Unleash Your Creativity: Crafting Abstract Art with Color Palettes From Your Photos

1. Introduction: Hello, everyone. I'm Denise Love. In this class, I invite you to embark on an artistic journey like no other, centered around the world of abstract art. Get ready to unlock the full potential of your imagination as we dive into the process of creating custom color palettes from our favorite photos. My hands on approach begins with selecting photos you love. These photos will serve as the foundation for crafting your very own color palettes using Photoshop, or you can simply use them to inspire your colors. You'll choose five or six colors from your photos, resulting in a unique and personalized color scheme that reflects your individuality. Once you have your colors, we'll start creating through a series of interesting projects, from expressive brush strokes to creative compositions. You'll witness the transformation of your palettes into beautiful art. Join me for this one of a kind experience and let the artistic journey begin. 2. Class Project: For your class project, I want you to pull together two or three photos that you love and curate your colors from these photos, pull together your materials and have fun painting. As a final touch, write a brief reflection on your creative journey throughout this project. Share the inspiration behind your choices and the process of crafting your custom color palettes. Remember, this project is all about embracing your individuality and expressing yourself through abstract art. Let your imagination run wild and enjoy the liberating experience of creating a color palette that resonates with your heart and your soul. Happy creating. 3. Inspiration For Color Palettes: Let's talk about what inspired this workshop and my love for color palettes in general. Years ago there was this website called Design Seeds. It's the first time that I ever saw color palettes created from photos, ever since I saw that. This is more than a decade ago that I'd seen this lady that did these is not even actively creating these anymore, but the website is still up. Her Instagram page is still up with all the palettes that she created over several years. I've always been fascinated with this concept of taking a photo which you can see already looks beautiful and harmonious and the colors flow together. Pulling colors out of that photo that I know already work together. Like I've already been attracted to that photo for one reason or another. Maybe I'd like to create art in that same color palette. That's what makes these so fun. Now I can pull a color palette. A lot of people have trouble sitting down and just pulling out colors and then creating that masterpiece because they get stuck at the color point. And I'm one of those people too. I sit down and maybe I'll pull some colors out, and I'll just start throwing stuff down on the paper. And I'm like, oh, this is terrible. What did I do? It didn't come out. I wanted it at all. And I'd be so upset now with things like this where you're pulling together a color palette that you're already finding super cool. You can get past the color part of your issue in creating and create something that is already going to be harmonious for you there. It's like you've already gotten over the biggest hurdle that a lot of us have. This was the original site that I had been looking at years ago. Design seeds, super fun to go take a look at that. Then more recently, I have been on Pinterest. If you go to, let's pull up Pinterest real quick. If you go to Pinterest and you search color palettes, then you get a hundreds of different options and things to be inspired by that people have created and that are beautiful that you could go for. People use these for a lot of reasons. They use them for help in interior design. Look how beautiful that one is, that's beautiful. You can be in for interior design, for home colors, for painting. I like to be inspired for painting and stuff. You can be inspired for things you pull together to photograph. There's so many things that you could do with that. Then more recently, I had done a photography workshop all about color, and we had created some of these lovely color palettes. Then a month or two ago, I came across these color cubes by Sarah Renee Clark. And I love these because they are right up my alley. Take a photo, have a color palette and they've got color cubes set one and set two. There are 500 color palettes to go by, and I have been working my way very slowly through the color palettes in these cubes. As a personal challenge, just as a color palette challenge to do fun things and work my way outside my comfort zone with creating a color. I love these. Then I happen to think, well, you know I do photography. Why don't I take my own photos and create some color palettes to do for some of these art challenges? And that's when I created this lovely set of my own photos and the color palettes under it. I've made a template for these color palettes that I've given you over there in your resources and downloads. And these are Photoshop templates. So you'd want to work in Photoshop or Photoshop elements if you want to create this type of thing, or you can just look at the template and create it in whatever design software you know how to use. I just think that pulling colors from photos that already have a lot of meaning for you. In my instance, ones that I created in my studio and took the time to pick interesting lenses and interesting props and interesting colors. And I created every aspect of that photo and then took the photo and then edited the photo. Then I'm like, oh yeah, this is definitely my style and what I love to look at. And I thought definitely a color palette from that might be interesting to work with in my abstract art. I just love these. You don't have to print these out. You can look at these on your computer or your ipad and you can work that way. I've done that several times and you can match colors just fine. You can print these out. On a home printer, I had these printed at because they're nice heavy card stock postcard sized pieces that I could print a different picture on the front of every one of these. On the back side, I just put a logo because you can only customize the front side. And the backside is going to be the same thing on all 25. But I thought, how beautiful would these be? Because I like my color cube ones that I can hold in my hand. I would love to be able to hold these in my hand and revisit them over and over. But you could also print these on your color printer after you get some of these together, or you can just use your own photos. This is a calendar that I made of some of my photographs two years ago. You could just look at some of your own photos and say, well, here's something that I really love the colors in. Let me just match colors out of that. Like save this one, for instance. Let's take a look at what I might do to match colors before we get started in our workshop. And I told you in the supplies that I was working with, the Kuretake water colors and the neo color, two pastel crayons. If I'm working with, say, one of these color cards, let's work with this one. For instance, I'm going to look here through my colors and pull together paint colors that are as close as I can get it. It might not be completely perfect, but it's going to be very close. We'll just see what can we create. My goal isn't to be 100% on these. My goal is to work within a color palette to get very close. It doesn't have to be exact, exact. If color mixing is your goal, then you might color mix these to get exact exact. But I'm trying to get very close. Just so I'm working within an inspired palette. Even if I'm a shade off here or there, I'm still within an inspired palette. Look how easy that was to come up with those five colors. A light lavender, a dark green, a black and a gray. I mean, that was fairly simple. If you had enough colors like this little kura, Taki ones that you could match that and not have a big issue. Now, if we did the same thing, but say with a photo rather than one where I've already pulled the colors out for us that I might want to work in. Now I just want to use a photo. Now I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, okay, what colors can I see in here? I can see a beautiful lavender. Maybe this color here. Let me get a little palette knife. Sometimes I can't get these out with my finger, but maybe we'll pull this out for these colors in here. I can also see a pretty brown in there. So I can either go with like an umber or ape, like I might even say that. And this lighter tope could be in there. Or this color right here is this topi shade that fits right there. I could say at this point, is three colors enough? Do I need another color? Do I need a dark color? Do I want this charcoal black that's out here? Maybe I do. Then what else do we have in there? We have a really white light, whatever this is. And I could either pull out like a white or like a shimmery white to be that fifth color. And then I could say, okay, here's the colors that I'm going to work with out of this photo. I don't want you to feel like if you don't have your Photoshop skills or you don't want to go and make a palette from the palette template. You can pull colors from the photo and still use some of your favorite photos as your color inspiration. You can do this with photos that you find online. If there's any photos that you happen to find online that you're like, wow, this is beautiful. And I'd love to use this in my art and be inspired by the colors in that photo. Magazine, pictures, pictures online. Something you find on my goal when I'm looking at stuff like that is not to copy somebody else's photo or their piece of art. I'm just being inspired by their color palette. So I feel totally comfortable looking at a photo and say, ooh, let me work with these colors and pull those colors out of that photo. So I want you to get creative here. And this is just kind of my little inspiration, telling you how I came about working with colors in my photos and some ideas that you might try yourself. So I hope you enjoy playing in this workshop. So let's get started. 