Unlocking Kandinsky: The Art & Color Theory of a Modern Master

1. Introduction: Everyone, and welcome to this master study of Wasil Kandinsky. I'm so excited to have you here as we dive into the expressive world of one of the pioneers of abstract art, whether you're a seasoned artist or just beginning your creative journey, this class will help you explore color and movement and abstraction in new and exciting ways. Wasil Kandinsky was a visionary. He believed that art was more than just a visual experience. It was a way to communicate emotions and energy much like music. Described certain colors and shapes as having their own rhythms and harmonies, almost like a symphony on Canvas. In this class, we'll take a closer look at Kandinsky's work, his influences, and the revolutionary way he approached painting. We'll explore four of his most fascinating pieces to me. Anyway, squares with concentric circles, 30 houses in Munich and upward and translate his techniques into our own creative practice. Each project is designed to help you understand Kandinsky's unique artistic language while also allowing you the freedom to bring your own personality into the work. You'll experiment with color, composition, mark making, just as Kandinsky did so that you can develop your own voice in abstraction. I'm Denise Love, an artist and creative educator, and I'm excited to bring you this fun and exciting dive into Willy Kondenski. For this class, you can use a variety of mediums watercolor, acrylics, soft pastels, even mixed media. So if you're ready to explore the world of Kandinsky, grab your supplies, set up your creative space, and let's begin our journey into abstraction. 2. Class Project: Class project, you'll create your own Kandinsky inspired abstract painting, incorporating what you've learned from studying his work. This will be your chance to explore color and composition and movement in your own unique way while using Kandinsky's techniques as a guide. Choose your inspiration, gather your supplies, paint with emotion and intuition and add some final touches and share your work. As a bonus, write a few sentences about your painting. What inspired your choices? Did you discover something new about abstract art, and I can't wait to see what you create. 3. Why Study Kandinsky: Who was Kandinsky, Wail Kandinsky, 18 66 to 1944, was a Russian born artist and theorist, widely regarded as one of the pioneers of abstract art. Initially trained in law and economics, he didn't pursue painting seriously until his 30s, proving that artistic journeys can begin at any stage of life. His early works were influenced by impressionism and favism. But over time, he developed a bold and unique visual language that moved away from representational art towards abstraction. Kandinsky believed that color and form had the power to communicate deep emotions, much like music. This belief led him to create paintings that didn't rely on depicting physical objects, but instead focused on rhythm, harmony, and the interplay of shapes and colors. His transition from representational to abstract art was influenced by various factors, including his exposure to the expressive use of colors like Henry Matist and the post impressionist, as well as his own deep interest in spirituality and philosophy. Throughout his career, Kandinsky was also an influential teacher. He taught at The Bauhaus, a revolutionary German School of Art and Design, where he explored new ways of thinking about color and composition. His ideas not only shaped modern abstract painting, but also influenced future generations of artists and designers. I study Kandinsky. Kandinsky's contributions to abstract art go beyond just painting. He developed theories on color, form, and the emotional impact of art that remains relevant today. He believed that art should be a spiritual experience capable of evoking motions without needing to represent reality. His ideas were groundbreaking because at the time, art was still expected to depict the physical world. Kandinsky challenged that expectation by proving that abstraction could be just as meaningful, if not more so than realistic representations. One of his most important contributions is his book concerning the Spiritual and Art 1911, where he discusses how colors and shapes can have an innate, psychological and emotional impact. He associated different colors with specific emotions, yellow with warmth and energy, blue with depth and spirituality, red with passion and movement. His studies on how color combinations affect viewers continue to influence modern art and design. Studying Kandinsky allows us to explore not only how abstraction evolved, but also how we can harness color, shape, and composition to express emotions in our own art. Key themes in Kandinsky's work, one, the spiritual power of art. Kandinsky saw art as more than just a visual experience. He believed it had the power to touch the soul. He often compared painting to music, where different elements work together to create an emotional impact. Two, music inspired compositions. Music was a major influence on Kandinsky's approach to painting. He believed that just as a symphony can evoke deep feelings without words, a painting can do the same through its colors and shapes. His abstract paintings often feel like visual music with elements that dance across the canvas. Three, emotional abstraction. Unlike artists who use abstraction purely for formal experimentation, Kandinsky saw abstraction as a way to communicate emotions directly. His use of color, line, and composition was always intentional, designed to create a certain mood or feeling in the viewer. By studying Kandanski, we can learn how to approach painting with emotion and intuition using color and composition to express feelings rather than simply replicate what we see. His work invites us to embrace creativity with freedom and trust our instincts as artists. Let's now take a closer look at some of his most famous paintings and explore how we can incorporate techniques into our own work. 4. PDF Guides: Class, I have made several PDFs to go along with the class that you'll be able to print out and then have, and some of them are super fun. I think you're really going to enjoy them. I just thought I'd go through what the different PDFs are so that you got an understanding of how you might use them. The first PDF that I've got here is exploring condenses techniques in your art, this PDF goes along with the book video where I just show you some book options that you might consider and some talking points in the books. I've just bullet pointed some different points that even if I talk about them or don't talk about them, you could just have that information, which is interesting. That goes along with the Kandinsky books. Then I have one for exploring Willy Kandinsky 40 bite sized facts, and I think you're going to really enjoy this one. Because it just goes through some very interesting fun facts about Kandinsky that you could just have at your fingertips. That's super fun. Things like abstract watercolors. He experimented with watercolor as a way to explore abstraction more freely. Um, wrote about color psychology. He believed that colors could evoke emotions, for example, Blue felt deep and spiritual. So it's just some bite size facts about him. I thought you might like to have that. Then the next PDF I have for you goes along with that color one, and it's understanding color and emotion in abstraction. This one just goes a little bit deeper. In his philosophy and what the different color meetings have. And so I think you're really going to enjoy that one. It was fun to create and it just gives you some good key points about each color and using it and the feelings and stuff behind it. So that's a really good one to have and just keep and keep using it going forward. Enhancing your understanding of Kandinsky's abstract art is another PDF that I've created for you, and it's a companion guide to your master study. It includes exercises, activities, and reflections to deepen your understanding and help you apply his techniques in your own artistic practice. This is just some information and then also, a little condensed version of that color theory, and then it gets into some activities that you could think on and do yourself, breaking down the visual elements of Kandinsky's art, and then the activity is look at one of his paintings and sketch a simplified version of it, focusing only on the placement of shape and lines. This will help you understand his visual rhythm. It's got some fun activities in here, talking about composition and color and art meditation. And maybe creating some many abstracts and just giving you a bunch of ideas that you can use to enhance your understanding and reflection here on the Kandinsky class. That was a fun one. That one's enhancing your understanding. Then I've made you some project guides. There's some projects that we're going to do in class and we can use the guide in class. Now with the prior master studies that I've done, I've done one master study where we did the master's color palettes. We looked at a master's painting and we pulled the colors out and created our own abstract art with it. The next master study that I did was on Gustav Clem, on his master study, we actually took little sections of a painting and we replicated the little section of the painting. This one, I want to do it a tiny bit different also, where we take the idea of the painting and rather than trying to create it exactly, maybe we study it. We understand the concepts and such that he was going for, but then maybe we create our own version of that painting. The project guides just go along with a little information about the painting, gives you some suggested mediums, and then gives you some ideas on what you might create and reflect from the piece that we studied. Then some final thoughts. This project is about exploration, not perfection. Kandinsky viewed color as an emotional language. So let yourself play and see what resonates with you. Share your completed work in the group. And so I just thought this would give us one step forward in the study of the paintings and then help us come up with some paintings inspired by Kandinsky, but not necessarily identical to the work that he created. So I did one for Concentric Circles, which is squares with concentric circles, which is one of my very favorite, and this is something I'll continue to take forward. I like making concentric circles already. The circles, the colors, and then mark making in the circles. This is one that you'll see me do over and over through the years and I've done this concentric