Warmups : As a Way to Make Art

1. Intro to Warmups: Hello, my name is Tamara. In this course, I will show you my method of warming up before my art practice. With this method of warming up, you can create meaningful pieces of art fairly quickly. To reuse, recycle, elevate, or even keep as is. I will take you through setting up your paper, the layers you should do and additional actions you can take to turn your warmups into finished art pieces. This is a mixed media course. So the supplies needed are whatever you have at your disposal, you may need some experience with the mediums of your choice. However, they are supplements in the project section to help any level user, with step-by-step instructions and supply lists if needed. I hope to see you in the course. 2. Overview: In this course, I'm going to show you some of my strategies for warming up. And also like to walk through some of the blocks that I experienced when I first started trying to warm up this way. Some helpful ways to overcome resistance towards any blocks you might have towards doing warm-ups. The main portion of this lesson consists of how to set up your paper, how to go about doing your layers and eventually bringing together your warm-up. I hope that you will go through the entire lesson. But if you're pressed for time and you need me to hurry up, you can just skip to the lesson portion. You can also watch it at double the speed or faster speed, just how things go along a little bit quicker for yourself. If you're here for the long run, I would like to just explain a little bit about how I structured the lessons. I have geared this course towards somebody who has a basic understanding of how their materials work. If you are a pure beginner and that's not you yet, that's okay. I've got a few things that I hope will help you through the lesson. The first one is, at all times on the top left corner of the screen. I have the supplies that I'm using, the brand name, the specific colour. And I've also got the technique that I'm using at the time. And now again, I also just put in a little sentence about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I also have a PDF guide that you can print. And I would print this out and keep it as a supplement, so that you can look at it and you can watch the lesson. And hopefully that will give you enough information to do a step-by-step follow through. If you do not care about what supplies I'm using or reading my PDF. Cool, I think you're gonna be fine! I speak in the lesson not necessarily about what I'm using next and what kind of mark I'm making, though I do mention it. I'm speaking more about my thinking and why I decide to do things this way. And sometimes I also include one of my thoughts or one of my beliefs about what I used to believe in what I believe now, more things about how this lesson is structured. On the bottom left-hand corner of your screen, you will always see the board name. There are two boards in this lesson, board 1 and board 2, I just wanted the name of the board's to be there, so if at anytime you turn around and you look back at the screen *shock* and the colours have changed, you can understand that we are on a different board. I also have the actual time taken to do the lesson, on the bottom right-hand of the screen. My experience is, I understand when I'm watching lessons that often it's time lapsed. It can't be too long, but I still have the bad habit of saying "It took the teacher five minutes and now it's taking me 22!" I'm just not happy with that. If you hold yourself to the same weird standard, then I really hope that the time, actual time, taken on the side of the board will help you. At this stage, you could go straight to the main lesson or come to the next section. "Why are Warmups Useful?" 3. Why Are Warmups Useful?: Why warmups are useful? If you're here, I would hope that I don't need to convince you too much about why warmups are useful. But if you still need some convincing strap in! Warmups aid in muscle memory. Just like an athlete, we need to be practiced. Our hands need to understand how a stroke goes. And it's not just our hands and our body, it's also our brain, ...which is a part of the body. What it does is it strengthens your neural pathways. It strengthens the muscle memory. So you understand that if you are trying to do a stroke in a specific fashion and you keep on doing it and repeat it, hmm...you build muscle memory. Number 2: reduces errors and costs of errors. Sometimes a mistake on a painting is not a happy one. It costs money and it costs time. And I could have prevented a lot of my mistakes by warming up first and getting rid of my goofs first, or taking away my shaky hand first, by just having a little bit of a practice. Low-stakes removes pressure. Sometimes when we sit down with the mindset of "I have to paint and this has to be great" Sorry, first of all, for that mindset, but it adds pressure to the situation. In warmups, it's private, it's between you *and the paper* and it doesn't have to be great. Nothing you do matters when you do a warmup, just like life Routine and Consistency: since the barriers to warmups are low and we do try to keep it low. You can build consistency in your art practice by doing warmups. Or you could just do warmups exclusively, which is what I did for a period of time to build up a daily art habit. Creativity and ideas are found here in this practice, and in other practices. But because there's no guidance and you can do whatever strokes you want and mix the colours, you are going to make 'mistakes' and you're also going to find some real cool things. A stroke that would usually mess up my normal work done in a warmup space means a new character a new place. It is a place for discovery to push you forward and deeper. Your confidence increases. The confidence in your stroke, in your colour theory, in your imagination and creativity, and even your follow through increases. Accessibility: Because warmups show you what you most often reach for, one of my suggestions, or one of my takeaways from my warmups was making my paints, the ones that I was always reaching for, more accessible. Or understanding that I wasn't using certain things because they were inaccessible. And it functions as exactly that... A warmup, meaning, you can jump straight into a painting that you were busy on yesterday and remain consistent in your stroke and in your energy. It makes for an overall more cohesive experience because you're not going into your painting, which is