Repurpose Old Acrylic Art into an Abstract Floral

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Tara Finley an artist and art instructor living in the wilds of Maine. When I'm not enjoying everything that my beautiful state has to offer, I am sure to be found inside or out of creating art. I got started making my own handmade jewelry and that developed into a wide variety of media including glass, resin, painted rocks, mosaic, ocean themed art, acrylic painting and more. In fact, it would probably be easier for me to tell you what I don't do then it would be for me to tell you everything that I do. One of the things that I enjoy the most, is teaching art. I love to help people uncover their artistic abilities and to understand that all they really need to be an artist is to understand the concepts and to apply those concepts through practice. In this class, we'll be taking a background like this blue one and turning it into a colorful, vibrant folk art piece like this. You can do this on any artistic level. You don't have any experience at all, but even experienced artists will find interesting things to take away from this class. I hope you'll join me. Let's get started. 2. Class Project: I wanted to talk about the class project. This is the original painting that I based the class off of. This painting was born out of a abstract painting that I didn't like. You can see that peeking through here on the flowers and the leaves. What we're going to do is transform that painting into something new. Here's what it looked like before I painted that red on top. Choosing a background. The inspiration for this class was to use up all the extra unfinished painting she might have laying around if you're anything like me and I have some examples here. But if you don't have any, don't worry, I'm going to teach you how to do that same blue background. Original painting was done on Canvas paper, this is really not paper, it's actual fabric Canvas like a stretched Canvas would have. This Canvas paper, this particular one in my hand, is the one I cleaned my breyer off of when I do print making. This type of recycling, if you will, of paint, is a thing that I love to do. I hate to waste paint, especially in these troubled times when money is tight, and so I try to take advantage of any extra paint that I might have. I roll it or brush it onto a piece of paper, onto a piece of Canvas paper into my journal. This painting is entirely done just with paint that was left on various palettes. I just added it to this page every time, same with this one, keep that in mind. I might watch the class all the way through so that you can look at how it's done and then go through, if you've got a pile of paintings like I do. Here is just some random abstract paintings. This is a painting that I was going to start out with some collage and I just abandoned it, I wasn't feeling it anymore. This is another background I did on a Canvas board with some textured modeling paste, I have this floral that I abandoned. This would definitely need the mark making that we're going to do. You could potentially paint directly on something like this without painting up background like the blue background, same with this because it's got stuff going on. But what you're going to have to decide is what colors are going to work best. If your painting is predominantly yellow, you might want to look at some blue or violet because those are across on color wheel. Here's another abandoned background that I had. I would just say that one thing to consider as you're working on this is depending on what color you decide to place on top, that is, you'll want to be sure that the top color, which is going to become the back ground, because the color that's on the painting currently will become the center of the flowers and leaves. You want to be sure that that top color isn't exactly the same as a color that's underneath it. If I had used my original blue background, I would never choose that same blue or any other blue close to it to be my main color later on, because it would just be too hard to see what are the flowers and what is the background. If we're looking at this, again, this might be hard to understand if you're used to a traditional way of painting, but the blue was there first, and all of the stuff that you see on top, these little leaves, these smaller flowers, and the marks on around the edge of the blue, those all were put on later. The blue existed first. What you want to think about in a painting like this. If you were going to say, use magenta as your top color or even a warm yellow like this, this area would get lost, so you may need to put more marks here or paint over. If I was going to use this color to go on top of this, which would look great, I might paint over this color with some of this, or with some of this magenta so that there's no confusion later about what does the foreground and what is the background. Your project is either to take an old or abandoned painting and paint on top of it or you can use any surface you like and paint the blue background which I use, and I'm going to teach you exactly how to do, so this is blue background. You can use the same color scheme as me and the same layout, whatever you want. Don't forget to post your project in the class projects. Also, I'm going to show you a bonus video where I design the entire painting in procreate. If you have an iPad and procreate, you might want to play in your painting out ahead of time, so you might want to skip to that video first and do that design and then come back and meet me at the supplies video. Coming up next, we'll look