Abstract Art Elements: Paint in the Style of Miro'

1. Intro : I started the abstract elements classes on skill share because I wanted us to take big abstract concepts and break them down into recognizable, easily digestible elements. It's fun to work small, and I encourage you to work small in this class. We start our first abstract elements class with one Mido. We will look at his paintings. You will choose some elements that speak to you. One. Mido used beautiful primary colors, often in his work. He also had a lifelong relationships with other artists. I felt he was a wonderful example for our class because not only are his Hughes brilliant and exciting, but also his personal life demonstrates the camaraderie that I feel we have in this class. You learn from each other's processes and you learn from each other's projects. I hope that you'll enjoy this class with me as you look for elements in Mido's work that you would like to replicate or simulate in your own projects. Come take these steps with me as we learn how to break down the elements of abstract art into small, easily understood beautiful little gyms 2. Getting Ready: Hi, everyone. Thanks for Let me go over the supplies with you for this elements class on Mido. These were the things that I'm going to use reference materials to keep me inspired. I have, ah, poster or two of Mido that I like to look at, and then I have an excellent book that is in the class resource resource section that I will be taking elements from toe work on. When you do your sketching, you can do your sketching in a sketchbook. That's fine. You can see some of my sketches here. You can work larger if you want to also feel free to do that and play with the color schemes that you like. Make sure if you are using the acrylic paints as I will be, always have some paper towels for you to wipe off on your supplies. Some paintbrushes that are your favorites have a little palate for you. I like to use a couple Sharpie pins or pippins. This is a copy pin to do finer work with, and I will be using the Posca markers in addition to a little bit of liquid tax. Also to sketch out your plan on your on your canvas. I'm going to use these small canvases You can see there about three inches by three inches . We're gonna use really small canvases on this project. Make sure that you have some very light pencils. This is a to H. And if you are working on a color background, make sure that you have a white pencil or a white chalk pin that will help a lot to keep your markings very light so that when you paint over top of them, you will obliterate that under layer. Thanks so much and keep watching. 3. Let's Paint, Step 1: Welcome back, everyone. It's time to paint. So I'm getting my light blue permanent paint that I love as a background color. And I'm just going to put this on each of these little canvases and the reason I'm using the light blue permanent because because it reminds me of a color Miro used on some of his backgrounds. It's not that he always used this, but I wanted to do a pair of smaller paintings, and I wanted them to be unified in some way. And by having the same background color for both paintings, you unify the same so that you can show the two paintings together if you want to, or sell the two paintings together in a show or display them together in your home. Now. Another thing that you may notice is that I have used a to H pencil, a very light pencil to go in and fill in my elements that I've chosen. So the elements that I've chosen for this painting or an eye and I don't know what to call the second element I'm gonna call it a chickie, a little chicken. It looks to me like a cute little bird maybe it's not a chicken. That's what it looks like to me. You can choose any two elements that you like that speak to you in any of Mido's work or if you're using another artist, any other artists work. But I would keep it very, very simple so that you can work quickly, which is the goal of this class. Remember, the goal of this class is just to break complex art down to simple elements that make sense . The more that you do this, the quicker you'll learn and have a handle on abstract art. So one to talk to you a little bit more about these elements that I've chosen this. I comes from one of Miro's paintings, and you can see that I have sketched it over here. It has a color scheme off black, red, blue, kind of a medium blue and then black again for the pupil. So that's interesting. The second element comes from another mineral painting, and this is what I call the little chickie. He is actually on a piece that was painted on paper for lots of stars around him, kind of a constellation, and I don't know if this was Maduro's idea of creating a constellation or not. But really, you just have a yellow and black little bird. And to me it seems like this little bird, which is surrounded by a circle in little dots It seems to me like that bird is just kind of a little yellow bird or Oriole guess. And I hear at least to me, that's what it looks like. And so I'm going to replicate that a little bit In my work here. You need to let this dry your background color, drive for a little bit, and then we're gonna come back and do the layers on top. 4. Let's Paint, Step 2: Hey, everybody, Thanks for joining me again. Now we have already finished painting our background. If you chose a background color to unify your two little, many paintings, then you need to let those totally dry and make sure that they absolutely are not sticking to you at all to go fast on these little mini paintings, I am going to use the paint markers, and you guys know from before that my favorite markers to views are the Posca markers. They are acrylic paint. They come out pretty fast, and they have a really good product. They don't also have any kind of residual oil that comes out, and they tend not to splatter when you use them, even when you have to kind of get them going in a little bit from the well that's inside of them. Feel free to use any markers that you want and also feel free to use Water. Colors were another medium, and it asked many questions about that. I just wanted to give you an idea here in our little abstract elements class, about one way to work quickly and to complete too many paintings in the style of a modern art master. And of course, we're focusing on one mito. I hope you can see here. I'm working on the little chickie, the top of which is yellow. And I have, even though I used a to H pencil, which is a very light pencil, I can see that there are some markings underneath, and all that that means is after this coat dries this original coat of yellow paint, I can come back and do one more coat to completely obliterate any kind of pencil marks. When I do regular shapes like circles, I tend to do a lot of little marks around