a more important, maybe high pressure one, and you're figuring out your stroke and you're figuring out how you should start moving your hands because you've done all of that in your warmup lesson. Low stakes, a mistake is just a mistake, and if you make it on one piece of paper, you still have 6, 10, 15 more to do in the exact same style, or exact same colours as the initial one you made a mistake on. Hone techniques: because you keep repeating strokes, you have a greater chance of remembering them and committing them to memory. That's because what you do on one piece of paper, you have to repeat on 15, you don't *have* to...but that's how I do it. Art components; the pieces I create in the warmups make my art practice easier. I haven't historically been the best at creating backgrounds, and what I like and loved doing is actually making characters. Now, if I complete a warm up, I have 15 backgrounds waiting for some characters. Really makes the barriers for me doing character art much lower Quantity; because you're producing 7 to 15 pieces on one board, and you might be doing more than one board at a time, the number of art pieces you do quickly adds up. And for a new artist, maybe any artist, for me, that's very motivating. I think now is a great time to progress to the lesson section of this course. If however, you still experience some resistance towards the warmup exercises, you can go to the supplementary section where you will find a PDF on blocks that you might experience towards warming up. I hope you find these useful. See you in the lesson. 4. Setting Up The Canvas/Paper: Welcome to this preparatory session before we start our actual lessons. In this lesson, I'm going to be showing you how to attach pieces of watercolour paper to a canvas board. So you have a substrate depends on later. We are trying to get as many pieces of paper as we can onto the board with some variation in sizes. You also want to leave some space for borders and the tape to actually stick onto the board. If I only put tape on the paper, there would be nothing for the tape to hold on to besides the paper, and this would mean the paper would slide off the board when I work. I want the paper to be stuck fast as I will be working aggressively sometimes and I don't want the paper to lift off the board *especially* when I use a lot of wet mediums I suggest a neutral coloured tape which has a medium width. You can see that I've used the opposite of what I've suggested *rebel* and this is why I had to spend a little bit more time cutting the pieces of tape to size and also was influenced by my tape when I did the warm-up lessons later To cut pieces of tape to size, I just cut it down the middle and used the straight edges of the tape to outline the paper. I made sure that the crooked lines, which I had cut, were overlapped. This meant I got a clean straight border on my paper. If you happen to repeat these exercises after this lesson, I hope you will play with your paper configurations. One of my favourite ways to have my paper configured is have 15 small pieces on a larger board. That means at the end of my session, I have 15 little pieces of art. Using a catalyst wedge or bone folder or anything with a smooth edge. I like to push down the tape against the paper. I want it to be really flush so that no bleed through of wet mediums takes place and I have a clean border left at the end of my session. Here is the other board which I prepared earlier, like a good chef. These are the two boards which we will be using in our lessons. Let's move on to the first board, layer one. 5. Board 1 Layer 1 First Layers: Welcome to the first lesson. Please remember the actual supplies and techniques used are listed in the top left-hand corner of our screen. My aim in this first layer will be to cover about 80 percent of the paper. I also tried to use similar strokes, patterns, or colours that I do on one paper on all. That's optional. I usually start my scribbling on my warmup paper. It's a good way to get my hands moving. The scribbles can be fluid, stabby, smooth, anything goes. And I'm not yet concerned about the results colours. I just want to make some lines. I want to expel my energy. And my advice to you for this layer is try not to bother about colour theory. Right now. It's not important, not your problem. It might not ever be a problem in this warmup session, but try not to bother about it. I go for more watery mediums right at the start. I tend to use acrylics *paint* more as I progress and layering watercolour on acrylic, it can be done, but it's not my favourite way to do things. When I activate my watercolours or when I put on any of my mediums, I tend to work very quickly, but I'm also trying to remain aware at the same time how things mix and move. I think this is one of the best parts of painting. When you get to see these unexpected little things happening or expected. We can use Gesso, texture paste and heavy body acrylics to create texture. I'm using Gesso and a brayer, which I'm going to use to move the Gesso around and apply it fairly thickly. One of my best texture making tools is a pair of unseparated chopsticks. It creates interesting parallel marks, and note that because the Gesso is thick, the chopsticks leave behind deep, clear indents when I scribble using them. Just some thoughts or texture. I think it makes paintings less predictable. Less 'perfect', adds interest... but if you're more inclined towards smooth surfaces, I think it can be scary or an annoying thing to use, because I felt like texture was a style and not that texture was a tool, because people have "textured art". And that wasn't kind of what I wanted to go for. but when I saw that texture adds all of those things I realized, it was a tool and it doesn't have to be everywhere, but it can be in some pieces and places. All my colour choices right now are as random as they can be. I'm selecting colours 'blindly' I put my hand into a drawer and I pull out a colour, and I use it. When I apply my acrylic paints, I do so very thick, clean so that I can put texture onto it or into it. When it comes to my placements of paints on paper, I say I do so in a sporadic fashion... but what I really think is happening is my brain is making choices so fast that I cannot articulate it to myself in the moment. So I follow my gut. If you're uncomfortable being sporadic or following your gut, try and place the colour in empty spots or spots where you feel drawn to put it, your first thoughts about where to put it. Try that. To remind you the board number is on the bottom left of the screen. We're working on board number one, layer number one right now. We're going to move pretty soon to board number 2, layer number 1, soon as we're done with this. And if at anytime you're confused about which board we're working on, please look at the bottom left of your screen. This looks like an absolute casserole right now and that's okay! We're now done with the first layer, off to the second. 