Intuitive Painting: Creating Abstracts in Charcoal

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I used to not spend nearly as much time exploring and experimenting and playing in my art practice. Now I'm all about play and exploring, and that's what this class is all about. I'm Denise Love and I'm an artist. Today I want to show you playing with charcoals in an intuitive painting way. I love doing this intuitive abstracts because they allow me to sit at my table, play and experiment with my supplies, push them in ways that I didn't expect like with the charcoal, adding water, using the blocks versus using the pencils versus adding marks on top, and just seeing where can we take this? Limiting our supplies down to just a paper type in a material type and saying, what can I create today? I love putting these limitations on myself. I love experimenting with the supplies that I've collected in my art room, and I love seeing what can I create today with this mindset? It gives me a lot of joy to play and discover and think, oh my goodness, I didn't even know that this did that. This is how we're going to come into developing our style. Your style is just a series of decisions that you have made over probably a long period of time of what you like and what you don't like. It's a series of discovering things that you're like, oh my gosh, I love this. I'm going to do this going forward, or oh my gosh, I didn't like that at all, so we're going to just scrap that. Then as you hone in on those things that you love to do, your artwork becomes more and more yours. The authentic work that you were meant to create, and so I like to explore and experiment and figure out what do I like and what can that do? What if I did this, and what if we did that? Let's peel this tape and see what we got. That's my most favorite part. [LAUGHTER] I always start a piece of art with the intention that I can cut it up. But with these, I find that there's always three that I love and one that I'm like, huh, I don't love that one. Let's cut it up and then I get the joy of pieces I created that I didn't cut, and agility of cutting up the other pieces because that's my favorite part anyway. [LAUGHTER] I hope you have fun in class today. We are going to be doing a large project that we've taped together. We're going to work big, but then we peel the tape and we have several different compositions left. We wave a little series, and then there's always a fourth that I cut up into something else. I want you to always keep your mind open to, let's create this series, and then we can always trim things down to a better composition. I don't want you to get super stressed about composition and what's on each piece. I want you to work intuitively like what feels good, what if I put this here? What if I put that there? Then let's see what we just end up with. Let's not put all that pressure on ourselves to create something amazing. But most of the time, some of these are amazing. It's a little bit of serendipity and you're like, I love this. [LAUGHTER] I hope you have fun in class today. I'm super glad to have you here. I hope you get something out of just letting yourself play an experiment with your supplies. I can't wait to see what you're creating in class today. Come back and share those with me. Let's get started. [MUSIC]. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Your class project is to come back and share some of your intuitive charcoal paintings that you did. I love how the charcoal looks when you add water to it and swish it around, and then add more dry charcoal on top of that. We got some really cool pieces in class. I love experimenting with my different supplies and new ways to discover what is it that this supply can do and how far can I push it? This is how we discover things that we love, things we don't love, things we want to continue doing in our art practice. It's how we hone in on our different styles. Style is just honing in on your likes and dislikes and then using the things you like in your art going forward. The more you work and the more you hone that down and the more you play with your supplies and allow yourself that time to experiment, the more you're going to discover about yourself, your art, and the things you want to create. I can't wait to see what you do in class today with the charcoal. I'm looking forward to seeing these projects so come back and share those with me and let's get started. [MUSIC]. 3. Supplies: [MUSIC] Let's take a look at the supplies that I'll be using in this class. I want to focus on just using charcoal, so I have pulled out the charcoal options that I want to use. I'm going to be using my extra large charcoal blocks because I love the color range in there. I'm also going to be using my Derwent tinted charcoal pencils. I love this because there's the whole range of colors in here. I can basically just use this one set of pencils and blocks and just create and see what all I can come up with. I've also got just some really dark black peel and sketch charcoal. It's just a dark black color. I like using pencils with charcoal because then you don't get your hands dirty as you're working with it. The extra large charcoals is the only thing that really gets on my fingers and I use a microfiber cleaning cloth here in my art room. I have lots of these. They come in a big package. What