4. Using Template For Palettes: In this video, let me show you how to use the color palette template that I've given you over there in your projects and resources. This is just a PSD Photoshop template, and you can use it in Photoshop, and you can use it in Photoshop elements. You don't have to use the template at all if you just want to pull colors from a photo that you have printed. But I like doing these little templates and printing them out and then being able to show them on camera and refer back to them. I just like the I'm going to show you how it is that we create one of these very easily right now. We've got a bunch of gray boxes on here and each of the gray boxes are going to represent something that I'm adding to this template. The first one is the large gray box at top. I've just started with a file that's about 2000. By 2000, I think it's just a square file. And I've taken my Select tool just to give you a, for instance on how I might have done this if we turn that off, if I just go ahead and select the size that I want to represent the photograph, I can add a new layer then with my paint bucket. Just fill that in and then de select your little marching ants that are going around there. That's how I created that gray box. Then underneath that, I just created 1 gray box. And I made a copy of that box six times and spread it out equally here on my template. The reason why I like having that gray box there is because now I can drag a photo in, whatever photo that I'd like to use. I can size it out to the size of that box. Then I can leave it like that if I want the photo to go edge to edge or I can right click that layer and create a clipping mask. Now I have put that photo within that gray box and it looks so nice and neat and clean. Then I'm going to select that first gray box here. I'm going to choose my color box down here in the lower left. And I'm going to start picking colors. Now from this photo, it's very light, neutrally, I'm looking for a range of lights to dark. So keep that in mind as you're picking. Then I'll pick a color, pick my paint can and I'll fill that in. Then I'll come over here and pick the next layer. Pick that color box again. Maybe I'll look for a deeper tone of that. Somewhere in here, somewhere in the shadows. And then with my paint bucket, fill that in. And then pick the next layer up. Pick my color picker box. Maybe I want to get away from the rosiness now, the pinky, orange, salmony colors, and move into another direction. Here I've picked out a pretty tope look at that. That's, and then we'll pick that fourth line. Pick our color picker again. Now, I could go lighter or I could go darker, or I could go towards the blue or I could go towards this yellow. Oh, the yellow is pretty. Look at that. Let's go with that one. Bill that. Oh, pretty. Pretty then I'm just going to do that until I get five or six colors selected. You can do five colors, just delete a box and stretch those out, but I like having six options. And then when I'm creating, who look at that green, I got out of the middle of that. Then when I'm creating, I have choices. And I might choose to leave one of these colors out and go with five of them, or I could go with four of them, or I could go with three of them. But I like having those choices and I think it's fun to have it in a format like this that I can then send to the printers. And the printer that I used was M 0 0. And what I liked about them, and I think it's just like Moo.com probably. But what I liked about them is they have this option where you can print a different photo on the front of every postcard or business card or whatever item it is that you've picked. And I picked postcards, square postcards, and you can pick a different picture for the front of every postcard. And then the back side, you would simply pick like your name or a logo. I put a logo on the back of mine. And one side, everything has to be the same. Pick a logo. And then on the other side, every single picture can be different. And then you have a set of like postcard sized color palette cards that you can hold in your hand and work with over and over. So I really love how easy that that is to do. The other option you can do is just print these out on your home printer and then you can print them on a nice thicker paper and cut those up into squares. And then you've got your own set of cards that you created at home. So these are super fun. I hope you enjoy creating some of these from some of your favorite photos. I can't wait to see what some of your custom palettes look like and I'll see you back in class. 5. Supplies: Let's talk about your supplies for your class. What I want you to do is to start looking through your photos and coming up with some of your own photos that you can create color palettes from. And you can create palettes like I've created and print them out. On your home printer, I had these printed at. This is a square postcard on the front. What move does is they will print a different print on every single postcard. This is a really fun way to get, say, 25 or 50 of your own photos as color palette cards. Which I love because I'm really inspired by the color cube color palettes which I use a lot of. This is the Color cube in the Color cube by Sarah Renee Clark. She's got volume one. In volume two, you have wonderful color palette cards that you can hold in your hand and use to be inspired and paint with and create things with. I love this design seeds is also like the very first thing I ever came across that had color palettes like these from photos that that lady did in her job. And she created color palettes from them. And you can search color palettes on Pinterest and come up with thousands of these where people come up with a color pallet from photos. But what I really like about this making your own, from your own photos, is now you're making color pallets that are customized to your preferences and the things that you love. Like this one here, it's one of my favorite photos. The pieces that we paint in class from this photo are so gorgeous. The pieces that we paint from this photo, super gorgeous. Also, this photo I used also in class, totally gorgeous. And these are not colors that I tend to pull out when I, when I photograph. My photography is dark and moody and I figured that out after years and years and years of photographing things. My painting tends to be like blue and green, blue and orange or blue, green or pink and orange. Those color palettes like that. I don't get as adventurous pulling colors out because you just get paralyzed looking at all the colors. And you're like, well, I want to pick the wrong colors. I don't want to pull things that don't match. If you pull something like this, 456 colors out of, say, a photo that you love and create a custom color palette for yourself. Now you're like, okay, let's pull these six colors in whatever materials I happen to have here in my art room. We will go from there. That's what we're doing in class. I've given you all of these palettes that are mine, that I created as a PDF in the projects and resources. You can download that. I think you'll have to be on a computer to see that page. You can download the PDF and you can work right along with me with my color palettes. If you want, then I want you to eventually pull your own photos and pick some colors. And you don't have to use the palette template that I give you. Also under the project and resources, you can just look at a photo and say, okay, I'm going to pull a dark pink, I'm going to pull a light pink. I'm going to pull this dark color in the shadow. I'm going to pull maybe this little yellow coming at the tip of the roses. You can just look at the photo and pull a palette together. I'd just like to be able to have something to hold and look at and refer back to later if I really loved it. Because now I could just pull this out over and over and do it again if I wanted. I like having these to hold and work with. Printed these at 0 has the most lovely options. And they'll print something different on the front of all your cards. So you'll have a PDF of this that you can print on regular printer paper if you want to follow along. And then you can create some of those for yourself. I tried to limit my colors for each painting that we're doing, but also tried this class to limit the supplies instead of being all over the board with everything that I own, throwing the kitchen sink at every piece, doing true mixed media stuff, I'm doing mixed media, but I want to limit that to some things so it's not so overwhelming. I'm working in watercolor for the bottom layers, I'm using the Cura Taki. This is the 48 piece set, and this is the art nouveau set. And I do pull from both color palettes because this tends to be so close to the colors that I like to use in my palettes that it was so easy to be like. Okay, this looks like yellow ochre, and this looks like this dark pink, and this looks like the black. And this looks the top, whatever it is, it was so easy to pull these without having to think on top of everything else. Let me mix all my colors from scratch. I'm using these. I'm obsessed with the set of water colors. I love them. I've been using them all year and they're. Favorite. I'm also today painting on fluid, 100 cold press watercolor paper. It is 100% cotton paper, which I love to paint on cotton paper is nice because it allows you a little more working time with your paints, whereas the cellulose papers that paint soaks in and dries a little faster. I like the 100% cotton because it's beautiful paper to work on. And I'm working on the six by eight sheets and eight by eight sheets in class today. I also using my Karen Neocolor two crowns. And I do have a big set, but I use these a lot. And these are perfect for color palette challenges because you have enough colors that you'd be able to pull two, or three, or four from this set to do your color palette challenges with. I'm obsessed with colors and color palettes and I have been, even in my photography days, I love things that revolve around color. The color palette challenges have been a really fun, active project to do every day that I've enjoyed doing. These come in super handy. You can just get away with a couple of these if you wanted to pick a few of your favorite colors. Maybe white and black, and you're probably good to go. That's what I'm using mostly in class. I also pull out some white acrylic paint. I've also pulled out iridescent gold, fine golden heavy bodied paint. And I use those with some stencils. I've used the Cubist stencil by the crafters workshop, corrugated cardboard by stencil girl. The paint brush I'm using throughout class is a number four Princeton Neptune quill. I pulled out a couple of Posca pens to use and I've been using a 14 B pit graphite matt pencil by fiber castel. You can use whatever mark making things that you're wanting to use, but that's where I have limited my supplies for class. I've got some painters tape that I'm using to tape down my pieces. I'm taping those down to an artist panel. I always have people ask me what this is that I tape things down to. This is an artist panel that you can get at the art store. And those are really nice because then I can move it off my table as it's drying and work on other things that of the supplies that I've used in class. If I spring something on you that I forgot about, I apologize. But I'm trying to limit it down to this for the projects today. All right. So let's get started. 