6. Board 2 Layer 1 First Layers: Hey, good to see you again. I'm starting this board with non-soluble pencil. If you're someone who's more comfortable writing visible words, this is a great stage to do it. I prefer using asemic writing, which is almost a made-up script. It's meant to be felt versus understood. Well, that's my interpretation. Another idea that might help you loosen up a little bit is using larger brushes than you need In this board, we're going to switch it up a bit and bring in acrylics earlier and spread it out thinly, the reason I wanted to do some different things on this board is to show you my way is not *the* way Time to crack out the natural sand paste, which is a beautiful paste to use, to create texture. These pastes and most texture pastes do take a *long* time to dry. Even when I do multiple boards, I sometimes find myself coming back to a board and it's still not dry. I don't really care, and I continue with it. But you might want to use a heat gun to dry it too, just note that heat guns do cause colour shifts, especially with student paints, be prepared for that. It's totally okay, as long as you know what's going to happen. Using my dropper or pipette to make smaller circles now. I noticed during recording the sessions that I'm very much inclined towards circles. Maybe it's just a more flowy shape to make. Maybe a just got "A's" for doing it in preschool, and that's why I like it more. But you could experience something different by making different shapes than I do. Now we get to witness one of my three favourite texture tools. It's a hardware spatula. I use the rounded edge to scratch around and I pivot my strokes on one spot to get a lot of lines radiating in different places, coming from one spot, kind of like a quarter of a sunburst. I am now spattering watercolour on acrylic as well as using it to paint, I do want to show you that you CAN do it. It can shift if you wet it afterwards, but you might not have intentions to do that. In which case, I think thick pigmented strokes and spatters will be best for you when layering watercolour over acrylic. When I first started painting, and teachers would say, do it your own way. I wouldn't, for two reasons. One, I had a fear of getting an "ugly" result, which would mean: "I sucked at painting!" Ironic because when it was like the teachers and looked good, then I would say "It lacked soul" "It was a tutorial", "Wasn't that great" I digress. First reason was fear. The second reason was not knowing how. So view your warmups as learning how, how to go your own way, how to find your own favourites, find your likes, dislikes. Bit by bit decreasing fear of making something ugly. I just wanted to show you this little round rainbow. Out come my chopsticks, which are being used to make spirals, not scribbles, on this board. And that's enough for me, for board two. Let's go back to board number one. 7. Board 1 Layer 2 More Paint: Our board has had some time to dry. If you're doing multiple boards, this drying time would not have impacted you as you would've been doing other work while this dried. If not, you must be a little bit impatient to get going. I picked out some colours randomly and place them on my desk for easier access. I tend not to put away what I use. I just shove them to the side. So eventually I also have a smaller pot choose colours from, as I progress. The placement of these strokes that I'm doing now, in Red, DO have a bit of a pattern, I'm aiming for blank spaces and I'm doing two or three strokes with one larger and the rest smaller. This is just the pattern I've fallen into, is not one you should or have to follow. You can also use different shades of the same colour just to add some variation as you're painting. That's always a good idea. Using my pipettes for mark making is fun for me. The ink can sometimes spurt out as you have seen, and create some drama. I keep repeating the general thing I do on one paper, on all. This really gives me confidence at the end to be creative with the paper I end up with. Because I have so many lookalikes that I'm not afraid of just ruining one paper. *Please clean your dropper before closing the ink* If you have any media on your dropper and you put it into your ink bottle that can compromise the ink, which you may know already. But let's err on the side of caution. At this point, you'll see me going in with shades of Purple and I'm following a similar process going in, where ever I see some blank spots OR where my gut tells me it might pop. And I later on go and touch the same spots, or something different, with a similar shade of Purple or something that's in the same family. Time to use a brush for painting. Now, this is not my favourite brush, but I wanted to challenge myself to use it more often this month. And what I decided to do was roll the brush between my fingers to get less structured lines. This is something I do with my warmups. I use one supply or tool I don't like for a few sets to learn more about it or see if I've done all I can to get to know it. Right now, at layer two, we have covered enough paper and created enough colourful chaos to move onto our next board and then create some collage! 