I love about these is they're perfect for getting chalky substances off your fingers, and so I always have one of these available sitting over here off to the side to get some of these chalky things off of my fingers as I'm working so I don't get marks and fingerprints and smudges on different parts of the paper than I intended. I'm also going to be playing on the Canson XL watercolor paper, 140 pound cold press paper. You can play on any paper that you like. This is just a good one for experimenting and playing. I liked that. Got some painters tape. Then I'm going to be using the charcoal dry and I want to use it wet. I've got some water over here in just a cup and I've got some different brushes. I want a variety here, so I've got a fan brush, I've got some square brushes. I can pull out some round brushes if I wanted to, but I want to keep this simple. I want to use the square brushes. Get a variety of brushes together and say, okay, here's what I'm creating with today, what can we make? I've tried to keep the supplies pretty simple. Now let's see what we can make today. I'll see you in class. [MUSIC] 4. Painting Big: I've gone ahead for our project, and I've taped down four pieces of paper. All I've done is taken my 9 by 12 pad and I have cut these pages in half and then stuck down two pages. It's basically two pages worth of paper. I have recently decided that this is almost as fun as using a great big sheet and cutting it up when you're done. Already almost cut up. I like working big, like we're working on the whole piece. Then we're going to separate it out when we're finished and see what cool art we end up with. I love this, it's more intuitive. I just paint, and I don't worry about the composition on each individual piece until I'm finished. Then I always keep the option open to trim these into a better composition, or to add two and change after I pull the tape to see, did it need anything else? Did I get it all when I was painting? I'm going to start off. I really love in this extra-large charcoal block. I wish this came in so many more colors. I'm telling you. I see all the colors that the pencils come in, and I'm like, "Can I have a block in every color, please?" Like this gorgeous green and this beautiful salmony, pink color. I love all these colors. But since I have the blocks in this set of colors, I'm going to go with, I really love the yellow ocher, the yellow one. I really love this pinky burgundy colorish one. In my other charcoal class, it was dominant yellow. Let's start off with the yummy pinky color one. I'm just going to work on all four of these. I'm going to lay some dry charcoal, going to smoosh that around with some water. We can add some other charcoal, some line, some marks, just wherever your heart desires. I don't want you to focus in on doing something specific at this point. I want you to focus in on creating and just having fun with the materials and just saying, "What does it do if I do this?" [LAUGHTER] Look at this, oh my goodness. On something like this, got to be careful with how hard we press down. Because as you see now we got a lot of little individual chips here. But I'm going to pick up with my fingers because it can spread that in. When you're working with charcoal, I want you to resist leaning your head down and blowing this off of your page. Because that is mostly going to blow pigment dust all over your stuff. It's an excellent lesson here with this stuff here. I'm not going to blow this off. If I feel the need to get it off my paper, I'm going to put a piece of paper towel down, tap that dust onto the paper towel, and then I can get rid of that very easily in the trash can. Let's just do that just to give you an example. I can put this here, just paper towel at the edge. Then we can pick this up, tap our board, and then you can see now I've got the majority of that dust off of my piece and onto my towel. I keep that handy and just do that in the rare times that I feel I need to get that dust off, and I might even have to do that at the end, but resist sticking your head down there and blowing the dust and then sucking air back in and breathing the dust. Just be careful when you're working with pastels or chalks or anything like that, we're doing here. Just be real careful in how you're doing that. Now I'm just coming back, adding in some extra little marks, charcoals, very chalky, just resist, resist. [LAUGHTER] Now I've got a couple of brushes here. I want to smoosh some of this around with water. But what if we did it with say, a fan brush instead of a regular brush? What would that do? This is why I want you to experiment with a couple of different brushes and techniques. Will still look at that. We don't have to do it all wet. We can leave parts of it dry. Look at that. Look at that. That was fun. [LAUGHTER] Can drag it through and see what we get. I liked that. Look on that one. So I did a little over here. Then we can keep going. Let's just keep on going. We can go ahead and pick some pencils and do some other marks. We can come back before we even do that, and we can do the yellow because I like this yellow and just see what are we going to create today. I'm personally in my own little project here focusing on larger blocks of color. Because in a lot of my abstracts, I get really tight in there and I don't know, it's almost chaotic, and sometimes I'm