6. Ranunculus Color Palette: I thought we'd start this first project with the cards that I had printed. I've given you all of my printed cards in a PDF. In your projects and resources. If you want to download that and follow along, exactly, you can. But these are the photos that I've pulled out of my own collection and pull color palettes from most of these. I've done like five colors that I've pulled just because I thought they were beautiful. I think for this first project, I want to work with this first palette here because I've always loved the ranunculus, the blue background, the pretty yellows in the vase. It's right up my alley for colors that I want to create with. But I've given you 25 color palettes that I created. Then I actually printed these at 0, which is a really great high quality printer. They have a printing type where you can get a different photo on the front of every item that you print. Say like postcards, I believe this is like a square postcard. Business cards, you name it. Whatever they print, they have an option where you can get a different item on the front of every. Now what I've given you in the PDFs over there in the projects and resources is some that you can print on your home printer. The PDF pages, a whole letter size page, print them on your printer. You can follow around along with the paintings if you want with the colors that I picked. Or you can create your own color palettes and then be creative with the colors that are custom to you. Then there's one duplicate in there, but it's not really a duplicate. I loved all the colors in these pigments so much that I picked two different color palettes out of it. I love that. But I'm going to start with this painting using the Ranunculus one. I love the dark charcoal color, this pretty gray, blue ocher, this dusty pink, then this beautiful rust color. I'm going to create a little set of abstracts with this color palette for this project. I think that's fun. These are super unique. They come in their own little package and I can pull them out of there or keep them pretty. I absolutely love having you can print them on your home printer and cut them out of a nice paper if you've got that. Going to be working on fluid, 100 coal press watercolor paper because I had a pad of it over here beside me. Use whatever watercolor paper you have on hand to do your projects or whatever paper you like with whatever materials that you want to use. I've just taped two sheets down, watercolor with artist tape. And I'm going to pick some colors out of our palette and I'll be right back. All right. I've pulled out some water color. I'm working in my Cura Taki water colors. I have the 48 Pi set, I have the art nouveau set. And I've pulled some colors out of each of these. Because this collection has such a wide variety of colors, I can work within a color palette and get very close. My goal is not to be exact, exact, but look how close that looks. I think I did pretty darn good. My goal is to work within a color palette. To use colors that I wouldn't normally put together maybe. And just try to work with that I'm a shade or two off of a color in that palette. That's fine. I don't mind that. I'm still working within, say, a charcoal, a gray blue, an oak, or a pink and a rust. I'm still in that color palette. It doesn't bother me if it's a shade or two lighter or it's close, but it's not exact. My goal is to play experiment within a palette and just be creative. I've pulled out number 20 black number one. Number 61 grayish blue, 44 yellow ochre, 19 potters pink, and number 43 venetian red. Then I've also pulled out some neo color to crayons just to make marks with. I've got the plocani blue and it's a metallic bluish color. I've also got English Red ochre. Then I've pulled out some graphite because this color here looks like graphite to me. I've got white and black Posca pen over here. I could also pull out anything white, black, gold or silver. I consider neutrals. I do feel like I'm going to be maybe pulling some gold out to do some stenciling on top. Perhaps I might do marks on top. Who knows? I'm just brainstorming with you here, giving you ideas and just seeing what can we create. I like a little abstracts where it's colors and it's like a color sampler and a mark making sampler. I'm going to put this to the side, going to get a little bit of water here. And wet down my abstract, my abstracts, wet down my water color. And let those be activating. I've got my Princeton Quill number four brush. I like using this for things where we're just starting laying down colors. Usually what I'll do is work within the colors that I really like and then move on to the colors that I'm less excited about just to see where are we going to get. If I don't like the colors, don't use that color as the biggest splotch. And I laugh because you don't know how many times. I've just gone down the road and thought, oh, I did not like that color. Why did I start with that? Now I say pick the color that you like, Start with that and then we can move around from there. I'm not thinking composition very hard at this point, but I've done quite a few of these where I start off with colors and I'm just moving around and I'm letting them blend and I'm butting them up to next to each other. Takis work a little different than traditional water colors that we're used to in the West. And I really love that about the cuties. They're a different binder, they're a little more pigmented. They dry matt. They just give you a different look. It's almost like a guash feel. That's what I love about these. I'm just tipping color in. Generally, I start on the diagonal. I don't lay it like flat right there in the middle, but I laying the first color on the diagonal. And anywhere I put a color once, I'm probably going to put a color in there a second time so that it's not lonely by itself basically. It's not just laid in one area. Then we might come back on here and add more color. We might use something very tiny and sparsely because you're like, oh, I'm trying to work within this color palette, but maybe I don't love this color that I got to start with. Maybe it's not my favorite. Like the black is your least favorite use, that the least amount. If the rust is your least favorite use, that the least amount always work on more than one piece. Because one piece is always like, the other piece is always like, oh my gosh, this is amazing and this is my amazing. So far I want you to have the experience of enjoying your art. I don't want you to get stuck on, oh, that one didn't turn out. This was a terrible paint day and didn't do what I wanted. And I'm so upset with my art. Whereas if you create more than 11 can be the dud, and the other one can be like, wow, look what I created today. And you can get very excited about it. I don't know. For me that tends to get me past my hang ups that I generally have when I'm creating, when stuff is not working out. If I have more than one, something works out. This is just my pit graphite, matt pencil and a 14 B. What if we just come in here and make some marks while the water color is wet? I want you to start experimenting with your supplies. It's just paint. It's just paper. I don't want you to get hung up on. Oh, I don't want to ruin it. Oh, I don't know about this. I'm scared. I don't know where to go from here. I want you to just start creating for the fun of it and seeing what would happen if I did this or if I did that. I want you to start having some fun and playing and figuring a few of these things out. And I'm just going to mark over here because I like it. It's dry, it'll let me go ahead and get some fun mark making in here. I already love it. This is the good one. But you know what? When we're dry and done, the other one could be the good one. It's funny what you like as you're working versus what you like when you're done. Don't judge it yet. I am judging it though, because that is amazing. I think we're going to have to let that dry a little bit and just see what do we end up with once it's dry. I'm actually loving the direction of this. Let's see how we've done here with our inspiration color palette. I'm thinking that's pretty darn right on the money, especially this one right here. Definitely feeling that we hit the money on that one. Let's let this dry and then we'll see what we want to mark on top of it. We're still drying here, but one thing I want to mention before it's completely dry, this is the time to maybe dab some water down into damp areas if you want to see your water color bloom out. And get that extra texture in your piece. You want to do that before the water is completely dry, before the water color is completely dry. Because if it's completely dry, the water just sits on top. And then it'll just make a texture with a circle around it. That's fine too, if you want to reactivate that and get that texture with the circle around it. But I like to do some of it when it's damp, so that water color does its little fun blooming and gives me some different effects than I might normally get. It's just a way to texture that water color. One extra bit, I did want to mention that before it's dry, just while the paper is still shiny. Not completely sopping wet because it doesn't work but still shiny and not dry. Drop in some color to add some texture and see what that does for you. All right. I've let this almost completely dry. There's a spot or two where it's really heavy water. Rather than mop it up with a cloth, I just want that to finally settle in and dry and be a darker spot. I used this water color in the way that I use acrylic paint. I wasn't looking for very thin color washes. Like a lot of times when you're using watercolor you're looking for, that's just not the way that I generally paint with watercolor. I like the transparency, but the vibrancy that these cure talkies give me. I'm not just going for transparent watercolor in my particular collection here. But you can play and experiment and discover as you're going what it is that you are wanting to create. Your goal may be totally different than my goal. That's what I like about doing stuff like this. When I start mart making, I got 1.1 That might be the whoa, I love it. When I start mart making, I'm going to draw first on the one that is not my favorite and then start drawing marks that I loved onto my favorite. I want you to start working in pairs or triplets, 3456 pieces at a time. That you don't get mad when you're sitting here at your art table. And the one you did wasn't what you were hoping it was going to turn out to be. Okay. So I'm going to start with some neo color crayon and just start mart making and see what can I get and just play, Maybe I've got some lines. I did something similar to this on another piece and I was like, oh, I love the line. See, look at that. I do love the lines. Good one. Let's do that over here somewhere. Let's just do it right through here because we're going to layer. I don't even care if I'm right on top of the other lines that I got here. Because it's all about the layers. I like to say with photography, there was this famous quote, it's not good enough. Maybe you're not like it's not good enough. Maybe you don't have enough layers yet. That's what I like, layers. Okay, here is that was the ocher, This one is this English red. What are we thinking? We can do dots, we can do dashes, we can do lines. We can just get creative in the stuff that we want to lay on here. This is a mark making guide that I made for myself. And I want you to start collecting marks that you like, whether it be in a sketchbook or on a piece of paper that you can hang on the wall as you're working. But this is mine that I made in one of the classes. I think it was the Rolling Stones class. And it hangs on my wall and I can keep adding to it. I can make multiple sheets like this. I doesn't have to be as fancy as I did it, but it's pretty. I even love it a year later, or however long it was since I made that class. If you get stuck for ideas, refer back to the marks that you've gathered and looked at and searched. And you can get on Pinterest and Google mark making, and you can find all kinds of