8. Board 2 Layer 2 More Paint: I'm still unconcerned with color scheme in this layer. I do, however, start selecting colors which I feel are better suited to the colors I have on my board already. I think in this instance that acid green made me feel like I needed more green. The reason for the green was to break up all those lines of blue, which shows my choices were definitely influenced by the blue tape. Another thing worth noting, when I watched this video back and compare it to a colour wheel, it is very clear that my brain knows which colours will be pleasing together. Which has come after doing many, many warm-ups and other artworks. which is both a comfort and a discomfort to me. See, It's good to know my brain learned, that I developed muscle memory, those neural pathways, all that cool stuff. But it also means that my colours can sometimes have some predictability in them. If you are not too confident about where to put your stroke, go with your gut. Or if that's not helping you...look for blank spots or spots where you feel a colour contrasts nicely. Don't be afraid to bring in some weird colours. If you think the contrast is going to look good, just do it. I think this pink seemed a poor choice, but I enjoyed it. Out comes, one of my top three texture making tools, a knitting needle. If you're paying attention and making a list because it is so important. My knitting needle, chopsticks and DIY palette knife on my favourite things for creating texture. I think because they're not traditional art tools, it feels like I've discovered something. One of the ways I make paint flow from paint markers is to dip it straight into water and then splash it around. It creates quick spatters without having to mix paint and water on your palette. And that's it. We're done with board number 2. I'll see you over in the collage or colour section. 9. Colour and Collage: Hi, We're going to go for a quick dip into colour theory. This color wheel on your screen is attributed to Bob Burridge. He sells colour wheels for print on his online website which have more information and definitely do look different from what I have here. You will see that this colour wheel has two less orange segments and a directional in the middle which tells you which is your main colour, focal colour, and complementary colours. We will take the work we've done so far and identify the colours there. We will then use this colour wheel. So find out what colours are missing what we need more of and use that information to make collage paper. Here are the two boards we've been working on. In the first board, I identify all the colours I see. I want the main colour to be Blue Green (Teal) So I change my colour wheel to make the m colour Blue Green. I then see that the complementary colours I need are Yellow and Purple, and the focal colour is Red. I have many of those colours in the board already. Red, already looks like somewhat of a focal point, but yellow is missing. I use the same thinking to look at board number two. Here I see that the main colour isn't really Purple, but I want it to be Purple. So I make my main colour purple and find out what the complementaries are; Blue, Green, and Orange and the focal, (Yellow) Green. I also take some other colours which I think might look good here. I think the first board would look good with some Green on it. I also think that Yellow could benefit both of these boards as well as Orange. And that I could add more Teal Green to the first painting. And at the same time, the second. Once I make my list, I put all these colours together and I decide, "What should I cut?" So I have decided that green, Yellow, Red, Orange, and all the other colours you see here are what I should add, to my boards, but I don't want to use green. So I scratch that out and decide that green or yellow green on the second board is enough. And if it occurs naturally, in what I do later in my collage, that's okay. One of the colours I decide to add to the mix is Bronze. I sometimes do Gold, Bronze or Silver. And I feel that these add some extra sparkle or shimmer to the papers. Now that I've got my colour choices, I write them down so that I don't forget them. And I start applying thick buttery strokes of acrylic paint onto my paper. This is a 190 GSM paper, it's straight in my sketchbook. So whatever I leave behind or don't use I can put on the next page or paint over. I have found any paper under a 190 GSM is likely to buckle. The 190 GSM is a sweet spot for me when creating collage in thick acrylic paint. I try to apply colours that won't necessarily mix and muddy each other. I'm applying Orange, Red, Yellow. And I know that if these colours mix, they will make a variation of Orange. It's not going to be anything Brown or Grey because these colours are so wet, they do mix. And what I do is, I don't put...as much as the paper is moving... I don't put as much pressure, as you think I might. If I increase the pressure of my stroke while I'm laying down my catalyst wedge. It will mix the colours. I'm now putting in Blue. And Blue will definitely cause a mix between these colours, but it would be Green and we did have green on our paper before, So if that happens, it's not such a bad thing but you will see, mostly, that when I paint, my colours aren't really mixing. This is a nice sensory experience, when you feel, this buttery gliding as you put your catalyst wedge on the paper, I really enjoy it. Here's that beautiful Bronze, which kind of looks like Orange. You'll see that I'm not breaking out my Golden (brand) paints here. That's because it's not very cost-effective for me to do that. I would like to suggest if you're into Impasto painting, trying Sennelier, it has minimal shrinkage. Colour shift is not bad. And it's really helped me expand my practice and paint without fear because it's cost-effective and because it has those properties. So that would be my advice to you if you're looking to broaden your techniques or even just for a more cost-effective paint that still works well. Once my catalyst wedge becomes too clunky to fill in those smaller spaces, I'll turn to a smaller tool such as a palette knife. Because the paint has been applied thickly, it will take a bit longer to dry. A good 20 minutes, did it for me, if you want to keep up your momentum, now would be the time to create new boards by setting up the paper and maybe even getting that first layer in. We're now going to return to board one with our dried collage. 