just too focused in really tight on stuff. What if we focus here on how to go bigger and not be so tight? That's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking let's not go as tight. Let's go bigger and see what that gets us. I'm treating the tape as just an extension of my paper so that I'm not thinking each piece is separate. I want this to look like something big and giant that I created. I'm trying to work further out and extend my lines from one piece to the other. Look at that, that picked up a little bit of that wetness in there, that was pretty cool. I see you now. That's really cool. I like that. Super cool. Play an experiment. Then this is perfect for getting all that dust off your fingers. I'm still resisting blowing in this stuff as you can see. I fill in this fan brush. Let's just come back here and wet some of this down. In the spirit of going further, let's just drag that down into our other piece. That's pretty. Then I've just got some water over there just to pick up some more freshwater. Pretty pretty. I love how the water really gets that charcoal in there really tight. I love that. Let's see, what else do we want to do? Now we've got some charcoal pencils. Come back in. Let's see. I can come back over here with some white to it. I thought I didn't like the white on some earlier pieces that I did in another class. But then after a day or two of looking at it. That white's pretty cool. What are we feeling? It's very intuitive in the moment. Let's see what this glowing embers. It's similar to this purply color here that we've got. But what if we come back in here now and start doing some lines and some marks and some pattern. Just use this as a fun mark-making scribble. One big reason why I like to do pieces like this, where we're doing like a set of four because I always like three of them, and they're, for some reason there's always one or two that are like, that's pretty fun. Let's see also like this gold since we've got gold in there. It's fun to come back in with some details. I do want to be very careful about setting my hand on my piece here. I got a longer ruler but the short will respond to. Rather than dragging your hand across anything with a powder. It's fun to have, I have a longer wood one wood ruler like a yardstick. That's really handy, but I've got this one right here. Put that on your page, rest your hand on that and protect your hand and your paper from any weird smudges. That's a good tip so that you're not smearing a lot of stuff you didn't intend to smear. This is more of an orange than it is this gold. But let's start doing some marks and that can be dots, it can be hashes, it could be circles. Let's start filling in some pattern. You could do a little plus signs, you could do whatever your favorite mark-making thing is. My favorite mark-making things tends to be circles and dots. [MUSIC] I might come over here since I've got this room and maybe do some fun lines. Did not mean to circle out, curve that one at the end, but maybe some lines would be fun. Don't be afraid to give any of your drawing tools. If you need help drawing like a straight line in a certain spot, don't be afraid to get out a ruler, is perfectly fine. Sometimes an uneven line is very interesting, but it doesn't have to be anything hard like that. I'm just going to do some little scribble circles here. I like that. If I'm doing something on one piece, I'm going to try to do it on the other pieces. Not the same necessarily technique, but something that's going to bring this color in because I want these to match, have some cohesive element that pulls them together. But I also think it's fun to have them all have, even though they're cohesive, maybe by the color, still have some differences just to see like what did we like the most, what worked, what didn't work? Here's our chance to play, experiment and figure things out. [MUSIC] That's fun, super fun. I liked the differences on all three of these pieces. Let's step back a moment, take a little look and decide what else we want to do with this. I did take that as a moment to tap the dust off of my piece. Again, resist blowing on your pieces just because you're going to make a mess. What if we tried, this extra large white just to come through with some extra marks somehow in here, and these aren't going to be super dramatic because I'm using white, which is not going to show up as heavy as some of the other colors. But it's a nice subtle transition that the closer you get, you're like, there's something else going on in there that's super-duper cool, and so what if we go ahead and do that? Let's just add that, it's almost like a really light invisible, something different. Not really invisible, but it definitely gives a slight dimension change. That's pretty cool. I tried using it on an earlier project like I was telling you and I thought, I don't know if I'm going to like that, but then after I cut the camera's off and I came back a day or two later. I'm like, wow, look that white really is very impactful and I didn't even realize that, so we could just really let the white do somethings, and it'd be very subtle. See, that's fine. I like that organic. Let's do that over here too. Let's not do a couple of straight lines within a couple with some of this random scribble. That's fine. I'm feeling that [LAUGHTER] Now do we want some extra