Transcripts
1. Introduction: I love coming up with projects
that are going to give you a good win when you go up to your art table and you start
creating some new art, so today I have an easy
project to share with you. I'm calling these
contemporary abstracts because they're very bold, they are very simple, they don't take long to create, and when you do like a
whole series of them, they get so exciting
how striking they are, especially, if you
frame them and hang them together as a series. Today, we're going to do
a couple of projects. We're going to do some
little ones where we are figuring out colors and mark-making and shape and we're keeping
the colors bold. I'm trying to keep most of
my project to say one color, possibly two color and a mark. Look how striking and beautiful these all
turned out, I mean, I could go and frame
these just as they are, sign and then we're
done and we have a piece of art that
I could turn into a gallery that somebody
could love and purchase. We're going to take
those little pieces and see how we can enlarge
that and make them bigger. You can see my little
inspiration and how I made it
bigger on that one. On this one, I've gone larger
from the little stripy one. I want to show you the
different challenges that you might incur when you start at one size
and then you think, this is the piece I love. Let's make it bigger. What are the challenges that you get when you go bigger? I want you to come
up in your art room, creates some
contemporary abstracts with me and come back
and show me what it is that you came up with
because I'm really excited about how easy these are to create and how beautiful and dynamic and bold that they are. I can't wait to see yours. I'm Denise Love and
I'm an artist and photographer out of
Atlanta, Georgia. Today's class is not super long, but it's easy and you're
going to have a great win. I can't wait to see the
pieces that you create. Let's get started. [MUSIC]
2. Class project: [MUSIC] Your class project today
is to come back and show me some of the little
pieces that you created because I'm really
excited to see what colors you picked
and what marks you made, and if you went like I did with the Payne's Grey ink,
love to see that, [LAUGHTER] and
then I want to see if you did a bigger piece that was inspired by one
of your littles. If you went bigger, I'd love to see that too because I think doing small projects that lead
to bigger projects, you will learn how to scale
up that piece of art, so I love practicing
little pieces. I could do hundreds of these, but occasionally, I do want to scale a little bit
larger and see, what are the challenges
in going bigger? Can I recreate this look that I wanted with the little piece? Can recreate that a
little bit larger? I want to see your
experiments in color, the littles and if you
did a bigger piece, I'd love to see
the bigger piece. I'm super excited about those, so I can't wait to
see what you create. Definitely come back
and share those with me and I'll see you in class. [MUSIC]
3. Supplies: [MUSIC] Let's take a look at the supplies that I'll
be using in class. I know it looks like
there's a little pile here, but I'm just giving
you some options. In this class, I want to create some really dynamic abstracts. Some abstracts that
are more contemporary, they are a little
more clean lines, minimal color or maybe one
main color or possibly two, and some bold markings. That's what I want
to create today. In doing this, I am going
to work with some of these wedges that are rubber
like the catalysts wedges. This one is a
Master's Touch wedge. They're silicone tips so you can move your paint around and
wipe them off very easily. I really like using these for some bold strokes and just to get outside the comfort zone
of always using a brush. The reason why I like having
different sized ones is because the larger the
piece that you're creating, the bigger the tool
that you'll want to use to create those marks. Just maybe have like
a catalyst wedge or one or two of these
with the rubber tips. You don't have to
have those if you've got just regular paint brushes, you can play with those two. Another thing that I
always keep on hand is old credit cards
or gift cards, and I've got several over
here in my little art thing. If you've just like an old card, you can use that to
swipe color also. Just choices there for you. Also got some painters tape. You can use painter's tape or artist's tape or you don't
have to tape it off at all. I find that taping