10. Board 1 Layer 3 Collage: Now we're going to add some more depth and dimension to our boards, as well as a potential focal point. We're going to do that by adding collage, I tear the paper with a balance between careless and careful. See, I want to use the colours. I know go well with this board, but I also think it's fun and has potential for new discoveries. If I also tear (use) colours, I had no intention of including. In this example that would be Purple or Bronze. To reiterate, we want to use collage to create OR sort out colour harmonies add depth to the piece and create focal points. If you find yourself not really liking the collage you've done, you can use other pieces of collage, collage paper. You have to do this. It would be cool if it could have the same function and effect as your current papers. So choose a collage paper that's Orange. If you needed Orange in your piece. When it comes to setting the paper on to the page, we can still change our minds. Do we want to cover the Red up a bit or add more Blue? Or maybe we want to experiment with Orange on to or next to it. At this point, even though I know what colours are one to use, I can still be very experimental and change my mind. I see that in my current frame of mind doing this board that I'm using the yellow and orange as some break or complementary colours to the Red. I layer about two to three pieces, or sometimes three pieces roughly on the same spot. In my work, I tend to go towards a Cantilever composition, some large spots or focal points with the smallest spots on the opposite side. Today, I went for some like that and others. I just put the paper where I felt it looked cool. My practice in my warm-ups recently, are more about composition versus colour theory. And I want to learn about what looks good to me. So I kinda followed my gut. Gel medium is better than glue when it comes to collage because it's designed to be used with paint mediums. It is, a bit of an icky job, but I prefer using my fingers, spreading it on and getting it going. You can use a brush. I've just ruined one-to-many good brushes with using gel medium (improperly). You will notice, I don't always stick the collage piece where it was originally placed. That's because I can't always remember where I put it, Or how it was orientated I'm most certainly not going to be attached to the exact place it was, but you're more than welcome to take a picture and make sure the orientation is correct for you. And that's it. We're done sticking these papers. It's time to get the collage on board number 2 done and dusted. 11. Board 2 Layer 3 Collage: I decided that this board needed a little bit more Green. It's never too late to add to the paper. I do try to keep my layers between 2-3 before I proceed to collage. That's because they're small and I don't want to cover up too much. But once again, this is your party. I reach for my watercolour crayon. I'm unsure if this is the intention of use they had for it. So drawing over acrylic... but it works wonderfully and it stays vibrant and has this smooth creamy application. I really enjoy it. I still have plenty of collage paper left as well as tiny pieces from the first board. Whether I use the tiny pieces or the larger is my choice. This is my puzzle to figure out. I think this part of the process can be overwhelming if you overthink it. Let the thinking be done when you make the collage paper and then trust that the thinking will come through, or mistakes will be made. If I went with the idea of every single page must have the correct focal colour and the correct accompanying colour. I think I would feel frustrated. This way I can play a bit and try colours that don't work and learn from those actions. And sometimes I get some really nice surprises by using colours I didn't intend to use when I planned it out in the collage section. Also, if for some reason you don't want to do any collage, that is fine. Now both our boards have collage. It's time to move on to the next section, which is outlines and drawing shapes or painting shapes. See you there. 12. Creating Outlines & Shapes: We're now going to add outlines to all, or some of our collage, and shapes to some, or all, of the papers. I use my best Titanium White to do strong outlines around my shapes. If I needed to use my student grade paints, I would then go over and outline twice. Choose to make my outline white as my papers are really busy. And I want the outline to have a very strong contrast to what is underneath it. I also want it to be white enough to show any colour, I may put on top of it. This elevates the sections of collage. It is where the depth is accentuated. It also makes the pieces look like they're floating on top of everything else which you may choose to keep or attend to later. I use Black gesso as it dries matte. It ensures the shapes I make have excellent contrast. Gesso also means I can use other mediums more easily on top of the actual shape I draw. Make any shape which you feel works. A cool design to try is arcs or concentric circles across all the papers. The effect you get afterwards is super. You could also use a paint marker and the colour of your choice to outline around the pieces. It definitely is easier, and it goes a little bit faster. The lines are a bit more even, but it's not my preference. I am showing you that you can do it though. After giving my outlines time to dry, I then go over it with a colour that adds to the colour harmony I am working towards. Or just go with my wildcards, my neon paints. I really like the range from (Amsterdam) Talens. I can see, I was really feeling the Pink, some days. I feel the Teals or Oranges. This particular Pink is a transparent colour. So when it touches any parts of my paper, it works like a glaze. I paint over the outline which I painted earlier. This is why I choose to make it White for this purpose, this transparent Pink shows up amazingly on the White. After adding the Pink outline, I feel it looks better, and more a part of the painting versus floating on top of it. Let's move on to some doodles and finishing touches. 13. Finishing Doodles: Our intention in this board is to add some finishing touches. Finishing touches are very specific to the individual. It could mean doodling on solid blocks of colour or spatters in complementary colours. I get a little fixated on arcs, dots, circles, spirals and spatters. You, may want more angled shapes. You may want more animals or symbols. Or you might even want to write words. Sometimes I don't doodle, It's because I like what I see and I want to keep it. What I do try to ensure is when ever I'm not doing something in my Art that I'm doing it because I really am happy and not because I'm fearful of ruining my art piece. Doodle could also mean you add a new shape in Black. Or you cover half of the work that you've actually done with a big solid block. If you find yourself strapped for doodle ideas, why not try and build a doodle library? A great way to do this is do some research on old cave paintings or ancient graffiti, and copy the images you find into your sketchbook. These shapes, wIll penetrate your mind and your art practice and enrich your doodle library. We are now done with our doodles. The next part of this lesson shows you how to remove your tape...badly! 