it. So don't worry about that. You can obliterate it. Don't be overly concerned, so I'm gonna start by going from light to dark. As you can see, that's what of treason to do. These markers will dry pretty quickly, but just try to be careful with your the rest of your hands, not to smudge what you have already done. You can work dark to light if you want to, but I suggest if you have chosen like mates, focus on a couple of elements by Mido that have black and most of his do I would suggest that you do that last so that you can use the black to correct any sort of irregularities that you don't like about your underlying shapes. And I just in general, like toe work from light to dark because it is a great rule of thumb and other media. For instance, in watercolor media, you really need toe work from light to dark. You really can't mess around with that. Okay, so there's my red. I'm gonna let the red drive for a bit and I'm gonna start on the black part on the bottom half of my little bird, my little meadow bird. Just fill in the bottom half. And for this, I could use the larger barrel Posca. And of course, you can use regular acrylic paint. Also. Just wanted to kind of show you my tricks for learning. Doing these quick little studies and these paint markers have been a great friends and being able to knock out a lot of work quickly. I'm not incredibly pleased with this line right here, so I need to kind of go back and add a little bit of regularity to that line. Needs to be curved but not unusual. This let that dry. You have a choice here with the I. I've gone with a darker blue and I think I'm going to stick with that or this inner iris of this Muto I So I went with a lighter blue background that's found in some other of his works. And I'm going with the darker blue here to create some distinction between the two different blues. All right, well, let that dry. And then I'm going to turn this upside down so that there's absolutely no chance of my sponging anything, and I'm gonna go in and complete the bird's eye. Now, if you're watching me very closely, you'll see that there's a little bit of a white edge here and here. After this dries, I'm gonna go back and fix with some very fine markers. This is a Sharpie marker. That's extremely fine. I have some other fabric markers. Fabric markers work. Well, this is a gel roller by Penn Tell. You can see it actually comes out very quickly. It's a little less fine than the Sharpie marker is, but I'm gonna let it dry first. I'm not gonna mess with it. I'm not gonna over think this. The one thing that you don't want to dio is give yourself more grief at the beginning. Instead, allow your painting time to dry and then go back and work on details. Okay, Now we're going to do the edge of the eyelids that are surrounding this eye shape. And again, if you're not totally satisfied that you're not getting all of the canvas covered. But you don't want your black line to be any larger. Don't worry about it. Nail. Allow the black to dry and go back at the end. I will. I will go back at the ends with my lightly permanent, and I will fill in any type of little lines very, very carefully with an extremely small brush. We're going to do the top lead here with this black. Choose this, I symbol because it is a universal symbol, and it has survived art history through several iterations. You see, I symbols and Egyptian art history and just throughout cultures and throughout time, and I really liked how Mudo had used the eye symbol in different paintings that he had done . The top lid is is definitely heavier, so I'm gonna add some definition to the top lid. I don't think I've done enough of that yet. All right. And then he has very non representational eyelashes. This is not what I lashes look like in real life at all eyelashes. They're actually, if we're being realistic, they go in all different directions. They do not curve in the same direction. They're pretty sporadic and haphazard. And here I'm using my sketch as a guide. Remember? You know, this doesn't have to be exact the way he did it. There's another thing that I want to add when this is completely driving to go back and put a little black line here around that dark blue iris. Now for my chickie, we have a little more work to do. For one, he outlined this little character. I don't think he thought this was a chicken. I think he probably thought this was some sort of star. Constellation almost looks like a UFO ship. It's from a painting that is a constellation painting one of his Siri's, and then the other thing that this little chickie had known. If you'll remember earlier on before I painted over it with blue, I could barely see my outline. Here there's a bit of ah, circle. It's an irregular circle. It's it's not perfect. So don't worry about being perfect here either around the chicken. And I'm gonna use a thinner black pin to get around the chicken and represent that. Okay, so next the other thing that's part of this little circle are the red. There's some red dots. There are some white dots and there are some yellow dots, the echo, the colors found in the chicken. I don't think the white dots are gonna show up very well. So instead of that, I'm going to use black, and I'm gonna use black for another reason. And that is that I suggest in this course that you choose just a few colors narrow attended , similar to Montreal on to have a preference toward the primary color palette. So that's red, blue and yellow. And I like that. I think it has a very strong impact, and you can choose a completely different color palette if that's what you would like to dio. But I enjoy this color palette. I like to work with it, so I have limited my colors to yellow black, blue and red, and I'm going to stick with that color palette for both of these paintings again to unify them. So now you can see I just have a little bit more detail work to do to tighten these up, and I'll post pictures of these so that you can see them at the end. I have the blue background to unify them. I've used the same color scheme to unify them. The last thing that I will do after these have completely dried is I will spray them with a varnish on top, and when you do that, make sure that you hold the can straight up in the air. Don't turn it this way. And don't turn it this way if you're using an aerosol can and you want to hold it. So in other words, if at all possible, try to have your work at a 90 degree angle to the ground and you want to spray at least a foot away. You don't want to get any closer if you get closer to the painting when you spray, then what you will find is that your colors will run, so make sure that you stay far enough for your colors not to run. I wish you great success. This has been a really fun little project for us, and I hope to do some more with you Sing.