contrast? I've got these dark colors over here. These are three different shades of almost like a black that I could come in or I could do more pencil work. I almost feel like maybe some contrast on these would be fun. See, these are fun because I can use the edge or I can use the little corner or I can use the whole big flat side. It's skinny flat side. There's just some options that you can do with the big blocks that are super cool. I want to go ahead and remember that I'm working on a bigger, four-piece, gigantic piece of art. I do want to see about coming off the page into the other page on some of these. Yes, I'm feeling some of this. Now we've got like some very exciting, heavy contrast that we weren't really getting before. You don't want it all to be samey-samey because then it's just flat. If you'll come in with some extra dark contrast in some places you'll really start to pull the eye around the piece, add some movement, some contrast and color. See now that's fun there. A swipe in. I like that coming in on the edge a little bit , I'm feeling that. You don't have to do it on every edge, but it is fun there. They're pulling that in a little bit. Let's see. Let's wipe our fingers off here. Let's pick the clean cloth and make it black. What do we think? Feeling like we need to tap this off and then peel the tape and see doesn't need anything else, and we can spray this with a finishing spray if we want to put, say, posca pen on top of this, we could use a finishing spray to hit this. Let me tap this off and then I'll be right back. [MUSIC] 5. Revealing & Cutting Final Pieces: [MUSIC] Before I go any further, I've tapped all of the dust off of this. If you need to blow it off really good, take it outside and blow it off. But don't suck the air in, blow it off and move your head. But before I decide if I'm going to be done here, we can add a finishing spray to these and that will help in protecting where that powder is sitting. There's really no way to permanently affix a powder. We can do it as best as we can do it, but you can always come back and if you hit it hard enough, you'll smudge it. But some options are the soft pastel fixative by Sennelier. I use this one for a lot of stuff because it's less likely to dramatically change my piece because anything you spray on top of these powders tends to change the color and if you're really adamant about these are the perfect colors, it can't change at all, don't spray a fixative on it. If you're wanting to add a layer and put stuff on top of this, you can certainly do it unfixed, but you're going to smear that powder around. You saw how we moved that charcoal around with water and anything you put on top of this, is going to smear and smudge that powder, so this would be how you could do that with the least amount of damage to that layer. We could spray a soft pastel fixative, we could spray a workable fixative on there and that will set it, make it less likely to move and be damaged. Then that could be a nice little finishing touch on there. Then you could always too spray a Krylon, final spray too. That's the final varnish, but it does say oil, acrylic, and watercolor, so I'm not sure I would use this on my final piece, but that is what I use on top of my pieces if I want to add a final varnish. I'd probably stop at the fixative on my charcoal pieces personally, just to show you what I would do there. I'm actually going to go spray my pastel fixative on this so I can give you an opinion on what it does. Maybe I'll spray it on half and not the other half and I'll be back. All right, so I sprayed the Sennelier fixative on these two and left these two as they were. You can see it's fresh, so it's not been set up for a couple days. You can see the color is very similar, so it doesn't drastically change everything. That's a good thing. [LAUGHTER] Now wondering, does it need anything else? At this point I'm probably going to peel off the tape and take a look at these and I'm going to be very careful with the ones that I did not spray the fixative on. I'll be careful peeling the tape because depending on how you peel it, you may peel some paper or not. But you're less likely to peel some paper if you will peel it at an angle from the paper. If you peel it at an angle, you're less likely to pull the paper. It just so nicely comes off. Now if you're still having trouble pulling off tape, you can hit the tape with your heat gun a little bit, and that will make your tape release the paper. Try that if you're just having all kinds of bits. But if you'll pull it at an angle, you can see very clearly I'm pulling these at an angle, not going super fast, but I'm not going super slow and it is coming right off the paper and not sticking to my tape at all. It tends to be how I get these to come off so let's be very careful here. See we just peel that right off without it snagging and tearing the paper. We're going to pull charcoal as we're doing this. I'm going to be real careful, I don't want charcoal all over my white edges, but [NOISE] it is the nature of the beast, so I'm just trying to be very careful not to press it in with my fingers, for instance, [LAUGHTER] and just see. [NOISE] Can I get some of that off of there? I can maybe even use, and we'll try this out, I can maybe even use my little kneaded eraser if I needed to get some of the dust that we've just created