14. Let's Remove Some Tape: If you're into satisfying tape peeling videos this is not one of them. If the tape is really stuck on, you can cut around some areas on the outside of your board with a craft knife. You can do without a heat gun if it's warm where you are, or if you have patience and work slowly, I am using a heat gun to warm the tape, and then peeling that off. If there are any areas where you have collaged over tape, use a craft knife and cut through the collage. Till you hit the tape. Try not to go through the tape to the paper that is underneath. If there are areas of tape which you have painted over, which is probably the case, especially in the middle of the canvas board. Work a bit carefully and try your best to save the tape if you have the intention to use them in some art or even craft projects. In the guided PDF, I have a few shots of how I use my warmup taped to decorate objects or in some journal work, in collage, or to stick on to other warmups. Sometimes there's nothing attractive or interesting on the tape. I guess if you really did a clean tear, you could reuse the tape. My tears are not always clean, so I discard the tape. Here we have my pieces of treasure. The pieces of tape that I salvaged what it should look pretty cool. And my final art pieces from board number one. And now repeat the process for board number 2. This is not my favourite parts of the entire exercise. As you can see, it took me a good 18 minutes to do two boards. And I was a little bit slow because I was recording, but I don't think I was much slower than I normally am. I have a lot of paint, tape to peel when I do six boards. So it takes me quite a bit. It is worth the end result in seeing those satisfying white lines. It, it can get tiring. I really don't want to say this because I think it's quite obvious. But please be careful when you're using the heat gun. It can burn you. When I look back at this board, I realise I really didn't like the colours initially, but now that it's done, It's one of my favourite ones that I've done recently. I enjoyed these colours together. Let's take a look. All the treasures we've made. Thank you for joining me. You are now done with the elevated section of this warmup lesson. You can add more doodles if you'd like, as you can see, more focal points, more interest. And if you feel so inclined, you might want to join me in the bonus section, which is right after this lesson. 15. Bonus: Hello, I am really glad to see you. Well, you know what I mean? This is going to be a less formal lesson where I'm going to show you how to do a grumpy character. And I start drawing a usual face shape, which I will segment in half. And for the eyeline, I take it a little bit lower. And I also take it at a bit of a rounded angle if you want, so that I can place the eyes, which are semi-circles at a lower place. It looks more like the characters looking up and looks a little bit more childlike and it definitely looks more grumpy. I don't put pupils touching the bottom of the eye. I like it this way. And my nose is always very simple. A circle two commas and some brackets. And when you move the brackets in and out, you can play with the shape of the nose. The mouth, you'll see is a very simple shape. Once again, I want this character to look grumpy, and I don't think that a cupid mouth (bow) will help in this particular case. I am showing you, where I put the shadows or the shading because I'm using black and whites, It's all values of black and white, so greys. And I will put my darker values. So my number three, number four values on the darkest shading that I'm showing here. And then my mid-tones, so seven and eights on the dark purple. And then my ten values, or even just pure white where I'm putting the pink. Right now, the eyebrows that I drew initially, the guidelines, that pink is, is quite prominent. So it makes this character look a little bit more grumpy... Maybe. I think it takes away from what he really looks like. So I'm just taking that out and having a look and seeing if this character is what I want 00:01:58.385 --> 00:02:01.355 And you can play with the shape of the pupils. You can play with the shape and the placement of the eyebrows. Maybe you don't want it to look grumpy, maybe you want it to look uneasy or queasy. So let's move on to the actual time-lapse. I'm using a black pitt pin, which is India ink, inside this pen. So you can just use India ink, but because it's a little bit smaller, I preferred the precision of this pen and I'm drawing, it looks almost like a cat with a circle in the middle. That is the base shape of my little grumpezoid. I'm going to put the face in the middle where I've left, that oval. I'm using my best titanium white because I wanted to cover all that colour easily. And these are the only two colours in this particular painting that I'm using. You can see that the paints turning grey and that's because until the India ink dries it is still soluble. So I use that to my advantage here, instead of mixing colours, I just use that to create the values that I'm looking for. The other thing is there's a lot of patterns and colours and explosions happening on this character and behind this character. And I want some of that to show through, it's really what happens in the moment for you. But I liked this pattern, and I felt it looked a bit like a jersey And I thought it would be nice to leave it on there, cover it up a little bit. Let's see what happens. And you should have the same kind of curiosity or experimentation when you're painting your characters, because this is really for fun. It takes me a long time to paint some characters. And that's not necessarily because I'm trying for something grand. It's because I don't really care about being efficient when I'm doing this particular type of painting. I want to enjoy the moment. I want to deal with any things that needs to be dealt with, sit in my emotions or my feelings or just just have a really good time. And this is why I don't have any time limit. Don't really bother about what I'm doing. I just want to take it on. I would even leave this character as is right now. But I've decided to add that face that I drew earlier. you can see I have decided to put the eyes a little bit higher. And it's a very simple face. it's the same concept. The India ink is going to dilute or dissolve or be soluble in that white titanium paint. I've left in (mistakes), because in this particular painting, I had an idea of making this brow really stick out. And then I had an idea of making it a superhero. And then I felt like it looked too much like a person I knew and that