ideas like this. But this is a good way to get inspired when you're not sure where to go next is if you have a card like this that you can then start referring to. I just wanted to point that out before I get any further, but maybe I want to do some round circles. This is all about the play. I'm not trying to cover the whole painting with marks. That's generally not my goal, but that could be your goal. You might be a doodler. You might want to doodle or zentangle on top of your piece, and you might want to cover every inch. Looking for more of interest details, things that complement the piece. And when you stand back, maybe you can't figure out what all those elements are. But as you get closer, you're like, oh, look at the details in this and that area. That's what I'm searching for. I'm looking for the beautiful surprises that we get as we come closer and we discover parts of the painting that maybe we couldn't see from far away. On this piece versus this piece, you can put these elements on top of different colors. Like over here, I tried it on top of the yellow. Maybe over here, I try it on top of the blue. Just experimenting and going with the flow and what you're feeling and what feels good. Why you'd have fun when you're at your art table and experiment. I always start a piece not really knowing where I'm about to end up. Interesting observation with the rust. I like the rust on top of the yellow better than I like it on top of the blue. Interesting things that we discover as we're creating. Maybe I'll come in here with some big color splotches. Oh yes. Okay. I'm feeling the big color splotch, but that's why we do stuff like this to discover interesting things to take forward in our art practice. My whole creative outlook is all about discovery. Even when I make photography classes, I'm not trying to make a macro class that's a plain micro class. I'm trying to make something that's interesting, we discover new things, and we get outside our comfort zone, and we try lenses that maybe are out of the ordinary, that we wouldn't normally try all about experimenting. Every piece of art and photograph that I've ever created have come about because of a project I was interested in or a deep dive of a subject that I wanted to do. The same with these, I want to create abstracts. I like to experiment with all the different art supplies. Look how good that looks. That's my philosophy. I want to experiment and play, and test out all the things. And that's where my love of all the things that I create come from. I'm not trying to create specific things I want to create and just see where I can get like what do I get if I do this or if I do that? Different people have different ways to create and they figure out how to get there in whatever way it works best for them. Mine is experiment. You don't have to know where you're going when you start. You might be one of those that visualizes the whole project and has a plan. And when you create it, you've created what it was that you visualized. I can do that sometimes with photo projects, but in steel life get something in my mind. But with art, I like to just see where can I end up. I don't have to create specific things. I'm not creating for anybody other than myself and my enjoyment. I'm good, just seeing like where can this take me? Oh, see I like that. Let's do some more of that over here. I liked it. This is how I come up with some of my favorite pieces that I've ever created. This experimenting that I do, pieces I have framed in my house or I use as examples and things. This is how those come about, all right? I'm really loving where this is going. Feeling a little bit like I could use some white dots in here. Let's get our Posca pen out where we want to do this. Do we want it? I like picking where the colors transition into something else. I like to pick those areas to doodle and do dots in and stuff because it gives your eyes a line of where to stop and start the dots. Like you didn't have to do the whole piece. You had like a little area that was controlled. I love that. That was super fun right there. It doesn't have to be everywhere. It could just be strategically something here and there where it gives that a little bit of whimsy. That's what I'm looking for, the lovely whimsy that we get in pieces. Then at some point, you might think, is it done? I don't know, do I need more? Maybe not. I can't decide. If you get to the point where you're like stuck, put these to the side for a while, live with them, and then later as you have more skills or you learn new things, you're going to be thinking, oh, here's what that needs. And you'll start to see that you're progressing in the things that you like and you don't like. Then what you thought was finished might then sometime need some extra little yumminess to go with it. I actually do think these are finished now that I've sat here and looked at it as I'm chatting with you. I actually love these. I do love this even more than I thought I would. I thought this was going to be my dud. But if you're unsure and you're like, okay, I don't know where to go next, but I don't know that it's finished. I want you to set these to the side, hang them on your wall, live with them for a little while. One day you'll go, this is what that needs or that really is finished or whatever it is that you happen to come up with. This artist tape, I really love because it peels off without tearing my paper. You can get artist tape on Amazon. This is Blik's artist tape from the Blick art store. So you can look at your art stores for artist tape. I also use painter's tape, but this is just coming right off without tearing my paper, which is always a plus. Okay? I'm not actually really digging these. I'm actually loving this one, even more than that one. How awesome is that? Let me tell you how I come up with my best piece of art. Pick a color palette, limit your supplies, and then let's just see what we can create. Because these palettes were made from my photography, which is another form of my art. Look at that. These are amazing in my color palettes because my photography is usually a little bit darker and moodier, Not so bright and flashy. And in your eyes, this is a brighter color palette, actually, even than a lot of the moody stuff that I do on dark backgrounds. I love how that translated into a little abstract. How super cool was that, given your first palette? To try out whether you paint with my palette or you pick a palette from a photo that you created. But check out how fun this is. I had super fun painting these and I'll see you in the next project. 7. Rudbeckia Color Palette: All right. I'm going to do another little set of abstracts. I'm using that same fluid, six by eight inch pad of 100% cotton watercolor paper. I've just taken two pieces out and taped it down. I want a little bit wider border and I'm going to paint edge to edge rather than the center pieces there. I'm going to pick another one of my color palettes that I've got here. I'm digging this. It is very similar to the one that we just did, and it's got pink and ochre, but it's also got like a burgundy, a brown, and a black. Okay, that's one option. Or we could do this mostly neutrals with this yummy pink in it. That's fun. That's a fun option. Let's just look real quick at our options here like this. We've still got that. Oh, oh, look at this one. Like these greens. That orange. Oh, you know what? Let's just do it. Let's be brave. All right, that's our color palette that I'm going to do on this project. You can follow along in your PDF or you can do one of the ones that you created yourself. And I'm going to pull some a Taki paints and then paint on top of that. I could pull acrylic paints. You can pull whatever paint you got. I want you to pull from the supplies that you have. I'm going to go with these. I love this set. Look at this green four oh five green gold. Let me set this up. Before I mess that paper up, check it out. We've got this one over here. 54 green gray. I think this green gold though, is not going to be this muted color. I think it's going to be a very bright look at this green here. We've got this yummy green here, olive green. That might be like a little mix there between the green gold and the olive green. Or that could be a mix of the olive green and some white. Okay, let's put the green gold back. Green gold is very bright. Let's just test it. And I can see for sure see it's more yellow. If we go with this one, that's definitely, you can do this, you can have a little sample sheet. Okay, that's definitely darker. All right. I like that. Now we're looking for that pop of orange is like a true orange. Is that a little bit of a vintage orange that we're feeling? Oh, yeah, feeling that one right there. Picking colors are fun. All right, This is 42 Mars yellow. And then we've got like this ivory color up here. This is 16 Cro bagen. That one right there could be a charcoal. It could be the black. I've got the number 20 black. Look at that. Lose er, feeling good about that. I could also pull out the white. If I want to mix these two, I could do that. Okay, I'm feeling pretty good about our colors. I get so excited pulling the colors and limiting our palette. I'm trying to limit the supplies. For instance, as I've got my Karen Neo color, two crayons, let's just pick a few. This is what I do. Limit my color palette right up front, look at this yummy green. All right, let's pick that, limit my color palette. And then as I'm painting, I'm not so overwhelmed with all the choices. Okay, there's not really a good like all of green in these colors. But we do have lots of oranges to pick from. We can just look like, which orange are we feeling, feeling this one. Then we've got this yummy sahar, yellow. Could be that. All right. I'm loving it. We could use charcoal pencil trying to limit what I'm doing in these projects. Sometimes look at that. Okay. What are we thinking? I'm feeling pretty good about that because I tend to pull everything in the sun out when I'm doing projects. And I don't necessarily want you to feel like you got to have everything that I have. I have it because I have it. I'm pulling out stuff that I have. And that's what I want you to do. I want you to pull out stuff that you have and work with things that you already have, okay? My goal on this is to go edge to edge. I might still pull some other things out to paint with. On top of this, I am a true mixed media artist in the things that I like to paint, but I'm going to try to limit myself today to a specific set of supplies. And just see a lot of times I will start just like you just saw in a corner, but then on the other one I want to branch out. That's pretty much what I was doing here. We've got that lighter color in there. I might come back in here with some white on top. I didn't have to contaminate my colors by mixing them in a palette. I could just mix them right on top and let that white add some different things in there. I want you to start out with whatever color you're wanting this to be dominant. If you wanted the whole piece to be dominant, Orange. Start with the orange. If you want the whole piece to be dominant, green and dark, with orange accents, like I did with this one, Then leave the orange to last to the little pieces. I