at the supplies you need to make the blue background if you need it. 3. Supplies: The supplies you'll need for this class include various colors of acrylic paint. If you want to make the same background that I did, you'll want some ultramarine blue paint and some titanium white. To apply the paint to the canvas, I use a number of different tools. You can use a regular old flat brush. You can use any roller you might have if you have a small cabinet roller or even a printmaking Brayer, you can use old credit card or a putty knife just to get that nice variable texture. Any painting knife for work as well. If you have an old piece of art like an old acrylic pour, like this one or a landscape that you abandoned, or even a background that you had done at some previous point. You can either leave it as is or you could use the same technique that I'm going to show you in the first video to do the blue background right over top of whatever you've already done. If you're new to acrylic painting, you might want to do this first in a journal so that you can practice the techniques on a smaller or less expensive substrate like I did here before you start using your expensive watercolor paper or Bristol paper or your stretched canvas. We'll be using some mark making tools during this class. I've got some pictured here,. Starting in the upper left, I have an assortment of pencils, including wax pencils, then in the upper right there are the neocolor II water-soluble wax crayons. In the lower left, I have some color pencils, including watercolor pencils. We have some acrylic ink and also fluid acrylic paint, such as Golden Fluid Acrylics or even the FolkArt Multi-Surface craft paint. These can easily make marks on your surface using a very fine brush or a liner brush, which is my favorite. Here's my script liner brush. I got to say a Hobby Lobby. It's the master's touch. You just need to wet your paint down with some water to make it more of the consistency of ink and then you can see I can get variable width marks with this paintbrush. Join me in the next video where we'll create this blue background. 4. Making the Blue Background: All right. Let's make the blue background. You can start a painting with any number of tools, and I'm going to demonstrate all the ones that I have. You don't need to have all these, you can use one or any combination. This is just a square brush, a couple of rollers, a putty knife, an icing spatula, which is now my painting knife, and a plastic palette knife from the Dollar Store. Over on the right, I have my glass palette, and this is my ultramarine blue acrylic paint. But since I'm going to use two colors. No, I could just work right out of this jar. I want three values of blue above. One is going to be the blue straight out of the jar. One is going to be a mid-value mixed with some titanium white or some white gesso. Then the other is going to be a lighter blue, which would just have more whiter gesso in it. I never wet my brush before I start painting. So I'm just pulling the paint off of that spatula, and putting it onto my paper. I'm working on a piece of Bristol paper that I have taped. It's a canvas board that's still in its plastic wrapper. So if I get paint on it, it won't matter because I can just take the plastic wrapper off later. This is Liquitex gesso. Again, you could just use titanium white. I'm just going to mix a little bit of these together. Value is the relative lightness or darkness of color. The paint right out of the jar is our dark value. This is still pretty dark, but I'm going to work towards a mid-value, and that I'm going to try to get a lighter value. I put a little bit more just so in there, and I'm just going in with a brush and getting up against that painter's tape. I have holding the paper down. I'm trying not to think about this. I have one objective here, and that objective is to cover this entire substrate. Whatever it is. It doesn't matter if it's paper, if it's canvas. Here's a putty knife. I just want to cover it with some random very gestural, textury background that's not too uniform, and doesn't look like I'm not trying to paint a sky. I don't want to pay anything recognizable, I just want to cover the surface. This can be quite fun, and something that is you don't have to think, it can be meditative. I just want to get that paint down. I like scraping tools for adding paint such as the palette knife or the putty knife. But I love painting with a Breyer. Breyers are great for just getting some great texture, and applying the paint quickly which I like. This is a cabinet roller, like you would just use from the hardware store to paint a kitchen cabinets. You can get some interesting pattern from this. You just want to be sure you don't have the pattern be too matchy-matchy. I am going to try not to mix this paint on the paper too much. When you work quite into wet, you might end up with just the solid swath of color, because you're effectively mixing your white and your blue so much that you just get this mid-tone. So I'm going to come in straight on the paper with some gesso, and just get me some of those brush strokes that I'm looking for. I just want to get some interests in there, and not have everything just be one big swath of blue. Let this dry and come back. In the next video, we will start doing mark making and see what that can do for us to give us a jumping off point, and to add interest and excitement. It's not required, but it's fun. 5. Making Marks to Add Interest: My background is dry and now it's time to make some marks because they give me something to work with, like a jumping off point. I'm using