was not working for me. So I then covered it up and I think it's really good that Teachers or people that we decide to look at, or just anybody who shows us their mistakes as well as how awesome they do things. Yes, I'm saying I do things in an awesome fashion. I was, slightly reluctant to do a fully time-lapse video because I don't ever want people to feel like I'm trying to hide what I know from them. And sometimes when I watch a time-lapse video, mostly when it's somebody that's not intent on teaching. I feel like, oh, this person doesn't really want me to understand. The purpose of the video is for me to see what they've created, which is perfectly okay. But because I like learning, I find that a little bit frustrating. So I really hope you're not finding or having that same experience. But if you are, maybe try and watch this video at a slower speed, I think you will definitely see more. And if that is not helping, you, drop me a message, dropped me a whatever it is, kids these days and send me one of those and contact me here in the discussion section. And I will definitely consider doing something slowed down, either in my personal capacity or on Skillshare on this forum. So here's the idea that I had. I was trying to some shadows using the India ink, which you can put directly over the acrylic. Not when it's to wet, but when it's slightly wet. And I thought, okay, I'm going to pull out the Mask section. And then I just felt like this person. It wasn't for me, I wanted this person to express how I was feeling. And I was feeling grumpy. One of my top five moods. After struggling with it a little bit and sitting with it and thinking about it. Eventually, like I said earlier, decided the face had to go. So you can see, I'm still trying to get used to it here at this point, trying to make some shading, thinking that that's going to bring it out. But that's just the process. And it's my favoUrite parts of painting when things don't end up the way I expected, the way I planned it better for me. And obviously that is subjective. And the reason why I use pitt pens as opposed to using acrylic ink from the bottle is number one; it's very messy for me, and I don't really enjoy opening bottles. The pitt pen has a tiny soft nib and that's soft nib, makes it much easier to draw and put colour exactly where I want it. The pitt pen's also come in a variety of colours and it is definitely more cost-effective, for me to buy a pack of pitt pens that come in different colours... than buy India, ink in purple, red, all the colours that they come in. So just kind of bear that in mind. Pitt pins come in different colours so you could make a drawing that's not black and white. It could be purple and white. Something else you might notice is because we used some water-soluble mediums on our warmups. If you did. That they sometimes leak and bleed into the final character. I really like that. I feel it is unexpected, nice mistakes all that jazz. But if you don't like that, and if you feel you're not ready for such surprises in your art practice. You can use Clear Gesso and you could put clear Gesso over the entire warmup card and then put on your white and then use your pitt pen to draw. Now this character is looking a lot more like what I wanted to look like. Another way to use your pitt pen is to draw across a surface that is non porous. So I have these little ceramic tiles that are glazed and then pick it up off that. You could also use the tIns that your coloUr pencils come in. Anything that's metal, coated metal would do well for this technique where you put the ink on and then pick it off with your brush. Of course, you could draw somebody that is not grumpy on your warmups, or a plant, something definitely more attractive... I like my little creations. I just, I don't know. I guess maybe it's like the love that you can have only something that you create. So other people might not really love it from the get-go, some might identify with it. But like generally, I don't think anybody wants to see at grumpy black-and-white thing painted on a piece of paper? Yes, I do it! Because it's not about what anybody else wants to see. It's about what I feel, what I want to put on here. So yeah, don't feel obligated to do something grumpy. But if you do want to do something grumpy, don't feel obligated to make it look cute. I mean, I still think this guy's cute, but you know what I mean? Well, I hope you know what I mean. You do you. (sage advice) I'm coming to the end of this, wonderful little grumpezoid final highlights Everybody's favourite thing to do. Then I am done. Once again, thank you for watching my courses, which in my lesson I hope you found value in this too. I hope I spoke calmly even though this was an informal lesson. And I really hope to catch up with you, somewhere. Thank you and goodbye. 16. Potential Traps: Common traps. These are the issues I've experienced when doing warm-ups, Repeating some strokes or pallettes I really liked something and I'm really feeling it. But the next day when I come (to paint) I'm not feeling it that much, but because its worked the day before, that's what I go for, is not necessarily a bad thing. It's okay to like certain colours are bright colours, Or just blue and purple. However, if you feel stuck or if you feel, I'm doing this because I'm afraid I don't want to waste I don't want to make anything that's "ugly". Then maybe returned to the belief section (pdf) in this course and analyse that belief. Try and figure out why you're thinking that way and how to combat it. Sometimes you just don't have the experience yet to use other colours. And once you know that, well, next step is to build it (the experience). So just try and do one set with some different colours and do all the other seats or other boards with the colours that you like. When production and output decreases. I am yet to find something that I can do day in and day out repetitively that does not get boring. You suddenly make four sets in one day and you can't do more. Whereas before you were making eight, you were working on eight boards, now you can only do four. You push yourself to do more, you get frustrated, and it's all about your diminishing returns. At this point, you've gotten too focused on the quantity of what you're doing and not the actual learnings or actual experience. And that's what I found in my experience. So be aware of that. Ask, always ask the question, why are you doing it? Also, just realize your production will fall because of energy