Abstract Painting: Create Composition by Using Botanical Shadows Found in Your Home

1. Introduction : Hey, you're in the right place because today we are working on abstract compositions based on shadows from plants that you have in your house. So I have a lot of different types of faux flowers that I use for still lives in my classroom and from my own work. So I have big flowers. I have some palm leaves which I've used a ton. I have this thing. Can someone tell me what kind of Florida says? Leaf? And then I have just like some simpler ones. So we're going to look at these and see which ones make the best pattern for our shadow. 2. Setting Up Your Area: So this is how I have my little light station set up. I just have a lamp that has really direct light. And then I have my canvas here, and then I have plants. So it's super simple. You could use a flashlight if you don't have a lamp with direct light. So don't stress. 3. Picking out a Plant: All right, so let's start with looking to see how good of a shadow this mix. So that is a little bit. These could be interesting. I think that that is too small of shadows for the way I like torque, which is making larger sections. I kinda like that. I like that it starts on one side and gets a little bit bigger. Maybe. About this guy. That's not as cool as I thought I was. Just not quite. It's a little bit aggressive, you know, like with those street sharp lines. So I think I decided I wanna do a flower, but let's look at the other ones to see which one might be the best. And we don't know why, but I just kinda like this one. I think at the white flower it's going to be. 4. Creating a good Composition : So I put on a piece of just tracing paper with a loosely drawn rule of thirds grid here. And I'm putting it over there so that I can decide what I want my composition to me and I want my focal point to be at one of these intersections. I also have my lamp here with direct light and my plant. So what I'm doing is I'm playing with how I want this to look. And if I get closer to the paper, it's going to be a more distinct shadow. And if I move farther away, it's going to be more blurry. Ok, so this is how I decided I want my clamp. So I'm now going to go with a pencil and I'm going to outline these larger shapes. And I'm gonna do this pretty quickly. And even if there is just a slight change in tone, I'm still like this shadow is darker here and lighter here. I'm still going to go over that. Hey man, I'm going to change angles. Well, I'm just taking the leaves and this time I'm going to see how I can overlap those shapes. I don't do very like I don't do really find painting where I don't do a lot of small detail. That's just not my style. But if it's yours, you can certainly make it more detailed. So I'm going to look at this, see if I like this overall shape. I do think that this shape is kinda weird. So I'm going to try to intersect that, to kind of just divide it up a bit. So this is what I have. I think that it is it you wouldn't look at it and be like, oh, that's a plan. But I like that it has some botanical shapes. 5. Underpainting: So our next step is going to be under painting. And I love to underpin, which means that you're going to lay down color on your canvas in one, like completely cover the canvas in a color that's not going to be what's on top. And the reason why I like doing this so much is because a really gives depth my paintings. So here's an example of a painting that I use under painting for. This is actually a painting of my grandma on the back of a horse. So I under painted the sky yellow. So then where the paint is thin and around my grandma You can see pops up yellow. Then I under painted the ground and I under painted it blue. So then when I went over that you can see these little hints of blue. Then what I think is the most fun is I under painted the horse pink. So people often say, oh the, what the piece with a pink horse. And some people noticed that and others don't. So I just like that. The underpinning is a subtle thing. I love to look at art and not notice everything right away. And that's one of the reasons I really like to underpin. So I am getting ready to you, I paint and the way that I'm choosing the colors as I'm want to base it off of this other abstract that I did for a different skill share class about how to make abstracts based on landscapes. And what I like about this is that I could hang it this way or this way. But anyway, I have much basing it on the same color palette because I'm want to create a collection. Creating collections is a really important for my work because I license are and people like to see the same colors used in different ways and have different types of art. Alright, so now we're going to start underpinning. I have my water, my paints. And I, though goal Ines is to cover the complete canvas and paint. I'm underpinning with the vibrant colors. So I'm only going to be under painting with three colors, the pink, the orange, and the black. Because I want Overall the canvas to be neutral. And so that's why I'm choosing to do the undercoat. This because only little highlights will be showing at the end. Okay, so we got the underpinning done. I promise. It's going to look better than this. This is not a plus work the way it is. So we're going to let it dry and then we're gonna put our top codon and you guys are going to. 6. Conclusion : All right, so we're back. This is dry and I have gone and collected all of my neutrals that I have painted. And I'm also going to be using this light blue and a little bit of pink because this is where my original color scheme came from and I like those things. So my goal is to completely cover this and neutrals so that you can only see the pops of color. Thanks so much for making art with me today. If you enjoyed this class or even if you didn't, please leave a review so I can make my class better or hear how you liked it. Also, please share with me what you worked on below. I would love to see how your project turned out. Also, I have a few other classes on skill share that are upcoming, so make sure you check those out as well.