the Caran D'Arch Neocolor II water soluble artist crayons, if you don't have these, it's okay, I have other tools that I'll demo. You can always use anything that you have, this is not a precise process. This mark-making is just something to help you loosen up, to get some interesting color and texture on the background. You'll notice, I've chosen some colors that will write on top of a dark blue. I'm going to use all the mark-making tools that I have, but you don't need to do that, you can use, if you just have the crayons or if you just have the colored pencils, or you could just use a thin paint brush. These color pencils are, prismacolors, artist loft watercolor pencils, and faber-castell. If your colored pencils don't write on acrylic paint, you should invest in some Liquitex Clear Gesso, you can get it at Michaels. It's clear obviously, and it has some texture to it, a little bit of grit, and it will allow the dry media like these colored pencils to really grip on. If you find this mark-making step useful, that would be a good thing to get. Here's just a China Marker, which is a wax pencil, and there's my rigor brush, also known as a script liner. When you wet it, it gets a very nice point, and artists are always trying to paint looser. Painting with this long thin bristles in my non-dominant hand, just trying to suggest maybe some grasses or some stems, not going too crazy, and I'm going to really be able to respond to those marks later. Then this is just doing some splatter painting, so the paint that I've been using for the splattering and the rigor brush is the FolkArt Multi-surface Craft Paint, it's nice and thin already, but still it's quite opaque. You could use that, or if you just have tube acrylics, you'll need to thin them down quite a bit, but you don't want them to be too thicker, the spots will be too big. You can see here I've got some nice size spots, they're not too big, and then you can see how loose that rigor brush was. Here's my thought process in these white flowers that I've superimposed, I'm looking for those shapes in those random marks that I drew. I will sometimes work from an exact composition, but I'm going to demo my composition process in another video later, just pointing out the shapes that I did see in the marks that I made. If you need a more determined composition like this one, you can certainly draw that out now, just draw it in a light colored pencil. I'm not going for these shapes that you're seeing now, but if those are the shapes that appeal to you, that's just fine. On the color wheel, I'm showing you the color palette choices that I made, so I have this ultramarine, which is a red-blue, cool blue, and across from it on the color wheel is a red orange like this, red cadmium red light or vermilion, and then also warm yellows, so any warm yellow will do. In the next video, we're going to use those colors to reveal those flower shapes, so the flowers are going to be in the blue with all those juicy marks underneath. We're going to paint around those shapes with the colors that you choose here to reveal those beautiful flowers. I'll see you in the next video. 6. Negative Painting: Now it's time to apply the color you've chosen to go on top of this blue. The point is to paint around the shapes that you've either sketched out previously or that you see revealed in the marks that you drew in the last lesson. This is sped up. I am using a flat brush, I'm using cadmium red light again, you could substitute for million. The point of this is to reveal what's interesting. I did not sketch an exact composition for this painting. I will demonstrate my composition process in a bonus video. What I did do was I looked at the marks and I looked for leaves and flowers and stems. As I'm applying my red paint, I'm going around the outside of where I see those shapes. I like to leave what I feel is interesting and cover up what I don't. This teal paint is blue-green on the color wheel and is directly across from the red orange. I want to preserve that teal color. Over here, I am trying to define where the stem will go for my flower. There is a strong white mark that I had made. I'm just trying to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. Keep in mind that at anytime you can go in with your mark making tools and adjust the placement of a mark. If I want there to be a more defined stem in this region, I can come back later with another color of neil color or colored pencil or even liner brush. I'm going to go in with a white and neil color and just reinforce where I want that stemmed shape to be because the existing one that I'm covering up right there was just a little bit too far to the right for me and I wanted it to be more centered. I'm leaving this stem shapes for the most part and these leaf shapes exposed, even though it may just be a little thin area. I'm going over and keeping that pretty little piece of teal that I like so much. It doesn't matter, this doesn't have to be any realistic flower or leaf combination. More than anything else, what I'm looking for is color harmony, pleasing shapes. I tend to mark out and leave more of the shapes in blue because I can always come back and cover them up later with more cadmium red light or adjust the shape to make them smaller or refine them a little bit. I'm just going to zip through this painting. You're always looking for balance without being too matchy too symmetrical. Trust your instincts and take your time. There's no hurry. You can plan your composition out ahead of time if you need to and draw it on there in some light colored pencil, and then you're just going around the outside