circumstance, materials, or just bordeom, just identify it and find the next thing. You need to move forward in your art journey. And always know that if you get bored of something else, then you can return here it's all about doing what suits you best in the moment. Getting used to a too small format because you are working on small pieces of paper, you might then develop some reluctance to work on bigger canvases. So my suggestion is always trying to have one canvas on the go where you're doing whatever you want to and what you do doesn't matter. Also understand that what you do on a small piece of paper doesn't always translate onto a big piece of paper. And I have made that mistake where I do something in a warm up and it looks really cool and I think this would look awesome on a big canvas. And it doesn't. So you need to just keep that in mind. You've got 200 little paintings in this format that you've done over a month. And suddenly you're nervous and you don't feel confident enough to work on a bigger canvas. And that is definitely a trap you could fall into. If you don't diversify the mediums and substrates you're painting on. Struggling to elevate your art. You've done the warm up and you want to take it to the next level and you don't know how. So I would hope that the extra lessons and bonus lessons would help you elevate your art. But if that's not the case and you're there and you're like, "this is not enough" My only suggestion to you is try, all you can do because you have so many pieces of paper is try what you want. If it doesn't feel finished. Listen to your gut. The more you exercise that gut muscle, more faith you can have in it. Attachment to wath you make. Even though you've made eight of the same basic design, shape, and colour, you feel like you can't part with any of it, not a single one. This can feel like madness and at the same time valid. Maybe it's both? There's a few things you can do here. Take one of the cards you love or sets and investigate and analyse, understand, Do you like the colours, the strokes, the theme? What is it that you love so much? And try and replicate it. Because once you've replicated you build this confidence that you can do it again, that it's not a once off. You've made these eight sets in one sitting? Well, you've now repeated it in another. The other end of the spectrum is to just destroy the card and it's run my favourite thing to do, but it helps when you're attached to paintings to just go over it. It takes a lot of bravery to do it, but once you do it, I have never found myself to regret it. It's not my favourite thing to do at the beginning, but after I do it, I normally feel quite good, like having a bath And the last step is maybe to rationalise it. And I try and do this by taking the "ugliest" set that I have, and trying to convert that into something I like or into something that I'm attached to. Because again, it's about holding his confidence that I can do that again and I can do it with anything. Making too many, "ugly" sets. Maybe it looks like mud or something that rolled in, something that looks like mud, whatever it is. Again, sit down, investigate, ask yourself questions, analyse, and let's try and move past or through it. If it's not gelling or if it's mud, try and use a colour wheel, try and make sure you're not using colours that are opposite ends of the colour wheel that will make mud or grey each other out. And then also try and incorporate some focal points to make everything gel or even hit the entire set of the glaze that often can create one cohesive look afterwards, what I think is better than doing those things is reflection and introspection. At some point you do know the colour wheel at you don't like what you're getting. So this is the time where you need to sit down with yourself and ask questions. In the supplementary section of this lesson, I have those lists of questions that you can ask yourself after an art session or an art practice. Some of the questions are, what don't I like about this? What would I do differently? Is there just one component that's throwing me off after you've reflected and you understand what it is, creates a set with those things in mind. We're now up to what to do next, and our final goodbyes. See you there. 17. What to Do Next: Oh, hi, you still here. Well, I'm going to tell you what to do next. Pick out your favourite palette from all the sets you've done. And then ask yourself, what did these colours mean? How did they make me feel? And try and use that in a separate piece of art. You could also find and discover new warm-up exercises and bring components of those exercises into here, or vice versa. Add those feedback questions to your art session. Again, in a supplementary section of this lesson, I have a list of questions that can enhance your introspection and reflection after you've done. art. Incorporate a sketchbook practice into your art practice. Use the prompt list in the supplementary section to help you elevate your art or direct the theme of a warmup. Prompt list; It's up to you how you use it. If you don't have a daily art practice, try and create one. Once again, Warmups have a low entry barrier. So this might be the way for you to cultivate your daily art practice. Share you work with me on Instagram. I'm not always on there, but when I do emerge from the shadows... I am super excited to see what people are up to. And I would be really excited if you tried something and you tagged me in it. Check out my socials, check out my other socials. If you feel like helped you or could help someone else, please feel free to share it with someone. We have now finally reached the end of our lesson. I would like to say, thank you. Thank you for your time, for your attentiveness for watching me. I really appreciate it. I love doing art. I like doing warm-ups because it helps me lose my attachment, my thoughts. It helps me focus, it gets me into flow. I hope that everything I've shown you or something that I've shown you, helps you reach that state, especially if it's your goal to. My parting words, to you are...Don't let anybody dictate the terms of your art, including me. This might be my lesson. That's all it is. If you want to use a colour wheel from the start, use one big piece of paper, whatever it might be, do it, don't let other people, teachers, critics dictate what you do. And as we say in South Africa, Sharp and Aweh, or goodbye, Hamba Khale, Totsiens. I think that's all I know. Until we meet again. Goodbye. Dowidzenia!