my page gives me a few visual boundaries to keep the piece of art within the size that I'm
trying to create. I do like at least taping the page where
I'd like it to be. I'm also using just some Canson 140
pound watercolor paper. This is one of the brands
that it's a little more reasonable for the papers and
I like how they create on. This was created on the Canson, so it's a really fun
paper to create on, and it's not as expensive. You can use any watercolor
paper that you'd like, under 40 pound cold
press is my preference. Then when I get into making nicer pieces because I'm like, oh yeah, this is my thing. Then I might work my way up to all cotton artist grade papers if it's something I'm
going to make and sell. Because these could very
easily be something that you take to a gallery
and sell as pieces. You just sign that it's done. You're going to love
making some of these. Another thing that
you're going to want is some acrylic paint. I'm using two elements on these, basically some acrylic paint and some acrylic
ink for my marks. I happen to like Charvin paints. That color that I've used
right there is the green gold. I also think that this yummy Caribbean
pink is super fun, so I've used it. I've just been experimenting, trying to step a little
bit outside my color zone. Some more green gold pieces. Then there's pieces
that absolutely hated. Just so you know,
when you're creating, not every color way is
going to work out for you. Here's some more green gold
and some yellow ocher. So you can play with
different paints. One to two colors is my goal. I've got some nicer
acrylic paints. I've got some cheap
acrylic paints. These little arts,
you can get a pack of 60 colors for $60 on Amazon. Then if you get them on sale, you get over my 30 bucks, so I've got a box of these
and they were on sale, so those are fun. You could also play with
the high flow acrylics. You could play with some of these standard color Amsterdam
or the basics brand. I've got several
different brands of these larger acrylic paints. I also like little tubes
of paint like this. This looks like the
little craft paints, which actually I have lots
of little craft paints also. But I love, well, I'm not sure
where I've got them, but I've got plenty of
little cheap paints too. You can use any kind of paint. Any acrylic paint that you have, you can do with this technique. The other thing that
I really like to have for my mark-making, I'm trying to stay very clear and consistent in the
series that I want to create. I want it to be able to color, I want it to be minimalistic and clean and the color
and the marks. I'm going to stick
with Payne's Gray in an acrylic ink and I'm using the Daler Rowney
FW Payne's Gray, but you can use any
one that you have. You can also use India ink. You could use high
flow black paint if you wanted to do
something like that. You could also use
my Blackmagic. That's India ink. I like the Payne's gray because it's almost black
without being black, it's like a real dark
blue black color. It's not quite as
black as black, but here's what you got. Experiment and see what
you ended up loving. You could also, if you wanted to use something like a stabilo pencil to
do your mark-making. You could do something
like that to just experiment and see
what speaking to you? What is getting you to what you love with your
contemporary abstracts. Then make a little
series for yourself. I'm looking forward to showing
you how easy these are to create today and I
can't wait to see yours. Let's get
started. [MUSIC]
4. Small samplers: [MUSIC] I've gone ahead and
taken a couple sheets of paper and just taped
it in half and in half and I'm using a really large sheet of
paper for this project. These are 12 inches
by 18 inches, which is about 30 and
1/2 centimeters by 45.7 centimeters. It's a really good size. The pieces that we're left
with are going to be in the range of five by seven
or something like that. It don't have to be perfect, I noticed that this maybe a
little bit smaller than that. If you want to measure
your paper out and really make sure that they're even or a little closer
even than I got it, then definitely do that. I can just eyeball it for
this particular project. I'm basically going to be
working in the center of these. I don't know what I've
gotten on my hand, but I'm marking some of my paper accidentally
and I'll be honest, I want to keep the paper
as clean as possible so if you've got anything on your fingers that you
don't want on your paper, then be really careful about