circle idea quite a few times in the past. I love this project, so that's one of them. Another project that I really like is 30. What this is, his painting is 30 squares. Just black and white, mark making and having fun. And so the project guide again, gives you what the painting explores and then gives you some ideas and suggestions and some bonus variations. So I've really gone through some final thoughts and put a lot of thought into each of these to kind of enhance each painting that we do. So this is another one that I really, really like personally. So this was houses in Munich, and I like the simplified abstraction of the city street. You know, you could do any city out there. It doesn't have to be the one that he did and get that simplified box and color configuration of a city street or city blocks. A lot of European cities have very interesting row houses that would fit into this type of project. And this project focuses on a reimagine of a cityscape using his approach to abstraction, bold colors and geometric structures. This was in 19 081909. It captures his transition from representational abstract art emphasizing simplified forms and vibrant contrast rather than realistic details. In this exercise, you'll create an abstracted landscape inspired by his unique style. You could try to replicate his if you wanted. It's not so overdone that it would be a difficult one to do. P's paintings would have been impossible to try to do the whole thing in a decent amount of time. He took years to do those, but this is something that you could do in maybe a 30 minute sit down of paint play, which is what I really like about his way of art is you can do it in small bits and end up with something that you really love because I really love that. You might look at different cityscapes. You could try doing one of his cityscapes, but I've got some materials and some ideas for you for replicating that and some bonus variations and some final thoughts. I really like that. That's another project I wanted to do in class. And then this one is upward, which is a painting. I thought we would do three or four projects in class and then I've given you some extra guides after that. Upward is another one that I really like. I like how it's simple with some geometric shapes. This project explores Kandinsky's later abstract style, focusing on upward movement and symbolic meaning. His painting upward is a prime example of how a huge geometric geometric abstraction and layered composition to create a sense of spiritual ascent and dynamic energy. In this exercise, you'll experiment with shapes, brushstrokes and layering to create an upward flow to your composition. Some of the way that he creates an upward flow, it's almost like a balloon floating in a sky because this is almost like a sky with some clouds and you can see we've got this shape that then ends in an arrow pointing up and so it's all lifting up and this is up and then this is further up. He's creating that upward movement with direction of his elements. I really love that. I thought it would be another fun one to do. And so I give you some ideas, whether you paint this exact one or come up with your own version. We are painting inspired by his piece. And then I've got some bonus PDFs for you. So these are not ones I planned on painting in class, but I thought it would be fun to have some extra bonus ones of some of his other paintings. Several circles I really like because of the circle composition. I would totally do this with a different colored background because maybe the black is not my favorite, but I love the idea of the overlapping circles. And so this project explores Kandinsky's fascination with pure abstraction and cosmic form, focusing on the dynamic use of overlapping circles, transparency and spatical balance. Several circles is one of his most striking works. Demonstrating his belief that circles are most harmonious and spiritual shape in art. This exercise will encourage you to play with color contrast, and layering to create your own abstract cosmic composition. You can see how studying and then taking that concept in your own art, taking it to heart and creating pieces off of it really allows you to maybe get into the mindset that he might have been in or he might have been exploring in the different pieces. Several circles is a fun one. And then this one, composition number eight. He did a whole series of these abstract type pieces where he just named them composition one, composition two, composition three, where he was really exploring these big abstract pieces that we see here. I've got composition seven, composition eight, and then yellow, red, blue, which was another in that series. I just thought it would be fun to take on a project. The focus is on geometric abstraction, movement and violence. This one focuses on his most complex and ambitious composition. Um, composition number seven, it's chaotic yet harmonious explosion of color movement and overlapping forms. Then this red, yellow, blue is inspired. One of his most striking composition, the painting showcases contrasting geometric and geometric and organic forms divided into two distinct sections. One dominated by structure, angular shapes, and the other by more fluid, organic elements. You can see some differences in each of those paintings that he started to explore in his works also. I thought that would be a really nice, well rounded view of some of the works that he created, give you some ideas of how you could take his ideas into your own art. Then some of the ones that we'll do in class, I think you are going to be super fun for exploring the different things that he did in his work, and I can't wait to get started on these. I hope you enjoy the bonus PDFs that we've got in class. I've tried to make them really valuable and interesting for you to have and I can't wait to see what we do with these different projects. I'll see you back in class. 5. Kandinsky Books For Inspiration: Take a look at some of the books that are out about Wassily Kandinsky just in case you're interested and we can do a little flip through so you can decide if you want to have a book or not, but I've given you a whole lot of information in the class and so it's not really necessary to have a book. I've given you lots of larger paintings and such in the PDFs, you've got enough that you could look at if you didn't want to buy a book. One of the books was not available to buy as a book that I could find, but it was available as a kindle and it was only $0.99, which was fantastic because it's a fairly large size book, if it were published. It's 400 and something pages, it's called Masters of Art Wasili Kandinsky. What I like about this one is it goes through his early life and a lot of highlights and information and what he was doing throughout the different stages as we go. Um, his early works were influenced by impressionism and fauvism. You got lots of bright colors, loose brushwork and hints of landscape, we can see that as we are flipping through a few of these pages. The blue writer is a good example of that right in here where you've got the blue rider on the horse. I like that. Before diving into abstraction, Kandinsky painted figurative and landscape works inspired by Van Gogh and Matis. You can really see that influence here on these first paintings. The use of expressive color foreshadows, how he would later treat color as an emotional force. I love that about it. Around 1908 to 1910, his paintings became more abstract, focusing on color and shape over realistic detail. Um, so that's pretty cool. The birth of abstraction started around 1910 to 1914, and it emphasized chaos. What you might look for in those paintings are compositions, impressions, chaotic swirling forms, expressive colors around 1910, he completely abandoned realism moving towards abstraction. He believed that painting should look like music, free, expressive and capable of evoking emotions without recognizable subjects. And as I'm flipping through some of our book here, you can see how he has started to really loosen up and you don't see the detail as strongly as his earlier works. His brushstrokes became looser, forms seemed to float or collide representing his belief in energy through art. Composition seven is one of his most complex works. He layered color, movement, emotion into a single piece, and that was part of those composition sets that I had talked about. It's just interesting to see the progression here. And how much looser and expressive and color that he gets in some of the work that he's doing. Um so in his Bauhaus period, he worked on geometric abstraction, structure meets spirit. He worked on clean geometric shapes. I don't know why I keep saying geometric when I'm reading this geometric shapes, precision and a mix of color and structure. You can see as we're again working through some of his pieces here, how he starts really changing his style and the different things that he does. This one right here is composition eight. What was this one? This one was stories. He did a whole series of those composition ones where he was exploring with this is composition seven, which is very abstract. Let's just zoom in, you can see, very abstract, chaotic. There's a lot of movement and color. So in his geometric and abstract and Bauhaus periods, structure meets spirit. You can see in these you get clean geometric shapes. You get precision, a mix of color and structure. He was influenced heavily by the Bauhaus design movement. After World War I, he moved to Germany and joined the Bauhaus where he became a teacher there at the Bauhaus. Composition eight is a great example of this period. Look at the way that he uses circles, triangles, and precise color movement. He called the circles the most spiritual shape, believing they symbolize the universe and harmony. There's lots of good going on in there. He created these ten compositions between 1909 and 1913. You can really tell he was experimenting with those if we go through and look at some of these pieces and the details. I like this one. This is a building and the sun is behind it and everything's radiating out almost. Interesting to look at abstract art and see what can I see with this piece? This one takes your eye off in this direction with that triangle, this little circle here moves your eye around the piece. There's a lot of movement and good detail going here in these pieces and then you have the sun or radiating up. Then several circles. So in the later years, he was in Paris from the 1930s to the 1944, and he got into organic geometry and playfulness. Now we're looking at softer biomorphic shapes, playful