don't want you putting the wrong color down and then thinking, oh no, that's not what I wanted. I want you to think about this right up front. I want you to start with the color that you're feeling needs to be the most dominant, the biggest swatch of that color. Then whatever you want to be the pop. Use that one last and just see how that works for you. Look how pretty that is. Oh, I love this already. I never usually want to start right in the center because I'm thinking of composition. I want to start on the edges and build that around. That's what I'm thinking there. My little mind set in there. All right? I'm not sure that this little bit of this color, I'm not sure that's what I would really, really wanted. But I put it in there. I want you to give every color a go. Even if it's not like your favorite, just give it a go. All right? I want some black in here. When I was picking colors in my photos that I wanted to work with, say like in this color palette, I wanted to go in a range of colors for some good contrast. I wanted there to be a very dark color. I pulled a dark color out, and I wanted there to be a very light color. I looked for the lightest areas, and then I wanted there to be other colors in here as contrast. And this one even has like a slight purple shade up here that I could have pulled from. A lot of good things to think about as you're creating your color palette. Whether you do it in Photoshop or whether you just look at that photo and pull the colors that you're thinking. That's some of the things that I was thinking of. I was looking at it going, okay, where are these ranges of color that I think I'm going to want to play in? All I want more green, more white. I could come back on top with some orange. Don't forget the orange. Then I, I could come back on top with acrylic paint. If I get to this point I'm like, I need something on top of this, say white. And you know that you're not going to get the white from the white water color. We could come back with acrylic paint on top of our piece and just see like, what can we continue to create mixing up our mediums. I am feeling like maybe because the orange is disappearing into the darkness over here. That's pretty cool. Check that out. I don't know what the heck that's doing, but look at that. That's a happy accident. Wanting to maybe spread that little accident around. It's not just in a little tiny blob. Now, maybe we'll do that over here. That was very interesting. I was going, oh no, it's mixing. But then I'm like, oh, but look at it mixing, That was fun. All right, maybe I want a little more of this green. I'm not looking for white spots to stay. Okay, that's doing some fun stuff. We could also take a damp brush, while some of these colors are still damp. A little water back in here and more texture, that water color. Boom. Do some interesting stuff. You have to do it while it's Dp. Look at that texture we just created. Oh my goodness, good stuff. All right. Excited with the color palette that we've picked here. Like for reals, most of my paintings are usually bright. Most of my photography is usually a little moodier in the different ways that your art goes, depending on what you're doing. I think that's very interesting how that happens. I just threw in some white water color. Just see what it does see if I want to throw in white acrylic paint on top of that, maybe not. We'll see. All right, so we're going to let this do its little thing. We're going to let it dry and I'll be back. Okay. One thing I'm going to do before it's dry, because I turn the camera off and then I start thinking of, oh, I should do this or I should do that. Let's do some mark making in here. Before it's dry, I'm using my pit mat graphite pencil. You can use any graphite or any pencil to do that, because the goal isn't to have the mark making show up. As dramatic as moving some paint around with that mark making, hold the pencil further back. I'm not trying to be perfect and exact. I like the imperfection of the way scribbling looks. If you Url that pencil around or do it with your non dominant hand, I like seeing non perfect marks. I don't want them to be perfect and pretty. Okay, now let's let it dry. All right. We're about 85% dry. I've still got some very heavy areas near the corners. I've resisted using a heat gun because if you heat up near the edges, tape releases, and if you're working with something like watercolor, it slips under the edges. I did hit it with a heat gun a little bit, but on these really heavy areas, I just want them to dry naturally. I resisted adding to that. Now I'm thinking, what do I want to do on top? Do I want to add any white? Because I could add white in the form of some type of stenciling. I do love distensil stuff. Now, I wasn't into stencils for years and years and years, but I did have some stencils from scrapbooking days. No man, I'm obsessed with stencils, so maybe this corrugated cardboard one from stencil Girl products might be a good choice for some white marks. Let us see, I need some palette paper. Let me grab a piece of wax paper. All right. I got a little piece of wax paper here that I can use as some palette paper. I got palette paper, but it's like in a closet hiding from me at the moment. This is just Liquitex, basic titanium white. I've got some little artist sponges over here and I like the sponge to be dry and the paint to be thick. Then you get good results from stenciling. Then when I stencil stuff, I don't just use the square stencil. I come in here and use parts of the stencil and let it be a little more organic. See, that's what I needed right there. You can do lines like this with real cardboard. You can draw lines. You can get creative there. Oh yeah. That's exactly what I wanted. You can get creative there and how you want to mark, make. I have just gotten to where stuff like this is exciting and I get really cool stuff and I'm like, yeah, just go for it. If you like it, do it okay. There we go. I like that. I do feel like maybe I need a tiny bit up here and this paint is a little bit wet. All right? We're going to resist at the moment because this is all still wet and I don't think it's going to give me a stencil. Well, let's just try it. Oh, there we go. That's what I wanted. And then do I wash my stencils off? Not normally. This is a very thin paint that I'm adding. I just let it do its thing, then we keep going. All right. I love that tad a white. I just throw that sponge into some water until I'm ready to do the next thing. Another thing that we could do is I've got these little craft divers with a little piece of sponge at the top. And I actually found some I hadn't open, these are from Michael's and it's a Dover set that was not very expensive. Then I just wipe these off on some towels when I'm done and then I can use them again. These are fantastic for creating like dots. Let me grab my sample thing and I can show you. Then we can decide, do we want to do this? We can create some type of dot. I can see that that might not show up on this water color. I think that's not going to be the thing that I do, but I do like showing you different things you could think about. Okay, I've got my neocolor to crayons. We might look at this and think, okay, what do we want to do next? Let me move the paint out of the way. Do I want to do lines? Do I want to do, do, do I want to do shapes? Do I want to do some organic line making? Do I want some big splotches of colors like we did on one of the other projects? We might like some big splotches of color. I could come in here and highlight and define some of these dark areas a little darker if I need to. I could use acrylic paint to do that. If you've got some acrylic inks, you could come on here with some mark making with your inks. Many choices. So many choices. What do I want to do? Maybe with this yellow, maybe we'll do some lines up here just to see what is this yellow. Oh, yeah, I see, I like that. And I could continue coming down just because. Why not? Sometimes I like it when there is some dominant force coming through a piece. It's fun. Visually. Oh, just leaning so hard on my crowns, I broke my crown. I'm just going to take some tape. If you ever do this, just tap it. Then as you get down to it, if you need to peel that tape, we got a little temporary fix. Not a big deal. There we go. I lean funny when I'm doing stuff on here and just leaned right down on that, nice and heavy. I like that Again, for me, with abstracts, it's all about the layers. If you're like, oh, I don't know yet, it's not good enough yet, maybe you don't have enough layers. That's what I'm looking for is layers. If you're like, oh my gosh, I love this so much before I put marks on it and I don't want to ruin it. Set that thing to the side. You don't have to finish every piece of art the day you started it. If you're not sure where to go or you're scared, put it aside and live with it for a while. And maybe that is the finished piece, and then maybe later you've got new skills. You're a little braver and you're like, oh, now I feel like I can finish this piece, that's when you go back and finish that piece. Sometimes you just need 5 seconds of bravery. But maybe you don't have it today. Love the little tiny bits of orange that shine through this. If you're scared to mess up a piece, you're like, oh, I don't know if I'm going to want to do this because I might mess it up. I do multiple pieces so that I can have a little series. But also because if I love one more than the other, I can do all my testing on the one I didn't love as much as the other, but I actually love both of these a lot of times too because there's still wet paint on this. I use a paints stick for like a five gallon bucket that you get at the paint store. I'd use this as my hand stabilizer. We'll just get this out. I'm actually just loving this so much that I'm thinking. Does that need anything else? Because I'm loving this one too. This one doesn't have as much orange in it. And maybe I do want to have some type of orange showing up over here. Maybe that's in the form of some scribble. Not everything has to be a dot, as a line or a splotch. It could be a scribble. Look at that. I'm filling, let's get some scribble action going. Oh, yeah, I'm filling some scribble. And then if you tried it and you're like, oh, I didn't like the scribble, then you'll know not to do that. Again, that's how you learn these things. Practice, play, experimenting. See I'm actually, I'm digging the scribble there. We could scribble off the edge. There we go, maybe some over here in this edge. Then magically, when we peel this tape, you're going to be like holy cow just turned into. Piece of amazing art and it was a hot mess. If you do more than one, like I'm doing, then when you peel it, you love one and you hate one. At least the one you hated wasn't the only thing you did that day. And you don't leave your table mad. I love painting in multiples because I always get at least one that made it worth hanging out at my paint table that day. If you only paint one and the one was bad, it's a terrible paint day. If you paint 61 was bad, four. So one was amazing. The one that was amazing makes your whole day, okay. I love the orange dot action here. That totally is an exciting element that just