and I've got my towels over here, so before I get this really smudged down into my papers, let's tap all the dust off that we can. [NOISE] I might blow it once at the end, like I just did. [LAUGHTER] These are turning out fantastic. [NOISE] One little boy with the end, I love these colors. [NOISE] A lot of these. [NOISE] We'll put that away. Then we can see I've got a little bit of charcoal dust on the edge of this piece, and I'll make sure I don't have any charcoal on my fingers. Let's just see, practice, experiment if our kneaded eraser will erase dust off of the edge. My goodness, yes, it does. [LAUGHTER] Look at that. If you get a little dust on your pages, be real careful and use your kneaded eraser. This is that one that is all rubbery. You can clean that edge up. Which I was hoping we could because it's basically a pencil. I got this one. My goodness, let's take a look at these. [LAUGHTER] My goodness. I don't know how we liken it? Do we like it? I like it with the stuff at the top, I think. [LAUGHTER] See, look at that one. This one, I feel like is a roadway and that was a car that did something funky because I feel like there's the road. [LAUGHTER] But I'm liking it that way there. I'm liking these all up. Look at that. I see, now I like it this way. [LAUGHTER] Look how gorgeous these are. Now, I always said I like three normally and I think these are the three that I love. This is the one that I'm like, huh. Maybe it needs more, maybe the composition is off. I always end up with one that I'm like, this one could be cut up into something else. Maybe if I cut it here, I have a better composition. I have something moving through the piece. I'm feeling yes to cutting this one up, so we'll take a look at that in just a second. But check out these, these are amazing. Now, you almost can't even tell which one I sprayed with the spray and which one I didn't. Sure I could touch it and that would tell me. But the fixative spray has not changed these colors to the point that it's unrecognizable so thank goodness. I actually don't want to add anything else to these three. I love those three. It really feels good to work a little bigger with my color instead of getting real tight in and getting all the color close and it being a little chaotic. This just feels like a nice breath of fresh air spreading that out. I'm loving those. Let's take this one. I'm going to set these up behind my table for a moment. [LAUGHTER] I love those. [LAUGHTER] I love doing my experiments with you guys. It just aids in my own art practice. I'm doing stuff now that I wouldn't be doing if I weren't sitting here chatting with you guys. I really love that we do these. It helps me expand whatever we're doing. I expand my own art practice. Let's see. I'm really loving that. Let's just take a look at these. That right there is actually really beautiful. If I cut out that one there, is there anything on this side that would be a match? Not really. This side is what's not exciting to me at all. If I cut it out more like this, I'm looking up in the camera so I can see it from a little further away. Is this a better composition? See, I'm feeling that right there. I feel like if I chop it down a little bit, my composition is way better. I feel right here in the middle of that circle. Because I've now chopped off the edge of that one, let's just chop all the edges off. Let this one be one that doesn't have those white edges or, did I get that off good, I could mount this to another piece of paper if I'm determined to have those edges and create new edges. I got to be real careful here not to smear charcoal all over because remember this is a powder and I don't want to put my fingerprints on it. See, totally looks better now. [LAUGHTER] That's what it needed. Sometimes you just need to crop a little out to pull the composition together, see how that was like, I don't know, it's not quite right and now it's perfect. Exactly what I wanted. Sometimes you just got to cut off a little tiny bit to make that composition perfect. [LAUGHTER] Don't be afraid to trim pieces down if they're working, but you're like, it's almost there but not quite, what can I do? Look at other compositions, cut yourself out a little viewfinder out of a piece of paper. Or just visually hold off some areas with another piece of paper and see, what can I do to make that better? Because that right there, look how cool that is now. Totally was not my favorite. But now that I have cut off the part that was throwing it for me, totally brought it all together. I'm loving that. Now this right here, we can keep that. It can be a collage element, it can be something other that we cut up and make it into some other type of art so I'd keep all my little scraps and we'll go for it. Here we go. Our intuitive charcoal abstracts. Hope you loved doing this project. I really love repeating one element of a project like taping four pieces of paper down. I want to do a whole series of these intuitive classes because I get such joy pulling the tape, looking at elements and things that I wouldn't normally have created. Definitely playing in a color palette that I'm like, my goodness, I love this and didn't even know I would. It's gold, and orange, and purple basically. But look how amazing it is. We discover all these new things and techniques. I love doing little force them because there's