colors, a sense of movement. Examples of that was the red, yellow, blue painting that we looked at upward that we talked about in composition ten. And you can see just a distinct change in some of these works that he did. If we go a little further, here's a chronological view of the different paintings. What I like about that is we go through and find specific paintings that we want to look at and study and the years that they might have been painted and the names, and it really gives you a good view of where he started and then when he started to get really abstract and chaotic, we've got some fun sketchbook pieces in here. Then we've got into more of the geometric things that he was interested in. Then there's many circles, several circles, and then here's the one that I was just talking about the upward and you can see all the geometric shapes. You can almost see a face in there with the eyeball and maybe this is the lip and you can see the upward transition there of the triangle moving up and the circle those stepping up also. I really like that piece and the way that he uses the elements to draw your eye through the piece. Um, so that's really cool. His later works blended structure and form with playful organic shapes, almost like a mix of Bauhaus and his earlier expressive extraction. He used transparency layering, almost like stained glass and watercolor effects. You can really see that in this piece. Composition ten was one of his final works and his colors became more muted, but they were still deeply expressive. So that is the Kendall book, in case you're interested in that. Then I have two Kandinsky books and I want to say, I was confused there for a long time because a lot of times you see them saying silly WAS LLI. Then sometimes you see Vasil ASLY I thought, Wow, two artists with the same unusual last name, but it's not. He was Russian and so there is some discrepancy or some different schools of thought there on how his name is translated because there's not a true WA in the translation, I don't believe. So sometimes it's translated as the silly and sometimes it's translated as Willy. So just so you know, same artist. This one here is the Tashen book. I actually normally love the Tashen books because they're so thorough and complete. But this one did not have concentric circles, which was one of my favorite. I felt like it was really more of a condensed version of his books like maybe a top however many top 50 of his books of his works instead of his whole catalog. So we do see some of the more famous works in here and explanations and photos to look at. But we don't have all the stuff that he made. When I want to buy an artist's book, I want to see all of it. Personally, I want the big clunker of a book. But I couldn't find one for this except for the one on the Kindle. I do like having it, but I would not say it's my favorite of the Tahin type books. It's more of a condensed version of him. Then the silly Kdenski around the circle is another one that I found, which again, I really like having books to look at because I'm very textile and I want to be able to see it and look at it and study it without it being on a computer screen. And it does have a lot of his works also in here and a few of the things that he experimented in his sketchbooks, something like this. I was thinking in one of our warm up exercises, we could do some type of pen and ink starter because this is the sketch of the final piece there that he did. But I thought it may be ink on paper would be a fun little warm up. It works with lines and different mark making and just some fun. I thought that would be a good warm up to play in. And so this book I do like a little bit better than the Tashen book. Does have some of the pieces that we're looking at doing in class. Out of the two books, there's the Mini circles, several circles. Out of the two books, I like this book better. But the book on the Kendall was nice because it included a much larger selection of his works and his history. That was fun. I do want some a book of sketches and stuff. This one's also very interesting. Vasili Kandinsky around the circle and Kandinsky by Tashin then the book here, in the Kindle was Masters of Art Willy Kandinsky. That is a cheap way to get a look at his stuff if you wanted to have something to look at that was about $1, or at least it was when I bought my version of it. That's some of the books that you can look at and be inspired by. I do give you quite a few PDFs in class where you have a lot of works that you could work from in class. You don't have to have a book, but I just thought I'd show you what I had come across in my research and I'll see you guys back in class. 6. Supplies: Let's take a look at your supplies that you can use in class. This class is all about, in my mind, using what you have on hand and adapting your master study to supplies that you've already got. WosiliKondinski used a whole lot of different supplies. He used oil paint, he used watercolors, used pastels, he used lots of things in his own work. And I'm choosing to duplicate some of these and learn how his mind work and his techniques and some of the marks that he made and stuff, but I don't want to work in necessarily all the same materials that he worked in. I've adjusted my project to work with similar things that will give me a similar look without being exact exact. And so we start off this class doing a warm up. And in the warm up, we actually turn our warm up into a fun concertina book. So for the concertina book, you're going to need a big piece of paper. I've used a piece of 18 by 24 watercolor paper. You could use the Cc in Excel. I've used the paper that Michael's has the artists loft. I'm a big piece of that. You can use smaller paper if you want, but it really is fun if you have a big piece, and you'll end up with a book that's about six by six. You might want a piece of ribbon if you want a pretty closure on the book, and then glue stick. I'm using the UhuGluStick to assemble my cover. You might want a utility knife and a bone folder and some bookboard which bookboard is basically thick cardboard. So if you've got a watercolor pad of paper or any pad of paper, really, this piece of cardboard is the same thickness or maybe even a smidge thicker. So it makes perfect bookboard. So this can be the cover for your book if you've got a pad where you can steal the back of it, or you can order bookboard. I've ordered a bunch of bookboard because I made a lot of books. Then I've also used a handmade paper that I found at the Blick to do my cover with, but you could you could paint the bookboard if you want the bookboard painted. You could put a piece of art on there. You could use a piece of fabric, kind of your choice there on how you finish it off, but I think the pretty handmade papers make a nice cover. So that's the first project. We paint and draw and then create a little book out of that. So for the drawing on here, I've just used a pasca pin, so maybe a black and white pasca would be a good choice to have on hand. I have also used for the other side, I wanted it to be fun and I wanted it to be fast and I wanted it to dry pretty quickly. So I have used the shuttle art tempera sticks, and I've got just all kinds of colors to pull from. They are super fun for a project like this. You can do this project with anything you have on hand. You can do it with watercolor, you can do it with acrylic paint. You can do these with any drawing or markers or paint pens, anything at all. It really is going to turn out well, no matter what you use. I'm just showing you what I used in class if you've got any of those and you want to use those too, that's fine. But if you don't use what you got on hand, this is about learning and discovering and playing with different techniques, not necessarily duplicating everything that he used or that I used. There's our first project. Second project we end up doing is concentric circles. And so for concentric circles, I used watercolor. So in a couple of projects, I've used my Kurataki watercolors, which I love those. They're more like a guash than a watercolor. You can do this project with anything that you've got on hand, whether it be watercolor or um acrylic paints or what have you. This was super fun with the watercolor and then using some mark making things. You could use No Color tools. You could use paint pens. You could use any pencils that you've got on hand on top of that. I've got the polychromas that I pull out for a project. Those are an option if you've got any colored pencils. I also use some oil pastels. I've got the Mongio oil pastels, which are some of my favorite and I list all these on my favorites list also, so you can use that. If you use those, you'll need to seal the piece that you use any oil pastels on. I do that with the sanela oil pastel fixative, but if you don't use any oil pastels, then you don't have to fix those. Like those tempera paints, you don't have to fix those. So use your favorite things and incorporate the different things that we're learning with some tools that you have on hand that are already your favorites. I do love the Neo Color two crowns. Those would be perfect on most of these projects. So any of those would be good. I also use some acrylic paint on some of these. So when we get to the second project where we are looking at his painting 30 and the third project where we are looking at his painting houses in Munich, those are acrylic paints and No color two crayons that I've used, and we look at his painting upward, those are watercolors that I've used, the kurtoki watercolors which really amazingly enough come out really super similar to the painting that he did in oil paint on cardboard. I mean, it's amazing how close that got. It was amazing. And with each of these projects, I've got project guides that will guide you into some other directions that you could think of for your projects and give you some bonus variations and tell you a little bit about, um, Kandinsky is painting to get you started, lots of options there. I also have some paint markers that I used on a couple of these for some mark making. I like the Artix paint markers or the paska markers would be great for that. For this, I did use a circle template that I've had since I was in school. So if you've got a circle template or a glass, I could have used my water cup to replicate a circle or something like that. I did actually use some type of shaper for the more geometric things that I had in and then I also use some fine liners. I've pulled out the prisma color fine line markers because I have them. You could also use the Pigma fine liners. If you've got those, the microns, those are probably the ones people most commonly have because in our observations and are looking very close at the paintings, we notice maybe sometimes he outlines things in a very thin black line, so that's how I replicated that. I think that's about all that I've used in class, but this isn't necessarily about doing everything exactly the way I've done it. I want you to see what I've done, see what I've pulled out, and then look at what you've got and say, Okay, what can I do? How can I create this? What can we make today and see what kind of fun you're going to have? Looking at his paintings and just kind of, you know, putting his thoughts and ideas into practice. I hope you enjoy class. I can't wait to see what you create. Definitely come back and share some of your projects with me, and I'll see you in class. 