pulled me into this corner. I'm loving that. Let's put a few more down here. Love the little orange dots. Who, who knew? All right. So now I feel like over here I could do some orange dots to go with my orange scribble. Used to be, I'd paint, I'd get mad now every single time I sit down and paint, it's a good paint day. If you're not to that stage in your painting, keep going. Cut stuff up. I think when I learned to cut stuff up, I got happy about art. I love to cut up art, keep on going. Figure out what part of the art process that you like and do more of that. I like to cut up. I like to paint in more than one piece at a time. Now I do the things that I know I'm going to get some enjoyment from that day. That's pretty fun. I like that. Okay. Does it need anything else? I don't know, like this, that's what it needed. It's not something that's overwhelming that you're going to be like, what is that? Until you get closer and then you're like, oh, look at that detail. This is this. It's called gold, but it looks green. All right. So definitely like that little tiny detail in here. Oh my gosh. Okay. I don't even feel like I pull out a black ground. I don't even feel like I need the black. I'm feeling like we're there. This corner still wet. So let me let this dry a tiny bit more and then we'll peel the tape. All right. I did hit this with a heat gun, so I just hope I didn't get it up onto the tape because that heat pulls the adhesive. Oh, look at that. Look at that. I would like to point out that this fluid hundred paper that we're using, let me pull it back out. Tape doesn't stick to the paper. It's nice and easy to peel the tape off and not tear your paper. That is always a plus. I'm always about a recommendation that we're not tearing paper with our tape peel because I love to tape things down in addition to cut things up, in addition to do multiples at a time. All right. And I wanted a little bit bigger border, that's why I came real heavy far over. But if your tape is tearing your paper or it seems really hard to peel, use your heat gun, heat the tape up, and pull that tape as you're heating it up. You guys look how amazing this looks like. Seriously, You peeled the tape and all of a sudden it looked like an amazing framed piece of art. Look at this one. I think this one going to be my favorite. But man, that looked a a thing. All right, let's just pull slope because it's hard to hold it down and hold the heat gun and pull the tape at the same time. Look at this one. Look, oh my gosh detail. Look at all the detail as we get in close to that. That is super fun. All right. Check it out. Our two paintings are inspiration, color palette. How did we do? I think we did amazing in this project. I hope you enjoyed doing this and giving this technique out to try. And I'll see you back in class. 8. Ballet Slippers Color Palette: All right, let's pick our next color palette. And I'm going to paint on an eight by eight inch fluid, hundred co, pressed paper. Again, 100% cotton. But it's the eight by eight. And I thought, let's do a square one and just see what we get. To set this up out of the way, I tend to set things on my paper and get paint all over it. We've done these first two color palettes. Let's just take a brow through some of these other color palettes that I have created from some of my photos and see, do any of these really jump out at me in a way that I'm like, wow, that's interesting and unusual. That's interesting and unusual. This color pilot here, that's a consideration. I am loving this with the grays and the yellow. Let's see, let's just check it out. I love doing still life photography and these are different things I've done throughout the years. And flowers, loving this too. This has got the pink and the ochre that we know I love so much actually. I'm loving this one. It's quite a bit different than the other things that we've done. I really like that. It's got this tope in here. I could pull in graphite instead of black paint. I've got these lighter shades. Okay, that's a consideration. Let's see. I like the. All right, let's pick out of these two, or this could be our next two projects. I'm filling this one. Let's just go for this one. This one might be the next project. Let's just see. So I'm going to take my paper down card right here. Wait, let's pick out the colors real quick. I already know I've got a yellow ochre over here that I love. I'm going to stick in the same paints. I'm just trying to make this a little easier than some of the other classes where I pull out like 15,000 things. This time I'm trying to pull out a limited selection from, I've already got here. We'll call this the whitish color, or we could even call that white gold and it'll have a slight shimmer in it. What if we do that? I love it when I think of stuff like that, we've got this pretty top color here called beige, gray. It's very close. All right. And I can pull the black or I can use something else in the place of that. I have pulled out 46 beige gray number 20, black number 96, white gold number 44, yellow ochre, and 34o and crimson. Let's just go for it. I also feel like because we have that yellow in there, maybe we could put some gold in there. This is number 90, and I think number 90 is gold. Let's see. Because I have a number 90. Here we go. It just says 90 also, but it says 90 gold in the box. There we go. All right, put these over here. Let me take my paper down. Wait, get ahead of myself. Let's pull out some of our neo colored crayons because definitely having a good time mark making with the crayons in some of our pieces. Let's go ahead and pull some, actually almost like this color right here. It's called purple, but it looks like a nice variation on this mav color. That's a good one. We could pull out our yellow ocher. We could also pull that black back out, just in case we've got the black. I could pull out this grayish color if I wanted to mark make in that light gray color. I've got this topi color down here. I'm just pulling out myself some options, doesn't mean I'm going to use all of these. But I do find it helpful at the beginning if you're doing something like this, let's say a color palette. If we go ahead and pull out what we might consider using, I also got my graphite pencil. Then also up here behind us, I've got different things that I might consider adding to this. It could be gold, it could be silver. I've got some different inks and things back here that I like to use. Sometimes I will keep those up for consideration because I think white, black, gold, and silver are neutrals. I do reserve the right to pull out one of those. Let's go ahead and tape our paper down and I'll be right back. All right. I have taped eight by eight piece down with a fairly wide border. I did actually really love the wide border on that little duo set that we did. Here is our inspiration palettes. I'm going to sit that over here. I thought what you're looking at this, and you're like, oh gosh, I don't know how to start. What if we get started? With some mark making. I don't want my marks perfect. I do want them looking like a three year old drew it. That's a good way to say, oh, I'm not scared of my paper anymore because I've already messed it up. It gets us past white page paralysis. We're working with water colors. There is a possibility we'll still see some of this underneath our water color. Just like with the other ones, I say pick the favorite of your colors and start with that. Then whichever one you're like, I don't know about this, use that last let me go ahead, take my spray bottle and activate these. There's two shimmery ones in this set, which I'm loving. Where did I just put that in that? I think I did. Let's just start laying some color again. This is probably where I'm going to start in one corner and do this other corner. That's my thinking there it gets, composition wise, it keeps me out of the center right at the beginning. And it allows me to build color around from the edges. I love that. I really loved on the other piece, how we had the neutrals, like the greens and stuff with the pops of the orange. What if we do the pink and the black instead of it being dominant? But I don't know, I just stuck that in there as I'm thinking and picking up color, we might end up with something different than what I was actually intending. But I did like on that piece that we did on that little duo set, I liked the pops of orange through everything else. That was amazing. Let's come back with some white. White picked up some of that pink, but that's all right. So it'll be like a light pink in here, but it'll have a little, tiny bit of a shimmer, which I like. All right, I haven't put the black in yet. I want to put the black in last. Let's pick up the gold because I'm feeling gold. We'll let that be like that top color too, but it's going to shimmer some. You can see too, we're using water color. You can definitely see the marks underneath. That's interesting. Did we expect that? Is it a surprise? Are like, oh, I didn't intend that. What are you thinking there? Let's put some black in now. The black here, the charcoal color, whatever it is that we decide to use are pops of contrast. They're going to give our eyes like places to go. That's fun and interesting If you keep that in mind, where is your eye going as we're traveling around through the piece? All right, I'm digging this, We haven't ruined it yet. Might come back on top with some more yellow because why not? Now is the time to just build and we're going to let this do some drying after a bit and just see where this got us. All right, I'm digging that. Did we get all the colors? I think we did. All right, here's where we started. It's interesting. I'm pretty excited to see where we're going to go with this then as this starts to dry, as it gets damp, it's not sopping wet with puddles. It's damp. We can come back in here just like we did on other pieces. We can lay some water in here and let that start blooming out and adding some interesting texture in there that not going to get. If we don't do that, I like the extra texture that we can get doing that. Okay, so this is pretty cool. I'm actually digging this. I do feel like we've got some layers that are going to come in on top of this. You need to decide now, do you need to do any more mark making? Is the bit of mark making I've got under there, Is that enough? Do we need some more? Do we want to draw on top of this so many decisions. I think for the moment I'm going to let this dry and then we're going to layer on top of this, all 99% dry. We're almost there. And what I think I'm going to do is mark make with the neocolor two crayons and maybe the graphite only move these colors out of our way for a moment. Just look at this and think, okay, what does it need and where do I want to go? Whatever is the least scary, start there. What's the least scary? Do whatever that is for you. I want to say too, with the neocolor two pastels, these are water soluble, we could dip these in water and draw with them. We could draw on here and activate it with water. We can use a dry, lots of options with these pastels. I actually think maybe dip in water and just see what that gives us. Line wise, it's like a heavier, more saturated line of color when we do that versus the