of it. But if you have a little bit more experience or you're a little adventurous, you can do like I am doing and look for the shapes in the marks and feel them and they don't have to make sense. They don't have to resemble anything in real life. I'm going for a folk art style because I like simple shapes. I do more complex floral in other areas of my art, but I love a folk art style. That's what I'm going for here. Those bright colors and those simple shapes remind me of folk art embroidery or paintings that I've seen in Mexico or even Hungarian embroidery. I love that boho folk-arty look. That's what I'm going for here. I can always remove some of the shapes that I have left in blue later if they don't appeal to me. But I think I do end up leaving all of these in this painting other than maybe those stems across the bottom that look a little too batchy to me. I switch to an angle brush because it's a little bit smaller and it can be good for getting into the crux of the stems and into the smaller spaces. I'm just working right out of my jar of paint. I know that I can come back later if I accidentally paint over something that I didn't mean to like part of a stem. I can draw that on top of the cadmium red light using maybe the neil colors or I can even mix up a little bit more of that same blue background paint and paint that on top to reinforce those stems or to connect things together if I so desire. It's all a work in progress. Those marks can be leaves, flowers, stamen coming out of the flowers, anything you want. Don't forget that you may need to do a second coat on your red layer because depending on the brand of paint you're using and how thick it is, it may need a second coat. The color that you choose for your background is also going to play a part in that as I said before, that yellow is very transparent and so that's why I'm using it as an accent color. There's my original thought process and here is the finished painting. I'm going to zoom in and show you those little dots made when I spattered the paint. I feel like these shapes here need a little bit more colorful stuff added to them. They were a little too white and blue earlier, so I'm adding teal and magenta to jazz them up a bit. This little leaf is very plain. Here's some work teal. I love the way the teal looks with the cadmium red light. I did another white line there and some peach color. This is the one that I did for the class cover. You can see how I have some leaves painted on top. I even went in with other colors and obscured some of the background underneath. Let this dry and in the next video, we will be exploring marks that we can make on top of our painting. 7. Refine and Define: Let's make some marks on the surface of our paint. You can use anything that will write on the paint. My color pencils don't work on top there, and I'm just indicating some areas that I feel like stems should go. I'm going to start with my Neil color to CROWN, and while I like the color, the mark isn't strong enough. So now I'm going in with a portfolio, oil pastel, and I really like the way that looks. But I'm thinking that it would look better there if I used the ultramarine paint. I'm going to erase that one mark and fill in there with some ultramarine. This is my background color, and initially I go in with it full strength. I'm just wiping off my brush there, the handle, everything so that no drops of water fall on my painting. But the ultramarine straight out of the jar is so dark that it looks black and it doesn't match the ultramarine that is painted on top of white. I'm going to add a little bit of just so, or you could use titanium white paint to bring that blue color to a brighter. You see how much brighter that is, and it looks like it belongs there, whereas the other Marc looked out of place. So if there's any places where I went into my shape with red and I want to cover that up. I can do that with this ultramarine just o combination just so acts as a primer or like white out and it will cover up things that transparent paints may not. I'm just trying to connect some of these plants together because I'm using my liner brush, I've added a little bit of water to that just so ultramarine combination in order to help it flow more readily, and I'm just thinking how would these connects, in this is not a realistic interpretation of plants, but in a real garden. Plants are willy nilly and the stems and the leaves go every which way. I'm just trying to make the stems and the leaves tie together and look interesting, and here I'm just getting a little bit of an outline of that ultramarine in different areas on the leaves. Because I'm painting on top of dry paint. If I make a quote. I can usually wipe it off with a paper towel, dry paper towel. These flower petals and the top rate flour, some of them are around and some of them are pointee, and because all the other flowers are round in the leaves are point t, I want to make the petals round. So I'm just going to use some ultramarine and just round out that pedal with a round brush, and now they all are a little bit more cohesive, and if I feel like there needs to be a little bit more of light value in any of these flowers I can or leaves, I can just add that in. Now since I've got it on the brush, I can reinforce any stems or make them a little bit wider if I need to make this one, and I'm going to start adding yellow to some of these flowers and leaves, and I have the neo color to artists crown in it's similar in color to that warm yellow. You can dip these in water to make them even premier and have them lay down more of a line. But here's that artistic