7. Dynamic Line & Shape Exploration Warm Up: Let's do two warm up projects. This is going to be the first half of the warm up projects. I'll be number one. What I want to do in this one is I want you to get as big a piece of paper as you have. It doesn't have to be as big as mine, but we're going to do something really fun with these and I think you're going to enjoy it. I want you to get as large a paper as you have. If that's nine by 12, that's fine. If it's ten by 14 ", that would be fine. I'm going to use an 18 inch by 24 inch because what we're going to make when we're all done is going to be so super cool that I just wanted to go ahead and do it with the larger sheet of paper. So for this first exercise, what we're going to do on the front side or the back side, we're going to use both sides of this paper in the warm up one and the warm up two. So we're going to start with the warm up one. What I want to do is focus on dynamic line and shape. I want you to use some type of black something, whether it be a marker, a brush pen, or ink, and a paint brush, you can use pastels or colored pencils and I want a big piece of paper. What I want you to do is start drawing free flowing lines, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and create a series of lines on the paper thinking of Kandinsky's belief that lines can carry energy, let your hand move naturally. I'm going to start mine with a black wing matt pencil. It's close to black. But I want you to close your eyes. And I'm trying to keep my hand on the paper to keep us hopefully focused, but I want you to just kind of not look at the paper and intuitively draw and just see where does your hand go? You know, maybe keep an edge, your hand kind of on the edge to stop yourself, but don't worry too much about it. And then after you've kind of covered what you think might be most of the paper, then look at it and see where we're at. Okay. That's pretty cool. I actually looked up and did not pay attention to the paper. Then I want you to add shapes and layers, introduce geometric and organic shapes with in and around the lines. Circles, triangles, arcs, were all key elements in Kandinsky's compositions. Now we can come back and start adding other details all around these lines and adding in just mark making, filling it up anyway that your heart desires. We're not worried about composition at this point. We're not worried about where things are being placed. If you want, after you do all of this, you can use some color to add contrast. Fill in some of the areas with color leaving others empty. Play with overlapping and transparency. In reflection, after we look at this, what mood or energy does your composition create? Does it feel musical, calm, or chaotic? This is a good exercise where you might put on some music and just let your mind roam free and the music guide the feeling and the lines and the different things that you put into the piece. So let's just create and have fun. And while you're doing this, it might even help to have one of Kandinsky's books or some of the PDFs available just to kind of look at and just to get some ideas of some of the stuff that he added into his pieces. I really liked these where they were you saw the sketch and the different and we can see in this piece here, we've got lines that cross over each other. We've got hash marks, we've got lines implying a direction. We've got some interesting shapes. I really like this funky crown shapes. I might even do some of those in mine. I want you to be inspired by maybe some of the pieces and elements that are in his without necessarily trying to duplicate his drawing. That's fun. I like that little crown shape. I might even put another one over here. What I like about exercises like this. We're not trying to duplicate something that he's already done. Rally enough, I like these eyeball shapes. I might want to even move to a black marker because my hand is moving this stuff around. I might pick a Posca pen in black, make sure I got that. I like these little eyeballs with the eyelashes, so I could put some of those in my pieces. And just have some little eyelashes looking at us there. This is a super fun way to explore a master without trying to overwhelm yourself by trying to actually like the finer point of my smaller Posca pen without trying to overwhelm yourself trying to recreate an exact painting, which for an old master study, I prefer to do because I'm never going to be able to create an exact painting the way that they did for some reason. That just doesn't seem to be the way my mind operates, but I really like looking at the different elements and studying different pieces and say, Okay, how can I create something with that without recreating exactly that? That's hilarious. This is actually super fun to look at it and say, Okay, that's a fun element. Can I put that in here somehow? That's exactly what I want you to do with this particular project. This particular drawing, which is untitled 1939 ink on paper, which comes over here to 1940 untitled Guash on black paper. This is 152 and 153 here in the around the circle book. I'll try to add another PDF to our PDFs with this in it so that we have it also to look at in class in case you don't want to get the books. But I do find looking at this piece, look at this right here that we can include these elements, but still make this our own. That's what I like about studying the master, but not necessarily trying to recreate his exact piece. You've made it your own when you do that. These little elements over here. So I might just do some of that and just continue working on this bit, maybe looking back at the different elements and seeing how can I do something similar. I like these pieces on here too that look like great big long, I don't know, staagttes that are not quite going down, you might find in a cave. Those are fun. Mine are tiny bit different, but it gets the impression. You get the idea there. I I don't know what that thing is, but we'll try something like that. It's just a good way to try different marks and different stuff in your work that you maybe would not have done otherwise. Like this little thing here. I want you to fill the whole page. Not worrying about where anything is. You're going to love what we make with these when we're done with both sides. It's going to be fun. And kind of like some of these line elements that I'm not really doing there, so maybe I can do a few of those. Mine looks more like a railroad track, but that's fine. Still still kind of working in an inspired Kandinsky set of marks. Some of these marks go into dots and other things. We could do something like that. You could look at any of his paintings and do the same let me create something but slightly different. We've got some funky triangle pieces here, which we could hatch mark off like he's done. That might have been good in pencil. Then this comes this way and we've got some lines going this way. And then we've got some element there, ending it off with some circles in it. That's fun. Then you've got long lines coming through there. Just looking at the different elements and saying, how many of these things can I incorporate on this big piece of paper. So that little donut looks like it's got little If you can't see it, take a picture of it or zoom in with a magnifying glass because some of the things in the books are too little to really see as good as I want to see them. Then feel free too to put in some of your own favorite marks if you've got some favorite marks that you love and you want to incorporate some of those also. Feel free to do that also. I've got some circles with some wagon spoke things coming out of it. Too, some of this, I want you to think of how fast can you do it? Maybe set yourself a timer for 30 minutes, create and draw and experiment with 30 minutes. But I don't want you to overthink this. This is not meant to be something that takes days and days and days. I want you to set yourself a timer so you don't get so hung up on what anything looks like or where it goes and then work fast, get some energy in some of these pieces and just see how fast can you do? Whatever it is that you're trying to do. I like less control of my pen. A lot of times I will hold a pen way further back so that I have less control. I'm not looking for straight lines, I'm not looking for perfection. I want this to be fast and energetic and let's just see where we can make it go. And how fun can that abstraction be? No, he did a lot of triangles and circles, so he might do some triangles in here, just kind of taking some of those elements and including them somehow. Maybe some fun just scribbly mark making, whatever it is that you're kind of feeling. I want you to let that go. And then you can color in some of these, so they're nice and dark and they're not all white. On a piece like this, I am trying to mostly go edge to edge because we're going to use the whole sheet of paper when we're done with both sides. So do kind of try to get edge to edge. Don't stop away from all the edges because I need that to keep going for what we're going to do next. So go edge to edge with whatever it is that you end up being inspired to do. Don't forget concentric circles. We know that he liked concentric circles. So we could do concentric circles in black and white with some mark making. Those would be fine. So just taking inspiration. Oh, that still had paint on it. Just taking all the inspiration that we can through all the lines and the marks and the lights and the darks and the triangles and the circles and all the mark making. I'm still just looking at that and being inspired to say, maybe I could do some of these great big things right over here. And then do I have most of it covered? I think now I do have most of it covered. And so at this point, if you've hit your 30 minutes and you're like, Okay, I've hit 30 minutes, then stop. Stop right wherever you're at, and we're going to go for it. This is the first half of our two warm up projects, and we're going to use the other side of this for the second half of our warm up projects. This paper is got some use. Don't get rid of it yet, and then we're going to come back in warm up number two, so I'll see you there. 