Geometric Art for Beginners with Acrylic Paint!

1. Introduction and Supplies: Hi guys. Welcome back to another video. My name is Cory J, and I'll be your teacher today. In today's class, we're gonna be making this really awesome geometric painting. I am so excited about this because I've used this type of style and a bunch of different paintings that I've done before. Let me show you a couple. There's this painting right here. This is a painting that I did have a little friend, She Dog. And I use this technique to do the entire background. Or we can take a look at this painting here. This painting is called G0 fly and it is a geometric piece with these birds on the front with the twigs making a heart. I also use this technique for that background as well. It's a really awesome technique that you can use in your art practice for backgrounds or just standalone paintings. For example, this painting is just perfect, just the way it is. Or you can take this class one step further and paint something on top of it just like I did. To create this PPE supplies are pretty minimal. You're gonna need some acrylic paint of your choice, as well as some painters tape. Now I use this painter's tape, which is my favorite painters tape. I get it from Dollar AMA here in my area. But also if you have this type of Painter's tape that's a little bit thicker, that's okay too. What you can do if you have this Painter's tape is just cut strips and use a combination of thinner and thicker strips in your work. You're also going to need a paintbrush. This is my favorite paintbrush here, so I'm gonna be using this one. But you can also use a paint brush that's a little smaller if that's what you have, any type of flat paintbrush Goldberg. One other thing I used were these foam brushes. But if you don't have these foam brushes, you can also try using a sponge. Or you can just leave them out totally and just use the brush. They're totally optional. You're also going to want a painting palette. So I really liked to use these takeout container lids because the paint will peel right off of them after you're done. When you're done, you can just let them harden and then you literally just peel the paint right off. As you can see, it comes right off. So I really love these because they were usable, your recycling and also the paint comes off so easily that you can use them again and again. For this project, I used a nine by 12 canvas board. So it's just a board that looks like this covered in Canvas. But if you don't have this one, you can also use a stretch canvas or canvas paper as well. All will work perfectly for this project. Then lastly, for this piece, you're going to need a water jug. And I always recommend having a rag on hand just in case things get a little messy. That's it to start, let's get into the project. 2. Layer 1: Okay to start, we're going to grab this nine by 12 inch canvas board and some painters tape. My favorite painters tape is this thin painter's tape that just comes from the dollar store. It works amazing. And we're just going to start to create a design. Now when you start to lay down the tape, you want to create geometric shapes with the tape. So I like to create triangles or rectangles and just kinda keep it really geometric. Now if your tape is thicker than mine, you can always just cut strips of it to do this project or you can use a variation of thick and thin lines. It's really up to you, but you're just going to take different strips of tape and lay them down to create a kind of geometric design where we're creating different shapes that we're going to fill in with the paint. Now you want to tuck it away that the ends of the tape, when you get to the end of the canvas board, make sure you tuck them under. One other thing to note is that when you rip off a piece, you don't want to leave any jagged edges exposed. So as you can see, all the jagged edges I'm using at cross-sections here to avoid a jagged edge. I'm just going to put that piece away and grab another piece so that there aren't any jagged edges that will create a shape. You can layer the tape on top of other pieces of tape and that will create these thin lines all around your geometric shapes. You want to create. I don't know, just a few shapes to start, nothing too intricate. Then once you have all your shapes down for your first layer, you're going to go through with your finger like this and just make sure that you push down all of the tape around the edges so no paint seeps underneath. Next you're going to grab some acrylic paint of your choice and a foam brush as well as a painting brush. And then we're gonna get started. Now there's a couple of different ways that we're going to fill in the shapes. The first shape I'm going to fill in. I'm just going to fill it in with flat color and just make sure that I have lots of paint on my brush and that I'm doing some nice light strokes all in the same direction at the end of the shape to have a nice flat color. Next, I'm going to grab the foam brush here. And I'm going to create a bit of a different design. Here. I'm gonna go and I'm going to start to fill in this shape with some pink color here. I'm just gonna make sure I have quite a bit of pink on the palette. And then I'm going to go in with a little bit of purple and I'm gonna start to do an ombre effect. So ombre is when one color turns into another color. And gradually with a gradient or a fade, I'm going to start by starting with the pink. And then as you can see, I added a little bit of purple and I'm mixing that together and I'm just going to keep adding a little bit more purple as I go. So that the gradient or the ombre effect will be from the light pink to deep purple. You