engineering perspective again. Yellow is the most transparent color that you can have. It's never going to obscure this dark blue pane. I've got that on there, but it looks weak and almost like a mistake. It doesn't belong, so I'm going to go in with a paint and I have the cad yellow medium and the dialerlyde yellow. The dialeride yellow is a little bit thicker. But because I'm trying to draw a thin line, I'm using the thinner cad yellow medium. It's not that cad yellow medium is thinner, it's that this the two brands of paint are different and they have different thicknesses. I'm using that liner brush to apply the yellow paint, and I need to do it with a light touch because I want to deposit the paint almost like a ridge. I want the paint to be dimensional because it's going to be more opaque that way. When I press harder with the brush, what happens is the brush touches the paper and leaves a thin line of transparent yellow with a ridge of yellow on either side of that thin line. Here you can see I'm being nice and light with my touch, and so I'm getting a more opaque line. Just using that yellow as a stem to connect that big flower, and then I'm going to let me dry because I need to do another layer on that VC. There's some areas that are not dark enough, so I'm going to do some splatter painting with yellow. Always try your brush handle off, otherwise you're going to end up with a lot of water everywhere, so I'm doing a splatter paint with the yellow, and then I'm going to come in and do splatter paint with that beautiful teal color. I love teal or Turquoise in red. It's used so often in southwestern jewelry. I image jewelry maker as well as the artist and the color combination as a match made in heaven. Now I've got my liner brush with that same teal on there, and first I think I'm going to put a line down the center of this leaf and then I decided I didn't like that. Again, I could just wipe it right off because my paint is all dry underneath, and instead I'll use that teal as some stems. I just adore the way the teal and the red orange make the eye vibrate. That's the beautiful thing that happens with complimentary colors. They just energize the eye. Now I'm looking for an area to put a leaf and I'm going to put it here. This leaf is going to be in that teal color on top of my red orange background. The paints that I'm using is quite thick, so it does mostly obscure the orange, but I'm going to add a second coat too. Some of it, normally I would wait until this coat dries before adding a second coat, but I was trying to get this finished for you. You could do as much embellishment on top of the orange or refine the flowers and leaves as much as you like. These outlines that I'm doing on the flowers and leaves here in orange. I'm not trying to make perfect lines, I'm not trying to exactly get right on the border with the blue and the cadmium red light. I'm just adding a very sketchy textural line just to make it look interesting and the orange that I'm using is called organic orange from a company called Nova Color Paint. They make really nice color paints and they're not very expensive, so if you haven't done acrylic painting before, you're looking for a good brand to start out with, that's not very precis, that's the one that I would recommend. I'm now using that teal again to add some stems and trying to figure out where should I go next, and there's no, the thought process here is just what pleases me. What do I feel needs to happen? What areas need something? I'm going to start doing a bunch of different things. I'm going to add some outlines of leaves and not color in the insides. Just to give a little difference like that one, and I'll add some more leaves probably that are colored in. Put a little line in there like a leaf. I'm going to do like a vain through that one, I'm going to outline in the blue and give that one a vein as well. This is the ultramarine blue I'm using. I did see if you can see that pink leaf in the center. I added that using the Kranz. So any place where I see a big blank area and I feel like I want to just put a leaf in there, and this one is a nice teal leaf and it gives that beautiful color vibration. I don't know if I showed it, but I did splatter paint on top of the cadmium red light using that seemed teal color. I love the way that splatter paint looks. Then here I'm doing a solid ultramarine mixed with white leaf down at the bottom. Using a round brush, I added a few flower shapes on top of the red using the teal paint, and how I'm doing it here is just using a round brush is a stamp. You get a good amount of paint on there and you just touch the brush down, and it makes that pedal shape very nicely. Obviously, you can use any size round brush for this that will make the size of flower that you like. I'll come back in with that lighter brush to add a stem. That stem is just going off behind that big leaf. Then these other stems, one into the crux of those two leaves, then this one I'm going to bring across this leaf, which makes it look like it's in front of that leaf, and unfortunately my camera quit working. I'm going to show you a close-up here of what I did while I was off, which is add some yellow leaves, and I went back over that yellow outline on the flower, and I added some hot pink petals going into some of the blue flowers. In the next video, I'm going to remove the tape and go in with colored pencils just to do a little bit more embellishment to the piece. See you in the next video. 