8. Emotional Color Exploration Warm Up: Move on to the second part of our warm up. And this second part, I'm going to flip the page over. The second part is going to be all about color. I'm going to set this out here so that my camera stays focused. But what I want you to focus on this side is color and line. It's going to help you tap into intuitive mark making and emotional expression through abstraction. Materials that you can use on this side or anything you have on hand, watercolor, acrylics, soft pastels, I'm going to use temper sticks because they're easy. I can make big areas of color if I want and they dry really, really fast. So even though it's not a traditional medium that Kandinsky would have used, I think if it had been available, I think he probably would have used it. For this, I want you to pick an emotion, choose a mood or a feeling that you want to express, happiness, calm, excitement, chaos. You can see from each of those how they would evoke a different set of colors and moods that you might be trying to convey. I'm thinking that I want to express happiness, maybe calm, maybe chaos. I don't know, maybe a little bit of all of that. And based on your emotion, pick three to five colors that you feel represented. Kandinsky believed colors carried their own energy and try to feel which ones match your chosen emotion. That one's going to be that's going to be hard. I want all of those. Happy could be sunshine colors, calm, could be blues and greens. Chaos could be, you know, different different colors that maybe match or don't match. I think I'm going to maybe do the blues and greens because I'm kind of obsessed with some of these right in here. And then we've got that color. Maybe I want maybe I'm feeling blue and green and purple in that realm. Maybe a dark one. Look, I'm kind of feeling it. Oh, my gosh, what are we feeling? I don't know. We're you let's just pull all these out and see what we can do. It's it's not about making anything in particular. It's about pulling something a color together, something. I'm thinking blues and greens. Let's just pull all our options out here. Some purples, but I'm not feeling purple, though I do like that dark green. I've got a whole little collection here. I missed all these greens, didn't I? Okay, so I got plenty to play with. What I want you to do is apply the colors freely without sketching anything. Start applying the colors in broad strokes, dabs and blended washes. Let your intuition guide where the colors go. See how the colors interact. Do certain combinations, feel more harmonious or jarring, and then adjust it as needed. I'm feeling pretty good. I've got a whole collection of colors. And so now we're going to start doing some fun intuitive mark making. Okay, so I'm just going to start with my favorite color and maybe do just some mark making and intuitive lines, and this is going to dry real fast. It's tempera paint. I love that. So I'm just going to start just swapping these out. It doesn't matter what's sitting next to what and what we end up with. I'm not going for something specific. I could look back at his pieces and try to do some of his mark making, but really more than anything, I'm just I'm just going for it. I'm releasing my inner Candenski picking different colors. We're looking for spring and happy and chaotic. I think that's where I'm going to go with mine. Just some fun. Doesn't matter where everything goes. Wait till you see what we're going to do with this. Afterwards, I got something fun planned. Ooh. This is kind of invigorating, just being able to draw different shapes here. For some reason, this don color is one of my very favorite colors out of these little tempera sticks. And what I like about it is they're fast drawing. I can draw right on top of other colors I've already put down and then keep on moving and not have to really have any dry time, which I love that. This is pretty fun, actually. Just keep on picking different shades. Look at this color. What? Wow, look at that color. Oh, my gosh, look at that color. Whatever you just feel intuitively inclined to make. Again, try to go edge to edge with these because we are going to be doing something fun and you'll want to have these go all the way to the corners. They had a tiny bit of pink on it. We threw a pink in there. Look at this color. This is really close to that color but a shade darker. I think this one along with the don. These two right here are some favorites, super favorites. Do these even have names on them? They don't have names on them, but that's okay. These temper sticks are shut Lart. Both of these colors are the shut Lart sticks, but I love them. Almost. That might be what that color is or it's real close to something I've already picked up, so that's fun. Let's see. Let's do this one. H. Some of these, I thought I was trying to get them out of my way, but some of these look identical to some of the ones I've already put out. Okay, I think I want some more green before I get out of here. I think there was still one or two greens I didn't get I spy. I spy them over there. How did I miss any? I did. I missed several. How did I miss those? Why didn't you say, Hey, there's more greens. I like this one. It's like an olive. It's like an olive green. Okay. We're getting there. Just having some fun. I'm not trying to create anything specific. It's just about the mood and the emotion. What emotion was I going for a little bit of chaos, little bit of happiness. I think a little bit of calm, maybe. I don't know. I felt a whole bunch, there's a dark green. There's a dark green. I don't know. I feel like there's a whole lot of all of that in here. You know what I think these would be really great for also is the Houses in Munich painting where we do a simplified color scheme. I think these would be perfect for that type of painting. Thinking forward to what I might want to create for some of my projects. I feel like here's another one of those Cladon. Did I already use that? I feel like I might have maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I'm feeling like This would be the perfect way to do the buildings and then the outlines, and then the houses, and then the roads. I can see this being the perfect type of material to do that really quick and really fun. You could do a bunch of these with this type of temper stick. I'm just think in my mind, what would I want to work with and I feel like these are it. This is still a shuttle art, this one feels like a lipstick a little bit. Rather than it's a waxier feel. I like to do that. I like to observe in my different supplies. What does this supply feel like? What's it doing? How is it different than some of these other ones that I'm doing? I'll take down some of that blue with a color that did not really take it down, did it? Get my little concentric circle going in there. This one is more like a neon, I don't want that. I don't feel like I want either one of those. These two are almost the same. That's why I feel like those are similar. Let's just come back. I'm getting close to being done. Again, this is the type project too. You might set yourself a timer and say, I'm going to give myself 30 seconds here. I'm sorry, 30 seconds, 30 minutes and then we're going to wrap that up at the 30 minute point. Um, so that you don't keep going and overdoing it. I feel like for this, I might be there. Let's take a moment and look at what we created. These warm up exercises aren't meant to be finished pieces. They're about freeing up your mind and embracing abstraction. Kandinsky often worked from feeling rather than form. Let this exercise prepare you for the larger projects ahead. Now that you've explored color, movement, and emotion, you're ready to dive into your first Kandinsky inspired painting. But before we do that, I'm just talking for a moment while these are drying because it's going to take a moment to dry. These dry fast, but still takes a moment for those last layers. Now we've got crazy color on one side, super fun, black and white on the backside and meet me in the next video where we're going to turn this into something super fun. I'll see you in the next video. 9. Creating A Concertina Book From Warmups: All right. So what I thought that we could do out of this super fun page that's got writing on one side and color on the other. I've put a big cutting mat out here on my board is I want to cut these into three strips. And what we're going to do is make our own little concertina book. So I have my piece of paper painted. I also have a piece of bookboard which this could be the back of a sketch pad if you had the back page of a sketch pad handy. That's just as thick as bookboard that back page is. And you could steal the back page of one of your watercolor pads. Then I also have some book binding tape, which you don't need. You can use sketch. You can use. Wait a minute. So now that I pulled that out, I actually have artist tape. That would be just fine also. I might just use the artist tape now that I thought of that. A tape is fine. You need it to be just thick enough to hold the edges of two pieces of paper together, three quarters of an inch to an inch is perfect and that's the supplies. I'm going to cut this into thirds. We're going to measure off. This page is 18 " by 24 " and so we want three strips of 6612, 18. Yes. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to mark this at 6 " and 12 ". And then do I have that on the edge? It's kind of hard to tell from where I'm looking on top of it. Yeah, it's close enough. If it's not perfect perfect, don't beat yourself up. Close enough is good enough. And then I just go ahead and mark it down here. And then you want a utility knife or some type of knife that you can cut. And I don't think, do I have a longer All right, so I have a well, it's actually too long for my paper. That's okay. We're going to use our short ruler. So basically, what I'm going to do is line these up and I'm going to cut these into strips. And so it doesn't have to be perfect. We can kind of finigle it at the end if we need to. If we didn't cut it exact. I'm just going to cut that straight down. You could do that with scissors if you've got scissors, draw yourself a line, do it with some scissors. That'd be fine, too. That one might not have been perfectly straight, but like I said, don't get hung up on perfect. Because when you're done, you're not gonna be able to tell anyway. There's so much going on, it's just going to add character. So now what we want to do is we're going to join all three pieces, and we're gonna make these into a zig zag. So basically, we're gonna fold these in half with one side over here, and then we're going to fold it back just like this. And if you've used pencil and you're going to smear anything like I'm going to smear if I do that, you can have a piece of wax paper handy, and I do like to have a bone folder handy. If you've got that, you can use the back of a spoon, anything like that. I like to just really firm those edges down so that we have a fun little zig zag, two sided, super fun. And we're going to go ahead and continue that. Kind of looking at it, thinking, Is that Yep, that's gonna continue it on. So here we go. Then fold this one over. If you've got a definite up or down, then you'll want to keep that in mind, but I don't think I have a definite up or down. I have a I have a fun chaotic up or down might be more interesting if it were flipped kind of composition, so I don't have to worry about that. But if you got a definite direction going on yours, keep that in mind when we get to the next step. Because these are so cool. I'm telling you. Then again, just a bone folder, the back of a spoon is fine. Anything to press that down. Now, I want to tape the edges together just like this. I'm using white tape, I think it will blend in better since that page is white. That's why I was going with that book tape, but then I remembered I had white artist tape. I wanted to be on the side that you're really not going to be able to tell that it's not super obvious is what I'm thinking, not super obvious. Just get that lined up and then tape that off. Oop. Got of green paints coming over. And then just trim that edge. If it's not a perfect straight edge because one book is slightly fatter than the other, just take your scissors right here and trim them up so that the seam, it is straight, you don't even realize that one side was a different side than the other. That's why I said it doesn't really matter if it's perfect, but get it as straight as you can. But when you're done, you're not able to tell, don't get hung up on, Oh, no, it's not perfect because that's how we'll hide that. Just as close as you can. And then tape it, and then you can make that edge look perfect when you're done. Doesn't have to be perfect. Okay, and then we got this one. Let's go ahead and cut that. Okay, this one slightly off, so I'm gonna cut it straight and kind of cut that a tiny bit so they match. Don't have to be perfect. And then once you've got that, I feel like I have a tiny edge sticking out over here. There we go. There we go. Okay. Now, once you've got that Oh, look at that. Oh, my goodness. Now we can take our bone folder, our spoon or whatever and just really press that good. And now we have made ourself a concertina two sided. Fun. What I really love about this and we're going to put a cover on this, which is going to make it complete. We are going to sacrifice one side, but I'm going to let it be this side. What I love about this is now we've ended up with some very interesting compositions that we never would have thought of or come up with on our own. And we can look at and admire how those turned out. Again, the same way for this backside, you can admire different compositions and the way that the pieces ended up. That's super cool. Now we are going to take our bookboard and I've got a little T square to make it easier on myself, and I'm just going to mark the size of that we're just getting close, doesn't have to be exact. And we're going to cut this with our ruler here. I like this big one because then as I'm cutting, I'm less likely to come off on my hand because this side is a little thicker. I love that. And you just want to slice a couple times until you're through it. And then I don't know. On this side, yeah, I'm not gonna have enough for two, so I'm gonna go ahead and just mark it right here. You could have just done two marks and drawn a straight line. If you wanted to, that would have been just fine. I just like using my baby T square 'cause it's so cute, and it's fast and it's easy. Okay, so now I'm going to get another one exactly the same size or it's closer you can get. Doesn't have to be exact. And then I'm going to get some I've got some handmade papers that I found at the art store. I'm going to cover this with a handmade paper. You can cover it with a piece of art. You can cover it with a piece of handmade paper. You can leave a bookboard. You can paint this bookboard a color if you want to paint it a color. So a lot of choices on how you could do the cover, but this is gonna be the cover. We're making a full little book here, 'cause I thought that would be cool. Okay. And now, let me go get a piece of handmade paper. So since I picked crazy colors of blue and green, I have this fun color in my paper stash, which would go perfect with this. And so what we need to do is just cut ourselves two pieces of this paper, a little bit larger than this. So you really want to give yourself about an inch all the way around. I think that gives us the mine's edge. Doesn't have to be perfect, so you could just kind of eyeball that. And then I'm going to use an hu glue stick. You get a second one of these. Again, you're not going to see the inside, so it doesn't have to be perfect. And then I'm going to get a glue stick, which I have right here on my desk. And we're going to see if there's a right side or a wrong side. Feel like, This is the right side. We're going to glue these down to here. And I'm gonna cut the edges so that I can fold these over like a nice little package. Let me glue it down first. All right. And then I'm going to glue these down, edge to edge, and then edge to edge. So that we get a nice even pull. So it doesn't pull it crooked. That's why I go side to side, side to side. Then there is our first cover. So I'm going to glue the other one down. And then cut my little edges here. I just want to give yourself about a millimeter there. You want to have enough to overlap, but not so much that it won't give you a clean corner, really. Then we can glue these. And we're not gonna see the inside when we're done, so you just need enough overlap so that it's clean. There we go. Now, I want to make sure they're all going the same direction. Yeah, there we go. Then I want to make sure I get this going the right direction. Yes. Now we're going to glue down this paper to this thing right here. I'm just going to go all around on the paper just in case. And then we'll be ready to stick this down. I'm going to open it up a little bit. Here we go gluing it down to my pad there and get it nice and even making sure that I've got it kind of even there before it really glues down. Just shifting anything I need to shift slightly. Then I'm going to glue this side down. If you wanted a ribbon on here, we should have glued the ribbon before I glued all these down. I could still add a ribbon. We can still add a ribbon. Let's just go get a piece of ribbon. This is a little piece of velvet ribbon and that's glued down. Hang on. I might just go ahead and have the ribbon right through the center here. Before I glue it to that, let's this is a piece of velvet ribbon that I have on a spool. That's about the center, so I'm just going to center it there before we glue this down. And I want the ribbon to go side to side. So it is good that I glue that before in the direction I want it to go and I want this to move down a tiny, tiny bit. There we go. Is that where I want it? Just double checking my spacing and where everything is at Yeah, there we go. Look, see. That's what we're looking for. And we might take our bone folder on both of those and just go ahead and make sure that we're nice and firm down. Doesn't take this glue long to dry, so we don't have to wait very long, really, but we're going to let it set a little bit. Then I'm going to go ahead on this side. Same thing, really get that down with the bone folder. And then I picked a green because we're still in the blue green. And now I've got about three links of the book, a little more than three links wrap around wrap around and then see that you've got enough because now we can tie this lovely ribbon into a bow and that's our closure for our book. How pretty is that. Then we can look at the book because now we've got a lovely cover and we can look at the book from either side that we want to look at it because it's two sided. How super fun is that? Coolest thing ever. I'm obsessed with making little tiny art books like this. Alright, so you don't have to make a book if you don't want, but I thought super creative way to turn our warm up into something really lovely that we can enjoy. So I hope you enjoy the warm up project, and I'll see you guys back in class. 10. Expressive Color Play: Concentric Circles: This project, I want to focus on squares with concentric circles. I've got the PDF project guide for you. Let's go through the project guide really quick and then we will create our own variation of this lovely piece. This project explores Kandinsky's use of color theory. And its emotional impact through a playful structured exercise, squares with concentric circles, 1913 is one of his most recognizable works created as a study in color relationships rather than a formal painting. It demonstrates how different color combinations can evoke various moods and feelings. Through this project, you'll experiment with color, layering and composition to better understand Kandinsky's approach to abstraction and emotion in art. So in this one, you can use any materials that you got on hand. I have a few suggested materials, watercolor, acrylic paints, pastels, colored pencils, anything that you'd like to work with. I'm thinking that I'm going to work with my Kurataki watercolors because we've got a lot of fun colors that we might work with there, and I've pulled out a whole little selection of colors that I was thinking that I might play in that are kind in a muted color tone, but I've got a good range of brown and a turquoise, and then there's a blue, and then I've got a couple of greens and we've got a pink, and then we go back into orange and ochre yellow. It's a fun range just to experiment with. And if you look at squares with concentric circles, the whole painting, he's got a variety of ones that he's used. He's done some color mixing with some neutrals in here that I can