can always grab a little bit more pain and go-between the seems to. But basically I take a little bit more purple and then I mix it into the same spot until I get a color that's a little bit darker than the one before, and then I lay it down. It's nice to blend this all in the same direction. So as you can see, all my brushstrokes are going in the same direction, up and down, up and down as opposed to side-to-side. And then I'm just going to add a little bit more of that deep purple and darken this color a little bit further on my palette and then transferred over to the Canvas board. And as you can see, it's starting to create this really beautiful gradient from the pink color all the way to this deep purple color. Then when you get to the end here, you can even grab more purple. So that's nice and deep. There you have it, your first gradient. Now for this project, I'm gonna do a mix of a whole bunch of different types of design. So one is flat color, one is gradient, and then the other is this speckled dot effect or the sponge effect. So you can get this effect using just a regular sponge to, but the sponge tip brushes are really useful for it as well. But basically I'm just going to take two colors, so I'm going to use this lime color as well as the green. I'm just going to do like a speckle effect all through the shape. Keep going back and forth between the two colors and doing little dabs. And I always like to spend my brush around as well when I'm doing this so that all the brush marks aren't all in the same direction and just fill in that shape. It just makes for a really interesting, beautiful shape. When you take the paint off, you just want to finish doing all of the shape and makes sure that it's all filled in and that you can clearly see the two different colors. And yeah, it looks really good when you take the tape off. I'm just finishing up here. Then also you want to make sure to do the sides. So this goes for all the shapes that you're doing. Make sure you pull them down to the sides of the cameras board. A good tip also for if you're using stretch canvas. Then I'm going to go through and use this really beautiful light blue color. And as you can see, as I'm filling in the shapes, I'm making sure that I put different colors in different areas of the canvas. And that's going to create a more dynamic design. I'm not going to have two purple squares right beside each other to purple triangles right beside each other. I want to make sure to kind of move the color around the board and put different colors that opposite sides are a little bit away from each other. You don't want to have the same two colors touching. If you do, it's okay. It's not the end of the world, but it just tends to look better if the colors are spread out. I'm just going to go through and keep adding different colors here. Make sure again, don't forget to pull the color onto the side of the canvas panel here. And at the end of after you lay down the color, make sure you go through with the brush and do all the same directional strokes and that'll give you a nice flat shape. Next time we're gonna go in with this pink here and fill in this shape here at the bottom. I like to use quite a bit of paint when I do this because it'll make it easier to create a gradient. I'm going to start with this pink on the left side here. And then I'm going to grab some blue and just lightly go into it. Now this is another way that you can create a gradient is just by fading two colors into each other right in the center. I basically lay down the pink and then I laid down the blue. And then I do some really light strokes with my brush in-between them and that blends them together really beautifully. Then again, make sure that you paint the sides. Yeah, that's another way to do a gradient or fade or an ombre effect. Then I'm going to go in with the pink that I still have on my brush. So sometimes if you still have one color on your brush, It's good to use it in multiple places before you have to change it or put it in the water to clean it off. And then lastly, I'm just going to go in with this green and finish off my first layer of this panel. Once you're done with everything, you want to make sure to put it in front of a fan. Or you can even use a blow dryer to help dry it. If you want. You can also just leave it to dry by itself. You don't have to use assistance. I often put it in front of a fan just to make it go faster. And then you want to really carefully peel off the tape. So you can see I'm peeling off the tape. All directions here. I just want to be as careful as possible and only makes sure to start peeling it off once everything is completely dry. 3. Layer 2 and 3: So now I'm going to do the same thing a second time and repeat this process. When I lay down the second layer of tape. Now I want to make sure to be a little strategic about where I'm laying down tape. I want to go and cross through the shapes that I've already made. And then I also want to make sure that I'm creating new shapes to fill in using as much of the whitespace as possible. I'm going to go through and do the same thing I did before. Where I am creating shapes, triangles and squares and kind of oblong shapes all throughout the piece, just by creating different sections. And what we're gonna do is once we have all our sections together again, we're going to fill them in and start to create a more dynamic layer design. One thing again, you want to remember when you're doing the tape is to make sure that you're not putting any jagged edges of tape out to complete a shape. Makes sure that those edges get put on top of another green space and then get wrapped around to the back of the board. That'll