touching the paper itself. But I'm going to keep going
and I'm actually going to work up and down and I can see that that's
really crooked on there, but it doesn't really matter. I've got a piece of disposable
palette paper here and I've managed to hide
my big pads of it for myself so I just cut a
piece off a bigger pad, and you can do these in a
couple of different ways. My goal is to stay very
simplistic in the marks. I want it to be very clean. I want to go ahead and
use my catalyst brush and get a little bit of the
paint on it and then maybe one will be a straight
line and maybe one could be some type of shape and maybe one could be
some vertical lines. I want to just play and then I will put my
ink marks on top. Now you can do ink marks on the top or you can do
ink marks on the bottom. But I have found on some past projects that if I did the ink
marks on the top, it was nice and vivid. If I did the ink
marks underneath, you can see that the
ink is a little bit less vivid because now you have a layer of paint
on top of the ink. Just decide as you're creating, do you want to have one layer of ink and
one layer of paint, or do you want to put the
ink first to get an idea of what shape your paint wants
to be because that is fun. Now the other drawback
to putting the ink underneath is then you
have to let the ink dry. So if you're wanting to
do these fairly quickly, make a series, work fast, then you need
to put the ink on top because you can work with
the ink on top of the paint. You cannot smear paint on top of the ink without
smearing all the ink. Just keep that in mind. I'm just going to
put some paint on here and start doing some lines, some mark-making, and just figuring out what do I
actually want these to be. Let's just do some
experimenting. Maybe we've got some
circular marks, may be straight, rounded. We've got some marks in a row. Maybe we've got a mark
that turns a corner. This could be our first four. Let's go ahead and get
some paint down and give it a moment for that paint
to be doing its thing. Maybe drying a little bit. You can certainly do this with a paintbrush
if you'd rather. That first four I did
with a catalyst wedge. Maybe this next four I can
do with a credit card, maybe I want to play with the green gold
instead of the pink, so let's just put
some of that down. On the third one, I'm going to show
you a third way to maybe play with that. We've got some on
our credit card and I'm just deciding like how much of that paint. That's fun. You can see that's a
completely different look than that wedge. It pushes the paint further
into the paper almost, I guess you could say. If we do the whole thing, maybe if we drag paint this way, that could be fun.
I like this one. Down on its edge is
super fun. That's fun. I like that one a lot, and maybe we'll just do
one dragging up. Oh, yeah. Then just wipe off whatever
it is that you used. Let's go head and do
one more and then we will have several that we
can mark make on top of. Maybe I want this one
to be in yellow ocher. You could also take this
opportunity to mix two colors, and we could do, instead of doing it on a paint palette like
we've done here, we could actually
come up here and put a little paint on our piece and then spread
it out from there. So let's just do one
of those in this way, and maybe I'll work with the catalyst wedge
just to give it a go. Maybe I just want to drag these. [NOISE] Look at that. [LAUGHTER] We know
that made me happy. Now I do have paint on here and I think I'm going
to come right back over here and just drag it
this way and just see. So I'm just flipping that
goal back-and-forth. But that's super fun.
I'm liking that. If you do that with the wedge, then just wipe your pain off or have like a little
trash palate or something that you put
extra paint on and you can maybe move your paint
on that extra pallet. So maybe we can do this
on this wedge with two colors and maybe
something like that. I'm just going to go back and
maybe we want some stripes. That's very interesting. Maybe on this last
one, what do we want? Maybe we want just bold. I like that. Now we've got several that we've
got the paint started on. Again, I've done the paint first so that I don't have to spend time waiting on the ink to dry because I've done lots of them
where I did the ink first. [LAUGHTER It takes a long
time for the ink to dry. I didn't want to do it
that way this time. Now we've got yummy
[LAUGHTER] and we're just going to experiment
and see what we get. I've got my Payne's gray ink. It's a good practice