see, which would be mixing opposites on the color wheel like purple, and green or orange and blue. So in this case, he probably did mix orange and blue because there is a reddish, vermilion kind of color and a blue in there, so he probably did do some color mixing in there, evaluating the relationship of what those colors did mixed. He's got a variety of starting with brighter colors in the middle and darker colors in the middle. And then there's little rings and big rings, and then each color ends off with a different color on the outside, even some split colors. So that's interesting. So it's just it's just an exercise to play. This to me is one of my favorite pieces of his. I already love concentric circles in some work that I do, and then you can mark make in the circles and really get creative with the things that you add on top of that to truly make it your own. But this is a nice, relaxing, easy, low stress project. Tools, watercolor paper, I'm working on a piece of Hana Mule coal press watercolor paper because it's the watercolor paper that I happen to prefer working on. Then other supplies might be some tape. I'm going to tape off our edges, a ruler to make our grid, and if you want to do some color mixing, then a little color mixing palette would be good. So you want to prepare your grid by drawing out your grid lines. I'm probably going to do maybe the three by three grid because this is a nine by 12 piece of paper, so that would give me four by three. So that's what I'm going to go for. Choose your color palette. That's what I've done with these grade down colors. Kandinsky believe colors had emotional and spiritual significance. See the expanded color guide for some deeper insights if you're interested in those and you haven't seen that yet. And then select a mix of warm and cool colors to explore contrast and mood and feel free to premix colors if you're wanting to create some unexpected harmonies. So paint concentric circles in each square, start from the center and work outward, adding layered rings of color and experiment with blending one color into another one or using bold contrast. Try varying your brush techniques and pressure and opacity to create depth in your piece, and experiment with color relationships. Observe how different colors interact when placed next to each other. Ask yourself, does a certain color vibrate or feel more dominant? Try reversing color orders, place light colors inside a dark rings and vice versa. Add some personal touches, consider using mixed media techniques such as oil pastels over acrylic for add texture, ink outlines to emphasize certain areas and scraping or blotting techniques for visual interest. So definitely start to play after you've laid your color down and then come back with the next layer. It's just about the play and experimenting and see how these different things react to each other. And with the different squares around it. Then reflect on your work. Step back and analyze, how do the colors work together? How does the piece make you feel? What emotions do certain squares evoke? If you were to title your piece, what would it be called? Then some bonus variations that I've given you here, monochrome challenge, use different shades of the same color for interest and tonal effect, a mood based approach, choose colors based on an emotion you want to express like calm or excitement or nostalgia. We could almost call my muted color range there like a nostalgia color range, layered transparency. Try glazing over previous layers to see how transparency affects color interaction. This project is about exploration, not perfection. Kandinsky viewed color as an emotional language, so let yourself play and see what resonates with you. Then don't forget to come back and share your project with me because I love, love, love logging in and seeing people's projects that they've completed, especially on these master studies because it takes a little bit of dedication to sit out and say, Okay, I'm going to commit to a master study. Let's see what we can create and then actually do the projects. So many people just watch it and then don't do the projects and you really learn by doing. I'm guilty of not doing projects too in classes that I watch. But with the master studies, I actually really enjoy doing these showing up and doing the project is part of the fun for me. Well, I was going to do my little T square and get that really straight, but might not work. Since I'm not on the edge, well, Alright, let's just go ahead and mark this at three inch intervals. I've got a tiny edge there, a tiny lip there. I think I'm going to come just a smidge over from my 3 " so that when I'm done, hopefully they're mostly even. Actually, if I do that, and this one in the center. I'll make those even and if they're not, it is what it is. I'm not too worried about it. I'm just going to go ahead and draw the lines. Lines can be there when we're done. I'm not worried about that. Just to give us a stopping and starting point for each of our elements. All right. Now that we've got our lines on here, I'm just going to go ahead and wet down my colors. I've got the colors I chose are 47 raw nberdep five oh six shadow green, six oh one grayish blue, 54 olive green, four oh five green gold, 17 coral pink, four oh two Mars yellow, and 44 yellow ochre. And I've just picked a variety of grade down colors. You could go with all primary colors and a white and black and have a mixing palette. Those are out of the 48 piece Kurataki and the art novoqe Kurataki your choice on how you want to work your colors and your concentric circles there. But I'm going to go ahead and just wet them down. I'm going to grab my favorite brush for doing concentric circles, which is the Princeton Neptune Oval Wash. I've got some water up there. I'm just going to be able to dip my color thing in. Then what you might do just to stop yourself. Let's see, I got one, two, three, four, five, six, I've got eight colors. I could go ahead and pull a little plate down to be a mixing palette because what might be nice is if we have a different circle in the center of every one of these. We could just go ahead and start with the circle. You could also do this with a round brush. You might prefer a round brush. So you might have one of those handy. Let's see what I've got here. Princeton Neptune Round number eight would be a good choice. I got a bigger one back there too. Is this it? Yeah, the ten. Probably the eight or the ten in the Princeton Neptune. But I like the oval wash because I get wonkiness out of it and the wonkiness is what I want. I'm just going to spread these around so they're not necessarily in the order of my palate. Just for fun, just for fun, no set reason, and we'll just see what we get. Maybe some of your centers could be crooked. They don't all have to be the same size or the same color. We can come back and mark make on top. We could keep our project guide handy so that we can see wonky is the name of the game. So keep that right there beside me. Oh, I didn't mean to do that. Let's go ahead and just pick that up. It doesn't really matter. We can mesh that in when we get to it, but we'll just go ahead and move it around, so be mindful that your watercolors are wet. Let's try this blue and this green gold and see what we get there. Oh, that's pretty. Look how pretty that color is. Oh my goodness. That's actually a super pretty color. A little similar to those, but it's fun just to see what would we get if we mix, say, orange and blue? What color is that? In that case, we should get some shade of a brown. Maybe if we mix yellow ochre and that aqua color. I just mix several colors, but that's okay. We got that green that's real similar to that. That's very interesting. Maybe if we go in with some orange and this pink, what would we get then? Oh, yeah. That's pretty cool there. I actually like that orange pink mixture. Now I'm just going to start coming and making circles. They're going to be wonky circles. My paints still wet, now we're going to get to see how any of these might interact with the layer that we put around it. That's part of the fun of this for me. I'm just going to pick some different colors to loop around the different ones, not really being specific about what goes where, but you could certainly be a lot more deliberate than I'm being. It really is about the fun for me, what if I do this or if I do that? I'm not trying for any specific outcome. And then I might do this with all reds and oranges and pinks, like the colors that are beside each other on the color wheel. That would be fun. Also might do one of these in shades of blue because I like shades of blue, and I think all the shades of blue would be super cool. We lost our center on that one with the brown. The brown dominated. Let's go over here with little bit of green. Keep in mind too, we can layer on top of this. It's not just going to be whatever color here that we do. Maybe a little pink and orange mixed together. Oh my goodness, these are already fun. Let's put pink on the outside of this one. This is a good way to see different color palettes and what would happen if you've got some color that you're interested in, and you're like, I'm interested in blue and orange. What would that do? This is a great experiment. Now, if you don't want the color circles running into each other like I've got going on, I want them to do that, but if you don't want them to run together like that, um let each layer dry. You don't have to have them running together. You could even come back in and do a loop in the middle. That would be fun. Okay, this one's coming out fun. I want maybe a little tiny loop on that one. I'm loving this one actually. Let's come back. I want some more of this color around there. I like this aqua color, so maybe we'll come back with some of this. Around these edges, maybe, really, I'm actually up to the edge on this one, so I may go ahead and make it an edge. Again, the goal is not perfection. If you look at our original inspiration, these overlap and run into each other and they're not perfect squares. I'm not trying to get an absolute straight, perfect square. You could tape each square off if you really wanted that, but that's not my goal and that was not Condensi's goal. I'm trying to channel his playful experimental goal that he had here with working with these. I actually find it easier to make these straight lines with my round brush so I might swap back and forth. I really like that, but what if we added in say, a touch of orange. Maybe some yellow. Look, we got our first square. Wow. Maybe a dot of something right there in the center. That's super