dryer line that we get when we're just using it dry. Super interesting. Okay, maybe I'll come right over here. Stick in this shiny color here. Oh yeah. See I love what that just did. Okay, we've got some of this light. I could come back with Posca pen too because I do like white dots something. Let's see, let's think if you get stuck, say you're on this and you're doing one piece and not multiple pieces and you're like, I don't know what I want to do. Make a color copy of this and print out your color copies. And experiment and play on those color copies before you get onto your important piece. That's the way that you can figure out what next step do you want to take? I just wanted to mention that we could, let me just get this piece here. This is a random piece I've done before, but I'm thinking like splotches of colors like this in one of these areas. That's what I'm feeling like. All right, Let's just be brave. I like to tell myself that I'm just going to do that like right here. We could do this with oil pastels, which I actually generally use. But I'm trying to limit myself into the supplies that I decided to use for this class, which was the cure Taki watercolors and the Karen crayons. Maybe a paintbrush, maybe a pencil. This is the way that you can limit yourself in your own projects so that you don't feel like you're overwhelmed with all the different things that you've pulled out, all the different things that you have available in your art room. Loving this, that's what I'm doing, I'm sticking to what I've pulled out. And then maybe if something inspires us, we'll pull out something else at the end. Maybe a stencil and some gold paint. All right. That I'm loving. What if we've got this darker red? Might be too dark. I actually have colored Posca pins. Who? I actually have some of these colored brush pins. I've got this metallic, not quite what I was thinking. I'm just spit balling ideas here. Throw one in if you got one boat with me as we're going throw one in. I know I'm funny, see I've got these yummy colored Posca pens up here. Oh, see now this is a good one. Oh, yes. Okay. We're filling this, I've got colored posca, we're going to go for this yummy, yummy color here. I could do dots, I could do lines, I could do a shape, could do little x. Definitely look at your mark making idea sheet to see what is it that we're thinking. But I think dots, because I don't do dots in colored like this. A lot of times I do a lot of white dots and black dots, and gold dots, and silver dots. But how often do we do a burgundy dot? I actually did not think that my lines are underneath. We're going to stay that obvious. What a great lesson to learn. Usually when I'm mark making on paper, I'm like coloring with acrylic paints and stuff. I actually did not expect that line to stay to the front like I expected it to fade back and maybe even disappear. It did not fade back, It did not disappear. See, these are things that you're never going to learn. If you don't just stop and experiment and play and figure things out, Really push your supplies and figure out like, oh, I didn't even know this, did that thing. It's all the experimenting that gets me to the next project, or the next class, or the next fun thing that I'm wanting to work on. Okay. I liked that thinking on the other one. I really liked it when we had a color that came in, Let's just do it. Be brave. I like to tell myself to be brave. I want you to tell yourself be brave. If you liked something on one of the pieces that we did earlier, like that, I like that. That's going to be like my thing for a while, I think. Then do it again and do more of it and perfect what it is you're doing. See, look how good those look. I like that. I love that. Okay, we're getting somewhere now. We're getting there. All right. This was just a little test, just some long lines, but you don't really see it in there until you get real close. That's interesting. Maybe I'll do a few more of those in this gold. See super fun? That is super fun. Did we do this brown? I got some brown here. No, that's the black. I must have did this in that brown. I actually like this. We could do some of that over here. Like coming in, it kept going, but it came in. I like things that appear in the painting that kept going and you're like, oh, I wonder where that went, like, what's further off that frame? I like it when you wonder what it kept doing. Okay, I like that. I'm also feeling like we could use some white posca dots. I'm definitely thinking that we could get away with that. Let's just do it. Look at that. Super fun, we just added like just a little fun element coming out of that. I like that. Look at that. Okay, so we've got black in here. And I'm thinking what if we took like a black pen or we could even do the graphite and did something in the black area here. I don't know though. I'm loving it like it is too though. Hmm, All right, we could also come back with something on top of this, like white or black stencil gold. What do you think about gold? Let's do some gold. I'm almost wondering, on my favorite stencils, we've got that same corrugated cardboard. Oh yeah. You know what? Let's just do it. This is the stencil girl, corrugated cardboard stencil. I think I'm going to do this golden iridescent gold fine on this project because I don't do enough gold in. My favorite one is my Kia Taki gold mica paste. But it's very hard to get and come by. I've been experimenting with different golds today. I'm thinking this golden destin gold acrylic paint because it's actually a lovely color and should be easy to get compared to the other one I like to use. It's nice and thick. Got my nice dry sponge. These are little artist sponges. They're little circle sponges that I cut into fours. But I like them because they are fatic. I can have a bunch of them for nothing practically not, but they're not very expensive. Oh, see, now that is pretty. Okay, that's pretty. Let's do some of that over here. It was just like a little touch, a little yumminess. Sometimes I scrub, sometimes I dab your choice on how you work your stencils. Oh, see. Now I like that, that was a good choice. Throw that sponge in the water. Now we've got a little bit of area where if I lift it to the light, you can see that shimmer. That's my goal, to have that little bit of shimmer in there. I'm wondering if we should brighten this up with some white, that white paint. Let's pull that white paint back out because I feel like it could benefit from some brightness. I've got this yummy stencil here. It's called Cubist by the crafters workshop. I'm thinking a little bit of this might give me the brightness I'm looking for. Let's just take a little sponge and do it. Let's just be brave. It's just paper. It's just, I used to worry about messing stuff up, but I just don't even think about that now. Oh, yeah. See that gives me back quite a bit of the light and bright. Let's just come down through here and do some more because I feel like we were getting dark. And do see, look at that. Look at that. Okay. I'm feeling that. All right. Now I got excited, now we got some weight, we got a little bit of bling. All right? So that's super fun. All right. Let's peel our tape and just see what we got. This doesn't mean that you have to be done at this moment. This means that you're going to evaluate, maybe look at it, maybe decide doesn't need anything else, maybe not. But I feel like I'm at a point that I could peel the tape and evaluate. When you peel the tape, it just magically turn your whatever you did could be a piece of scribble. You peel that tape, it's magically a beautiful piece of art, like it framed it out and it was like just finished. It gave it that finishing edge. That's why I don't like going edge to edge because I want this satisfaction of peeling it. If you're tearing the paper, use your craft gun to heat the tape up so that, that ah, it releases. Look at that. Look at that. Look how pretty that is. Look how pretty that is with our little bit of shine in there. How did we do compared to our palette that we started out with? I think we did pretty darn good, matching our colors. Look how pretty that is. All right, so I hope you had fun with this project going a little bit bigger, doing a single piece rather than multiple pieces, playing in a color palette that I might not normally pull out for myself. That's what's so fun about working with stuff like this. You push your directions that you normally would go, come up with colors that you normally wouldn't use, and create things that you're like, wow, I never could have created that any other way. So if you had fun with this project, and I'll see you back in class. 9. Calla Lily Color Palette: In this project. I thought we'd go ahead and do that card that we picked. And then I picked the ballet one and said, and I said, maybe this will be next. Let's just try this, because this is one of my favorite photos. It's a set of lilies taken in this very pretty blue mug that I have up against these wonderful antique ten tiles. It's long been one of my favorite photos. I pull different colors out of there, going from a very dark to a very light, and then some colors in between. And just let's see what we can create. That's my inspiration palette. I am still working in the A Taki, the 48 piece set, in the art Nuvo set, so that I could pull the colors that I thought was closest in match to the colors here on our photo, I'm still working with the fluid hundred co press. I pulled an eight by eight sheet out and taped it down. And I want to do some minis and I didn't do exact exact eyeballed it, but these are approximately 3.5 by 3.5 with a little border around it, making them about four by four. Out of these colors, I've pulled 38 Imperial violet, which I didn't test that color out. But the one that looked closest was a blue. And I'm like, oh, I know that's not right. Let me just test it real quick. Oh, yeah. See it's a little, maybe even too bright. Let's just make sure that's the one we want, because maybe I'd rather have this purple. Let's see. I hope that's too light. Again, my goal on pulling stuff like this is to get close. It doesn't have to be 100% exact because that takes the fun out of it. Unless your goal, see the one I thought is really a blue, we're going to stick with that. Okay? Always fun just to play and test. Okay, that was imperial violet number 38. Part of the fun for me is just working in a color palette that I wouldn't pull. Pull a purple, green, blue, gray and black. And you're there. I want to get close, 53 sap green. But it doesn't have to be 100% Six oh one grayish blue. 20, 1 gray and 20 black. You see, I got pretty darn close if I didn't get exactly spot on. And that's all my goal is to get close and to play. Just see what we can create in this color palette. I'm going to activate those. My rule of thumb on sizes versus brush size. The smaller the piece, the smaller your brushes could be. This is a zero. Raphael soft aqua on the bigger pieces. Then I move up to a bigger brush, like this, Princeton quill number four. That's the way that I determine brush sizes. The bigger the piece, the bigger the brush. My thinking there at this point, I could draw with some neocolor two crayons and I could water activate them. That might be fun. I could