to shake your ink up before you start
laying down marks. My goal here is to do
more of a scribble. Pieces I've done in the past, like doing little scribble. Up and down and maybe
some zigzag lines. I like up and down with
some circle things. This one's a really good
inspiration for that kind of L-shaped up and
down some circles. You can see you can
just be creative here and then somewhere I've put it on top and
smear the ink some. What I like about doing things like this
with the scribble, is thing you get a feel for your own personal
mark making. I love that so much that I'm
going to stop right there. Let's just go over here and see and you start
to discover like, I can see a definite
pattern here in my marks. I don't think I like that one, but we will trust actually now that I look
up in the camera though, I do like that one. [LAUGHTER] But this is a good way to figure
out what is your mark making technique like
what's going to end up being something that's you, that's pretty, that people are going to
look at and be able to recognize as something
distinctly that you've done. The only way to do that
is to practice and play and do things like this where
maybe we do a whole series. Then you're like, I like this, that, or this or whatever. That's the only way that
you're going to then be like, this one I love and this one maybe I don't love or this one I love more
than all of them. [LAUGHTER] You're going to up set these to the side and
let them dry at that point. But look how fast that went. These would be beautiful
for a gallery exhibition. You can trim these right out and that's ready to frame,
sign your piece. But what I like about doing
something this simple, you get a feel for your
materials, your mark making. You start thinking, I like
this, rather than that. You start defining
a whole collection in a style like look
how pretty those are. I like that they're all
in the same color way. I like the simplicity
of the marks. I like the differences
in the color shapes. I'm loving this one. We're going to set this to the side, you got to let that ink dry. Just because this one I've
messed up the paper anyway, let's just use this
as an example of smearing ink because at this point you might
come in and think, I want that ink to maybe be part of the composition a
little more and we can spread that out
and do things with it and come back and mark
make again on top of that. [NOISE] See, I like these lines when
they do that, that's fine. The other thing I
like about doing so many at a time is then when you have
one that you're like, oh, I hate it. You have three
more that you love [LAUGHTER] because
if you started off and this was the one you created and you're
like, I hate it. This did not work out.
This is not for me. Then you're not
going to revisit it again and you're going to miss out on these other pieces
that you could have created. When you're starting these, I want you to create
several sheets. I want you to pick a
color for each sheet. I want you to do four, so tape it off and
get four out of it. Then out of that collection, keep the ones you like the best. If you end up with
something you don't like, cut it up for scrap or for doing your collages
and stuff like that. Because this is thing I use in my collage is if
I don't love it, I will come back and just
reuse it for something else. Let's go back to our green gold. I'll just drip ink there, so be careful when
you're dripping. I really like this shape. [NOISE] I like that too, I like it bold. I like that there's contrast. I like what the paint up there
is doing That's super fun. [NOISE] I like that one, look how fun that is.
That's super fun. You can also get adventurous. [LAUGHTER] Try with
your non-dominant hand and just see what you
get because those will be a little more unsure. They'll be a little more organic and you
might be pleasantly surprised that you
like the marks that look a little less confident. Because look how pretty
that I ended up. I love that. There's
our green gold. I'm putting these behind us on the floor so that they can dry. Here's our pink and gold mix, and you don't have to use the same color ink
that I'm using. You can pick a color if you
really loved this and you wanted the marks to
be something bold, like blue or whatever, you could use something else. I'd rather than Payne's gray, I really like the Payne's
gray because it makes such a statement and a contrast. Look at that. [LAUGHTER]
I like that one. [LAUGHTER] It's bold. It's just like a one color. It's low commitment.