just create some nice strong angles and some nice strong shapes when we fill it in. You just want to go through and create a similar amount of shapes. Or actually if you want to create lots of shapes this time it's really up to you. You could really make your piece your own. But I'm going to make a similar amount of shapes that I did on the first layer, on the second layer here. Then once you have all your shapes on, you want to go through and make sure that you do the same process of pushing them all down with your fingers here just to make sure that no paint seeps through the edges. Next, we're going to grab our color palette again and our brush, and we're going to start to fill everything in. Now as you can see over here, I have blue, so I'm going to create some blue on the other side of the canvas panel. This is just to ensure more dynamic design. I'm going to try and keep the blues away from each other, at least not touching. So that it just says more interesting when we take the tape off, when you're putting your colors down for the second layer, you want to look at what colors you have wear and then decide what makes sense for you to lay colors on top of them. Now here I'm going to do another gradient. I'm going to grab a little bit of the blue and then I'm going to grab a little bit of the green and mix them together and start to make a fade here. Just want to be really light with the brush and also loaded up and use lots of colors. The more paint that you have on here, the easier it will be to blend it. Obviously, you don't want to put too much paint because then you'll have to be scraping it off or lifting it off after and it will take longer to dry, but you want to have a decent amount of paint on here when you are fading it so that the paint has some other paint to adhere to and mixed together with. If you don't have enough paint on your Canvas, it'll be kind of dry brush and scratchy and it won't blend together nicely. So I'm just going to grab a little bit more green every time blended into the same spot on my palette here. And then drag it down. And this will create a really beautiful gradient for my piece here. You also want to be very deliberate with the direction of your brushstrokes. Don't forget to do that. And then you want to just continue filling in shapes all around the canvas with the different colors. You can do a mix of the ombre shapes. You can do a mix of flat shape. You can even do some of that speckled shape that we did with the two different colors on the sponge brush. Really, you want to just make it your own and fill in the second layer. In whatever way that you think makes sense and whatever way that you want it to come out using whatever colors you like, and just really trying to make the piece exciting for you. And then I'm just going to do a gradient here for this last shape that I'm filling in with the blue. Just adding a lot of blue at the top to take away that purple. That will be my second layer. Now as I said before, I like to use a fan to dry between different layers because it just helps it go faster. And then once it's a 100% dry, you want to remove the tape. Again. Now when you remove the tape, you already have a layer of paint underneath. This tape is really good for not lifting up the paint underneath, but you want to be very careful. Anyway. You want to pull the tape off really gently in one direction and just be really careful with it so you don't remove any of the tape, the color from below, then you're hearing a really beautiful piece that's coming together here. We want to take this piece one step further. So I'm going to do a third layer and I suggest three layers, at least for this project. However, you can do as many as you want. And we're just gonna go ahead and do the exact same process. So first stage is laying down the tape. Once you have the tape down, you want to make sure that you smooth all the edges down. And then you're going to go ahead and fill it in. Now again, when you fill it in, you can use a combination of the ombre technique, the gradients from one color to another. Or you can just do flat shapes, whatever you would like. As well as you can try that stippling technique that I'm doing here with the sponge brush. This is really fun and just add some nice texture to the piece as well. But you're just going to go through and again, fill in your third layer just like we did the first to make sure that you have all the layers filled in. Then once your piece is completely dry, we're going to go ahead and remove the tape again. Now we have this third layer, two layers underneath the tape. Just be very careful removing the tape and just make sure that everything is completely dry before you remove it. And this is going to reveal our final geometric design on this awesome canvas panel here. As you can see, I just have a few pieces left to go. And this is my last piece, just peeling it off so gently. And this is the final design. Creates this really beautiful geometric design on your canvas. And I really, really stunning art piece. Now you can always take it one step further and paint something on top of this or just admire it and enjoy it just the way it is. This is a really good technique that you can take into further art projects and use as geometric shapes or to create geometric backgrounds. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video and learned something new. 4. Outro: Okay guys, that's it for today's project. I hope that you enjoyed it and you learned a new technique that you can bring into your painting practice. Don't forget to leave a picture for every one in our discussion. And I can't wait to see what you create. See you in the next class. Bye.