRc

Length: 95min 5sec (5705 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 20 2019