That's fine. That's going to be
a lot of ink there that's going to have to dry. [LAUGHTER] Do some little
thing in while you're at it, put on your favorite music
and just let your marks go. Super fun. I really loved that. What I'd really like
to do is use one of these as inspiration for, look how pretty that is, inspiration for a larger piece. Once you've got all
your littles done, we can cut these up. I'm going to let these
dry before I do it, but I'm going to cut these
into little pieces like I did the pieces I've done before. When I was playing
these little pieces, I've cut these out
of a bigger piece. You could do like a
great big splash too, all fun stuff that you can
do here with this paint. Then when you cut these
into smaller pieces, if you like them, definitely sign it and use it
as like some art. [LAUGHTER] It's
part of a show or something because
these are so cool. [LAUGHTER] Pick your favorite, like whichever one
inspired you the most. We're going to create
something a little bigger. I like doing that because
then you can see how the challenge of going from a piece that smaller to
a little bit larger, you work out some of those
challenges a little bit. I really love this too toned, and I love this one here. I loved this one here. I'm feeling like that could be my inspiration for
the larger piece. Let's try some of those. [MUSIC]
5. Trimming And Finishing: [MUSIC] I thought I'd
show you real quick. These are not 100 percent dry, but they're dry enough for me to hopefully not mess them up. I was just going to show you
real quick what I do with these after I take the tape off. I will then trim
the paper to about the size of what's on the paper. If I have a little trimmer here, I might start off by giving them equal
amounts of paper there. [NOISE] Then if I get
it cut out and I think, oh, it's got too much paper
on one side or the other. Now, I'm going to then just [NOISE] trim these
so that the piece of art is better placed in the piece of paper
that I've got left over. Judging it by the edge
of the ruler here, I want the art to come down towards the
edge of the ruler. But I don't want to cut off so much paper that the art
is sitting on the edge. It's about the same amount of space there with that paper. Then, I can look at it and say, oh yeah, now that piece goes
in that piece of paper. What I find easier about
doing that is again, I love to cut up art
[LAUGHTER] even know I'm not cutting up the individual
pieces of art on this. I'm not so stuck and worried on working on a piece of
paper this exact size, trying to get it in
the exact middle. Now, I'm working on a piece of paper a little bit larger, and I can say, where does this
really need to end? Like on this one, I actually dripped the
ink on the very top of the paper here and
this is my chance to now get rid of that and
have a finished piece of art, [NOISE] hold the paper good, without having that
mistake on there. Or it's not really a mistake, but maybe I didn't
want it there. [NOISE] Then hold your paper
good when you're doing that. Then I can judge the rest of it. Again, I'm eyeballing it
with the edge of my ruler. You can be way more
exact than that if you [NOISE] want to get stuff out and be a
little more exact. But there we go. Look
how nice that is. That's what I do with the four pieces once
I get them out. I go ahead and just trim them up to the size that I
need them to be. Now, if I want to look how
these might be framed up, I've got a little
mat set that I have gotten from the craft
store and just to see, what would this look
like be in a frame? Look at that. I love checking out a finished
piece in a piece of mat because it
instantly elevates it to a finished piece
of art in your mind. Now you can see how amazing your little abstracts would be if someone bought
it and framed it, what they would end up with? You can see how amazing
these pieces end up. I've got several of
these that I had done for myself before
and you can just see. Some of these are
in the colorway that I played in today, so I have a whole
series of these now. When you're looking
at them thinking, I don't know, if you'll
stick it in a mat. You can see how that instantly elevates any of the
pieces that you created. Let me grab one of these
other ones just to take a look of some pieces that
I had created before. Look how beautiful that is. We can even judge on
our piece that we have. I've got this one that
I didn't cut up yet. I do want to be careful not
to touch any of these in case they're not 100 percent dry. I don't want to ruin
my beautiful pieces. [LAUGHTER] Usually
what I would do is, I would create these
and I would walk away and go eat lunch. I would come back later and start looking at them and
cutting them up and stuff. But if I do that
while I'm filming, I'll forget where I was and
what I was talking about. [LAUGHTER] Look how amazing these are
just framed up like that. You can get a look
before you even cut them up of what that finished
piece is going to look like. Then we know that I
didn't like that one. That was my experiment. We know what we're going
to get as we're going. I love that right there. You can also a
little bit, judge. Does it need more marks? Did it need anything else? Because at this point, even though I have kept