8. Final Marks and Ideas: In this last step, I'm just using some of my mark making tools, the color pencils, and the neo-colors, to add a little embellishment to some of the paint that I added on top of the CAD red light. Over here, I'm using a pale green color just to give a bit of a value difference between the pink and the red. There's not enough difference in darkness or lightness of the color to make that leaf stand out. So going around just the outside, even with a little bit of a darker color, lighter color, whatever will help that to stand out a little bit more. There's nothing to say that you need to use colored pencils for this step, you could always use other paints or inks or a regular graphite pencil, or just stop without adding these extra embellishments. I just wanted to give you a good mixture of ideas. Okay, so if you are done, you can use a hairdryer to loosen your tape if you've taped your surface down so that it doesn't tear. I had originally taped this to the back of a canvas panel that I left lime the store on so that I could still use it as painting surface later. I do this all the time. This allows me to work on several pieces at once and gives me a way, move them around and stabilize them. I really like the way this turned out. I'll probably mat and frame it. If you don't like the way your piece turned out, don't worry. You can always use some mat board if you have it, or just cut some card and tried to isolate a composition within the greater peace that you actually like that map that I was just using his obviously too big, but this one's a five by seven look at portrait, which is up and down. Look at it landscape which is side to side. You might be able to get even a couple paintings out of one piece that you can mat and frame and then hold onto the other bits. Because I have a lot of things that you could do with leftover paintings, especially paintings that are on paper. This is my wall hanging and this is the first painting of this type that I ever did. And it was the inspiration for this class. It's done on canvas paper, which is really just canvas fabric. The same exact stuff that's put on the stretcher bars to make a stretched canvas just sewed on one side and it comes in a pad and I got it from Michael's, I think it's artist loft. I had done a blue abstract painting on it and I just it was too boring, it was plain and I didn't like it. So I am heavily influenced by folk art and embroidery, like autonomy and a Hungarian embroidery. That was what really prompted the color palette and the stylized flowers and leaves in the wall hanging. All I did to make this was just saw some ribbon on the top and put a piece of driftwood threw in. It is some string to hang it on my wall. If you have a piece on paper, you could probably do that as well. If you have a piece on a stretched canvas and you have enough room. You could potentially cut the canvas off of the stretcher bars and make a wall hanging like this as well. Coming up, I'm going to have a video, a bonus video for you, showing you this exact process from start to finish on my iPad and procreate. 9. Bonus - Using iPad and Procreate to Plan Composition. Wrap up.: In this bonus video, I'm going to show you how I made this digital version of the painting. I did it on my iPad Pro in procreate with the Apple pencil. I used brushes that come with procreate to create this. I found a sketchy textured brush to do the blue background and just varying values of the ultramarine type color and then I used a variety of brushes and colors to make my marks. Then just like on the regular painting, I looked at those marks and I looked for shapes within those marks that looked like flowers and leaves to me and I sketch those on another layer in white that I could see them and turn them on and off. Then I went through and I spent quite a bit of time very purposefully recreating that and adding to it much more neatly. I like that work because you can sketch in the moment and then on another layer, you can go back in and be much more deliberate and careful about having straight and neat lines. Then I went and went around those lines on another layer in the red, and I turned the outlines off so that the edges of the red would be much more loose and textured then I went in with another layer of marks on top in various colors, just like I did on the [inaudible] painting including some splatter painting and now I'm just going to grab a brush and some black color here just so I can show you how I tried to make the composition more interesting by crossing some of my stems, having my flowers pointing in different directions, and normally, I would have an odd number of objects in my painting, not an even number. I have an even number of flowers but because that flower in the middle is pointing down, it works out okay. I'm about to count those for you. It just seems to work out all right. I think if I was going to change anything, I would have the yellow outline flower number five there, slightly pointing more to the left then I probably would have had one of the little orange flowers that I did pointing in a different direction. You can see that one's pointing in the same direction as that one. I wanted to show that I have some leaves that are solid and some that are open on my top marks, and really that's it. That's the painting in procreate. If you create a painting in procreate like this, I'd love for you to post that in the project section as well as the actual painting if you do it and if you have any questions at all, be sure to post them in the comments or in the discussion, I'm happy to help you out and I really can't wait to see what you do. Thank you so much for joining me in this class and I look forward to seeing you in future classes. Have a great day.