draw with some graphite like we did on that one piece that was pretty fun. I could start off with something like liquid graphite and add other colors in here. That could be fun. Because the liquid graphite could be like this black. Let me just see. I think I've got that right up here on my shelf now that I've thought about it. Cura Taki fluid graphite is super duper fun. I might go ahead and just open that. We might play in that also because that's a pretty grayish color. Let's start out with the color that we want and think, do we want to do solid little abstracts like we did with the green and orange set? Or do we want to make it more delicate and spread it out and see what we can get? Maybe more minimalist in style. What? Okay, now that I've thought of all that, maybe a little minimalist pieces, starting off with some charcoal, filling in with some color. All right, let's do it. Oh, ooh, see Now I like that. Okay, that's fun. Kind of try to make them all different, not looking for straight perfect lines. I'm looking for it to look a bit more imperfect. That's what my favorite thing is, imperfection. Maybe we can start off with some color and just see what's this going to do for us? I'm just playing at this point. I don't know where we're going. I like starting off pieces of art, letting the art guide me and figuring out where are we going to get. I'm not trying to get anywhere specific here. Even though I pulled out black, that could be my black. May not revisit the black. Interesting here where we're thinking, huh? You may do a couple of these and then we may fill one in. Even though I wasn't thinking fill in, we could fill in, It's just interesting and go and see where you end up with. I'm just throwing you some ideas out there, maybe some of this green. Oh, look at that green. I'm doing real light with the green, so it's not like super heavy, but man, it's cool. All right, that's fun. That's that purple in there. I'm just looking at different styles sometimes, like what can I do? How can we create something cool that we've never done before? That's pretty fun. I can mark make on top of these. I could just come back and fill one in, now that I'm thinking about it. We could fill one in and make on top and then have some that. Look, let's do that. Let's just do it, let's just do it. Be brave, let's fill one in. Usually when I'm filling stuff in like this, I do like to start with the corners instead of right there in the middle. Even though I started that in the middle, going with the corners there, then what if came back with the black and got our contrast really contrast in here? That's pretty fun. I like that. I did that, but I like these three, so I don't want to come back and do that on those. I could come back with a little bit of contrast and just see if I throw some contrast in here. What would we get just playing, letting go. Don't be super concerned about where you're going and then we'll just see what we get. I'm going to let these dry and then we'll mark make on top of them. All right, we have got this dry now. I just need to decide, look, how good our colors look. I think we got right on with our colors. Good job. Everybody who I had to walk away so that I could let this dry. The tendency is to get your heat gun on it, but I don't want the heat gun around the tape because the tape would lift and the water would go to the tape. I just walked away for a few minutes to let that do its thing. Now we could come back and do some mark making. I really like graphite marks. I could continue that, or I could use some of these neocolor two crayons that I pulled out in the right colors. Just because you pull it out doesn't mean you have to use it pulling it out, just having it available for the next step. I actually think now that I did pull these out, maybe on this one we could do some mark making and some line drawing. Possibly there's a tiny bit wet on that. I just touched it. Let me get my little stick out that I put my hand on. This is a paint stick from paint store, a little five gallon bucket of paint stick stir. Now we can just come over here and maybe do some mark making. I like to mark in the areas of water color. It gives you a natural place to start and stop. It gives your eye like that visual stoppage area. Look at that. I really like this gray one. This is just light gray. That's what the color is. I like that, Maybe I'll do that over here on this edge too. Nice. That's a fun. Okay, that was fun. I could come back in here with some other, could do some dots. This is like a brown, which is similar to that black there pa. I might just come in here with some pats. Look around in all your little supplies and get creative in pulling out stuff to work with. Then see what you can create. I want you to limit your color palette and then limit that to the supplies that you pull out. And then as you're working, if something amazing comes to mind, then pull something else out if you need to. But for the most part, I want you to get creative and play in what you've pulled out to use. I'm thinking this blue and this is a shiny blue. This is that palo octane blue. I probably said that wrong. That's okay. It's a very long word. It's little, tiny letters actually can see all the letters. Even when my glass is on, I have to get my magnifying glass out so I can see how many letters are in there. Because it's like 20 letters long. I got to work with the old people here. Don't put stuff out that we can't see. Here's a fun green. Okay. I really like what that did and I'm thinking, do I want any of this green? I really like the green that's in there. Let's not do that. Okay, I also feel like maybe we can do with some white, let's pull out our little Posca pen. Maybe get some really fine white lines. White lines, White dots. I like a little fine dots and things that adds a whimsical touch to your pieces of art. The delightful them. See now I like that a lot. Maybe I'll put some up here. It's a different color, but I don't, I'm not too worried about that. I just think if you put something in one place, sometimes it needs to be in more than one place so that it doesn't look out of place. Does that make sense? Oh, there we go. I like that little touches. Oh, okay. We're going to go with that for a moment and look at these and think, does this need anything else? I really liked these blue splotches here. What if on one of these, I came in here with some blue scribbly squotches? It's fun when you take an element that you really liked from one piece and bring it into another piece to see how would that work over here. What do we do with that? Okay, I didn't use the purple. What if we do over here? I didn't use the purple crayon up there. What if we come back with some lines? Oh, see I like that. That's fine. Okay. I really like that. Maybe we'll do that over here. Come right down this line that's here. And maybe right outside that. I like that. Let's go right inside that. And just make a whole little statement here with these little lines that are almost like a ladder. Like it. I like it. Okay. And we'll see. All right. I'm loving that. I like these marks here. Maybe we'll do some marks over here in the gray. Will we even see them? I don't know. But we're going to do it just because whatever you're thinking at the moment and you're going to think, oh, let's just go with it. Let's just be brave. It's my new mantra this year. Be brave. I don't know if I love that or not, but it was we could come back on top of that with the blue just as an extra scribble right on top. Why not Fun little extra detail. All right, be brave and play. Let's do the green. What do we want to do with the green maybe? Oh, oh yeah, like just like some funky marks. Oh, you might not see it, but it is fun to put them in there. All right, that was fun. All right, I'm liking the simplicity of this. I almost don't want to add anything else, except maybe we could come in with some dots. Maybe we need some dots. Do we need dots? I feel, I feel. Oh, yeah. I love that. Okay. I'm feeling good about these. I want to see where we're at, so I'm going to peel the tape and check that these are where I want to be. Maybe even cut them apart. Even though I didn't heat the tape up, I didn't stick the tape down super hard. Oh, I had something on my finger. I didn't mean to do that, but we're going to cut a border around these anyway. Let's just cut these out and see what we got. Look at this is what the tape pulled. Watch when we cut this. We're going to love this. Oh yeah, man, I love peeling tape. Let me go grab my cutter and I'll be right back. This is just my fisker paper cutter. I love this thing because now I can trim things up to exactly where I want it. Oh, yeah, I like that. If you get a spot outside your piece, like I just did that I did not intend to do, I can trim that right off. Look at that. You better than I even thought we should have done a whole set of that. All right. Let's trim this one down and we'll get rid of this piece that I added accidentally. Oh, see Now I like that one that way. Okay. I'm loving that. Let's cut these two apart and just see what do we get. Al right, there we go, Right there. Okay. This one could be tighter. So let's tighten this one up. I'm not being exact at the moment because this honestly is just play for me. But I do want them to look nice and then I might do something with them. That one. That one turned out awesome. Oh my gosh. Truly, when I started painting these, I doubted now that we're done, I'm like, oh, way better than I expected. Way better. Oh yeah. I love making art that ends up better than you thought. Yeah, let's set right there. Okay. Let's see what we got to. These two are awesome. And this one Oh yeah. Good paint day. This one. I like painting more than one. I can try out ideas if one doesn't work out, let's say you didn't like one, you still had two or three others that you're like, whoa, amazing. Check out our colors that we started with. I think we did pretty fantastic working within a color palette. That to be quite honest, I never would have pulled out. That is what I love about challenges like this. You discover things that are uniquely you, that you never would have tried. And maybe you love so much that you want to keep using those going forward. Love these type challenges. Hope you enjoyed this paint project and I'll see you back in class. 10. Final Thoughts: As we come to the conclusion of this enriching art class focused on custom color palettes and abstract art, it's time to reflect on the journey that we've embarked upon and the invaluable experiences we've shared together embrace your creativity. We've learned that creativity knows no bounds, and that every individual possesses a unique artistic voice waiting to be heard. Art is a journey. It's not merely about reaching a destination. It's a continuous journey of growth and learning. As we part ways, artistic journey never truly ends. It continues to evolve, transform, and inspire, leading us to new horizons of creativity. Keep that spark ignited. And may your artistic endeavors always be filled with passion, wonder, and the joy of self expression. Thank you for being part of this wonderful class, and may your artistic journeys flourish in the colors of your imagination. Farewell and happy creating.