these extremely minimal, because I wanted them to
be more contemporary, clean lines, I want them
to be statement pieces, I wanted them to be bold and
speak for themselves without all the fun mark-making and changes that I
might normally do. I like it this way. Now, you could add more marks, dots, color, doodles
if you wanted. But I'm going to ask that you [LAUGHTER] perhaps
resist if you can, because look how
striking these are as a collection
just on their own. They're really beautiful. I wanted to show you
what those look like, how I was cutting
those out and my thoughts about how to
get that centered. Then take a look at that
in a frame and just see how that elevates those
marks and those bold strokes. All right, I'll see you
back in class. [MUSIC]
6. Going larger: [MUSIC] In this video,
let's go larger. My inspiration was
the pink and ocher, this Caribbean pink by Charvin and the yellow
ocher by Charvin. I'm using them
because I have them and I like those colors. You can use whatever
paint that you happen to have that
you want to play in, and I want to just create one of these
a little bit larger. It's never going to
be exactly the same, but it can certainly be
inspired by the pieces. I really like the stripe one, and I really like this
one in the top corner. These are not
completely dry yet, so I'm trying to be really careful not to move
the ink around, but I wanted to show you my inspiration for
these larger pieces. Let's just go ahead
and make two. I haven't even taped
the paper down. We could, but we're working
here in this middle area, so we don't have to. I've got my little piece of
pallet paper still available. Because we're going larger, I'm probably going to use
this larger catalyst wedge, because when you go bigger, I like to use bigger
tools for the most part, but I could also use
the little wedge, especially for the stripey one. Let's do that. Let's do the
little wedge with the stripe. I've just put both
colors on here, let's just go ahead and
see what we can get. A little more pink. Let's see. I can see here when you do
it a little bit larger, you're going to have areas where the paint piles up very heavily, so I was very gently getting
rid of the extra pile up. You also might have the color blend even more
so than you intended. Like I almost would
have liked a little more pink in that,
but that's okay. I still like it just like it is. I do still like that, so I'm going to do that. On the other piece,
if you remember, we actually took the pink and the yellow ocher and we spread
it up here on the page. Let's do that. Then I move my wedge
back-and-forth, so let's just see what
we can get doing that. This is going to be a
little more challenging. It's longer than my wedge, so it's almost like
wouldn't it have been neat if I had
a longer squeegee? But let's just try. Look at that. We'll go ahead and flip it over, so I'm working on the
clean side to get this. Look at that. I want that yellow up here, and the yellow down there, so I'm going to work
on that edge that's got that like that and
drag it from there. I like that. Now, I almost don't want to even do
anything else to it because I like the way the
paint separated there, so I'm good with that. I don't want it to be solid, I like the separating there. That's what it looked
like on our little piece, so let's clean off our wedge. Let me move the paint palette
out of my way because I have a tendency to
put my hand in stuff, and let's come back here. Now, with the other one, had that going up like that, so I'm going to do
it with this too. I'm still going to use
my dropper as my brush, but if you're going
larger and you really need it to be larger, you could do something like
a paintbrush in your ink, but I'm just going to do. Look at that. [LAUGHTER] Oh, yeah. I like that. You know what? Before I'm tempted, I'm going to go
ahead and do that. Now, the other one, I
see that I've got an L-shaped here and
L-shaped there, so let's just see here. Look at that. Oh my goodness, look at that. Oh my goodness. Let me grab those smaller ones so that we can take a look. We can see here on our larger
piece, the smaller one, we had the paint separating and like basically the two Ls, and here, same thing, a little bit larger. Look how beautiful that is. [LAUGHTER] These little
ones are still wet, so I can't separate them yet. Then on this little
try line here, we can see we went straight up with some
zigzags back and forth, so as far as our re-creation of that look, we're very close. There's more pink in this, and if I do another
one of these, I think I want the pink
to be more dominant. But how beautiful
did these turn out? Oh my goodness, inspired
by our little pieces, you can see how easy
that is to create the next size larger off of our little inspiration pieces. That was super fun and look how fast that was and this is ready for me to sign it and then
put it in a little frame. These turned out even
better than I had expected. [LAUGHTER] Let's do
something larger after you do your little color pieces and then use those as your
inspiration to go bigger, and let's see what we can get. You can see how fast and
easy these were to create, so I want you to