always going to be three I love and one that I'm like, what the heck, I hate this one. Then we cut it up and we're like, okay, now I love it. [LAUGHTER] You can do this with any of your supplies. I don't want to do a whole series. That lets me experiment with different art supplies and different techniques and we talk about different things and so I love these. I hope you love these as much as I do and I can't wait to see what you do with your charcoal. Pull out your charcoal, the Derwent extra large blocks and the colored pencils. The charcoal colored pencils are definitely my favorite. These extra large blocks, love them, so pull those out and see, what can you create? Yeah, your colors are probably going to be similar to mine because the blocks are just six colors, but who cares? They're cool and you're going to love them. I can't wait to see what you create. Definitely come back and share those with me and I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 6. Finishing & Storing Pieces: [MUSIC] Let's talk about storing these and finishing these. I talked about using in the middle of our project some fixative to fix that pastel down. That's the best way to secure it and, the test I did, the color didn't change at all once it dried. I was really happy to see that on these charcoals, that worked really good on this paper. Paper is going to make a big difference depending on the paper that you use. I would do a little test page, go out and spray it and see if you like it. But I would recommend a soft pastel fixative and I'm using this a Sennelier. I can also use something like the Krylon working with fixative, which lets you keep working on top of things also and I finished it that way. To store these until you do something with it, I would use some type of wax paper or deli paper. I have these deli paper sheets that came from a big box store. It's just a box of them. But if I'm going to store these on top of each other, I would stack these in-between sheets of deli paper to protect them so that they're not rubbing up against each other or anything else and getting this charcoal dust on anything. I just wanted to give you some ideas on finishing and storing and then if I were to frame these, say to sell, I'd probably float frame. If I left a pretty border and it was clean, I might float frame these or I would mat it in under glass. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 7. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] How much fun is charcoal? I'm telling you, I didn't even know charcoal was this fun. Getting these blocks and pencils and just have enough stored in my art room for a long time now, I've had these for a long time and I never really used them and now I'm in this intuitive painting phase and so I'm going to do lots [LAUGHTER] of these intuitive classes because it allows me to pull out supplies that I'm like, why do I have this? When did I get this? Where did this come from? I totally forgot it was here and dig through my drawers and be like, let's play with this. I don't even remember what this was. [LAUGHTER] It allows me to pull these things out and paint something just for what feels good, what colors feel good, what marks feel good. Let's work big. Let's not go so tight and chaotic and I discover new things about myself and my own art-making. I love doing this journey with you. I hope you love experimenting and playing and giving yourself permission to come up to your art room and explore the things that you have and see how can you push them further? Could you add water to charcoal? Could you make on top of that? Do you need to finish it? How would you store it? All these fun things that you're learning and discovering about yourself lead you to some things later that help you develop your style. Your style is just a series of decisions that you've made in all of this play for the things that you love and you want to continue doing going forward. Sooner or later, you're going to be like, I know exactly what I want to make. I know exactly the colors and the materials, and these are the marks I like and you get very deliberate. I'm not at the delivery stage and I didn't do an art for most of my life, and I still like the exploring, the playing. I think that's why I like making workshops so much because it allows me to continue that play, that experimenting, that joy that you get back to your five-year-old self. You watch a child make art and they're not worried about color and composition and what things they're doing. They're just having fun and mark-making and they're playing on the paper and they hold it up and they're proud of it. That's what I love about art making. That's what I love about the intuitive painting that we're doing now. Taping down several pieces, just going with the flow and moving from piece to piece altogether like it were a big piece and then pulling the tape apart and seeing what we get. I'm like super proud like a kid. Look at these that we've made today. I'm like I love these. [LAUGHTER]. I hope you love the pieces that you're going to make in class with me today. I hope you have fun exploring charcoal and what it can do and the way you can push it. If you've never used charcoal before, these are so much fun given charcoal. [LAUGHTER] Can't wait to see what you're creating so come back and share those with me and I'll see you next time. [MUSIC]