be able to sit at your art table and walk
away with a win fairly easily while you're learning
new techniques and playing with paints and colors in a way that maybe you don't
normally do it. That's my goal when I create
some of these projects, I want you to walk away with a win when you're in
there because that's how you're going to get to
come back and get excited and start working more on
your creative practice. These would be an
amazing 100-day project. Pick a different color, pick your Paynes gray ink, get your piece of paper, create a piece that day. Do that 100 days in a
row and see where you are when you started on
day one versus day 100. This is the perfect project
for that type of practice. So can't wait to see
your larger pieces. Look how amazing these are. I will see you back
in class. [MUSIC]
7. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] I'm super glad to
have had you in class today. I hope that this
really simple project inspires you to
create a bunch of fun contemporary art pieces that maybe you wouldn't
have created any other way. But look how striking these are. They're so striking in their simplicity because
we've used bold color, we've used bold marks, and I want to see what you've
created and discovered in the abstract contemporary pieces that you created in class today. This was a little
bit shorter class, I think than some of
the others that I do, but it was such a great project that I couldn't wait to
come share it with you and get you excited
to come up here into your art room and
start making some of these for yourself because
the pieces that we ended up with are so beautiful
like this here, this yummy striped piece that I created from my smaller
inspiration piece. How beautiful are these? Once we frame these up, they're going to
be super striking. They're going to be
a statement piece wherever they are hung, and I want you to get that excitement out
of something so easy. Art doesn't have to be
all hard all the time, and even though most pieces of art go through an ugly stage, I don't feel like these
went through an ugly stage. I thought the color was fun. The mark was bold, and wanted to add in my extra
mark-making with the ink. I was like, oh, look at that. So sometimes it doesn't
all have to be hard. These are perfect for a 100 day project because
you can very easily sit down and do one or
two or three or a set of four in
just a few minutes, basically, maybe five minutes. Set that to the side and dry. The next day, come
back and do it again, and every day you can
switch up your colors. You can switch up
your mark making, and see where you've ended
up from Day 1 to Day 100. That's how we grow and
learn and figure out things and develop
into our own style. Because every day we add
things that we love, subtract things that
we didn't love. You learn so much doing
a project like that. In 2011, I did a photography project that
was a 365-day project, and so I tried to take
photos every day for a year, and that's difficult
trying to think up a new subject to take photos. If I did that
project again today, I got a million
ideas and I can take a beautiful piece of art
every single day with my photography because I like doing still-life
and I've collected props and I love
photographing in my window, and I can come up with something different every single day. But it took me many years
to figure all that out, and if you go back to my
365-day project pictures, you're going to look
at those and think, what were you thinking? [LAUGHTER] I might've went
around and randomly took an object on my bookcase because that's all
I thought that day. And the lighting
was probably bad, and I look at that stuff
now and I'm embarrassed. But if I didn't
go through all of that learning process
at the beginning, I wouldn't be where
I am today in my photography and I
wouldn't be where I am today in my art without sitting
up here in my art room, my little four-foot art table, that's all you need really,
is just a space to create. This could be on your
dining room table, and creating on a regular basis. That's how you get better. If you create on
a constant basis, you're going to get
better no matter what it is you're practicing at. These little projects are perfect for something like that. They're low commitment. They take no time. You could do this real
quick in the morning. You could do it
on a lunch break. You could do it sometime in the afternoon
when you're like, let me create my one
piece of art for the day, and then where you're
at at the end is amazing compared to where
you were at the beginning. So consider doing something
like a project, super fun. This is the type of project that I think is easy and
it's low commitment. I hope you enjoy making these, even if you don't do
a project with them. [LAUGHTER] I definitely want to see some of the pieces
once you're finished. Come back and share
those with me. I get so excited
when people share. Lots of times, people are too
shy to put their stuff up. But I truly enjoy
seeing where you are and how you grow with the different art
things that you do. Come back and share
the projects with me, and I'll see you
next time. [MUSIC]
DENISE LOVE, Artist & Photographer