fun. Let's just again, vary your brush pressure so that you get some white and skinny loops there. They don't all have to be the same opacity or the same size. You can have some skinny ones and some whiter ones. I'm just picking colors at random and just seeing how it makes me feel. I really like how that color right there was. I don't know what that was, but I loved it. That was pretty. Oh, it must have been that one there because that's pretty. I don't want a blue edge next to a blue edge, so I'm not going to blue edge that one. I'm going to come back with a different color there. Oh, I like that color a lot. Let's take the round brush and get that color. What color was that? That was the grayish blue six oh one. I like grayish blue six oh one, grayish blue six oh one for the wind. See how that gives me a little more control if I'm using the different brush you could also use. It's got a oh, no, a little brush piece that let go in there. There we go. You could also use a square brush with a square edge. If that is easier for you to play and experiment with your different supplies. It's not about being perfect. It's about the play and the experimenting, which is why this master study appealed to me so much because I'm all about the play and experimenting. That's what I enjoy in the painting process. That's what I try to do when I show up at my table is what can we create today? I'm not worried about trying to make a masterpiece, which is what I find frustrating is trying to create something amazing and then being stuck or not creating what you thought. So I let go of that expectation. My little rings are running into each other more than they are staying to find, but I'm okay with that, too. That's part of experimenting. I'm just going to keep on maybe with this round brush because those are working pretty good. Okay, that's looking super cool, actually. Then we can come back in and define circles if we disappear or circles as we're going. So don't get hung up on, oh, my circle went away because we're going to add layers we're going to let that dry and then add layers on top. So don't despair. We're going to get there. Hi are more defined, so it almost feels like he's using maybe some mediums that did get an opportunity to perhaps dry in between, but I'm not looking for that, so I'm good with the play like we're doing it. Master studies for me, I don't want that green there, I don't think are all about, yeah, I do. I do want the green there. Learning the master's techniques and philosophies and how they looked at painting and doing the different things that they did. But then looking at it and evaluating how can we take that learning into our own work? It's not necessarily to duplicate or make exactly what they made. Some master studies are, that could be your goal, but my goal is to learn methods and what drove them to create in the way that they created and then embody that. That's where I get interested, which is why when I do master studies like the color palette one, we're studying the color palettes, not exactly what they painted. And then the lemt one, we were studying the patterns that he used and how we could maybe work those into our own work. And then with this one, we're studying the paintings, but I like his ideas and his philosophies and what drove him to create and the way that he created and how did he get where he got. So that is in the different things that I look for and take away from a master study in a way that I've learned something that I can actually take forward with me. And if you don't want your squares running into each other, like I just did, um, let one square dry before you do the one that bumps up next to it. I just went straight on into it. I'm okay with that bumping in because it's not about Exact imperfection. It's about exact perfection. It's about the imperfections for me, and I think it's kind of cool when they do funky stuff you did not expect. Okay, so thinking maybe a green because we got that blue. Even though that last circle there was green, we can do a different opacity so that it's different. I'm just having some fun with some colors here. But if you have any areas that really pull up terribly, you could just take a tissue and pick up some of that color. We're getting to the very last one and I wasn't being super specific in how I picked up color and where I put them, but it is interesting to see just where you gravitate towards as you're going and what you end up with. So going to do this last one and then we'll let this layer dry and then we'll be ready to just add some fun layering marks on top of this. This was actually super cool even doing this part of it because it's beautiful just like it is. Okay, so once you get all your squares painted, not looking for perfection, looking for interest, looking for each one to be different enough from each other that you can tell it is a different square in there. Mine are a little less vivid than our inspiration piece, but that's what I was going for because I actually want to end up with a piece that perhaps I would frame as a tribute to doing a master study to Kandinsky. Okay, so let's let this dry and I'll be back. 11. Concentric Circles Mark Making: All right, we are dry and now it's time to pull out every favorite thing you've ever wanted to experiment with and just see what we could then add to this as marks or lines. We could come back in. I'm interested in, say, some line making. Got some different pins up here. These are just some prisma color fine liners, so we could do some lines. I've just picked one. This is the 03, and now we could just come back in and redefine some circles if we wanted to do that. I like that as this square, not necessarily trying to redefine the lines at all for the squares themselves, but it is fun to come through and say, Okay, for this one, I'm going to add in some circles in the black fine line pin. That's fun. We could also come in with some neo coolorraons. We could come in with some oil pastels. We could come in with acrylic markers. The possibilities are endless. This is some of my neolor two crayons and I'm going to stick in the same color palette. But now I can come through and add to my circles in there with some different colors like that. Come over here with some you're fine. So now is the time to really look at these and start experimenting and playing and don't worry too hard about what color goes where unless this is an actual final art piece that you're creating, which for me in a master study, that's not the goal. The goal is to learn from the master, to take from his techniques, to get excited about the way he created and see how can I add that into my own process? It's about the learning part of that for me. I like that, doing some little outside square work almost to the circle with a crayon like that. I like that. Then I've also got old pastels. I've got acrylic markers, maybe I'll pull the markers out because these colors do fit in. These are the Artyx markers. I like them because I have the I think it's called the anime set, but I like the colors in this particular set. They're not the bright bright colors. They are more muted. This is something where maybe I could come in and maybe even mark make. Maybe we'll do some dots or some different shaped somethings just to add a variation, like our own little take on, say, a project that we're doing. It doesn't have to be something that jumps off the page at us, but it's certainly something that could add just a few fun details in a way that feels good. It's all about going where it feels good and riding that moment and really channeling our inner Kandinsky, looking at the way the colors interact with each other. I love, love, the dot thing. Those are fantastic. Oh my goodness. This is a pretty color here and I might come in again with maybe just something out over on this one. Just something fun. Maybe up here. Because you do it once, you want to do it a couple times so that it actually goes in with what you're doing. Doesn't look like a random one off mistake or something. Okay, I love that. I love that. Oh, my goodness. I'm getting excited because this is coming out. Super cool. And maybe I want some oil pietlls or we could even do temper sticks. We could do any kind of pencils that you've got. I like the polychroma pencils now that I just thought of pencils, I do have pencils over here. So the polychroma pencils are oil based, and I like them because of the colors and the smoothness that they draw on top of other things. And say for instance, I might take an orange. And this would work in the same way for me on this that the No coolor two crayons are working, so I wouldn't necessarily say that you would need both in a project like this, but it is interesting. I like how smooth they are. I like the variation that we can get by adding just some other interesting materials. So much fun. This might be my favorite project I've ever done for a master study just because it's all the elements that I already like. It's the mark making. It's the concentric circles, which I actually already enjoy so this could be a fade fade for me. I like that. I like the way that the pink looks on the green gold color. Start noticing a few of these as you're going. Is there something particular that you're like, oh, I really, really like the way, that's doing compared to the color I just set it on right there, that's super gorgeous, maybe even with just some lines, not necessarily all the way around. I love that one. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. There are a lot of color choices in the polychroma so I don't feel like I'm limited in my choices. I feel like there's something in all parts of this that we could pull out and utilize. We might do even some interesting scribble kind getting in with some of the interesting things that he puts more in his work abstracting a square. That one's pretty. Oh, I love it. I love it. Oh, I love those. Alright. So those are fun. So don't limit yourself on what you pull out and consider using, pull out all the stops. Just pull it all out. And then white pasca might be fun on here, little white dots, possibly. Maybe even some oil pastels, which I've already got out over here because I'm already thinking of those I love them. Now on an oil pastel, I would spray this with a fixative at the end, the senile oil pistle fixatives so that these actually dry because I do want them to actually dry. Then this is an opportunity for us to really pull some structure back in. If we've lost all the structure of our piece, we've lost all the structure of this piece here. Now is the time to maybe pull structure back in with a supply like an oil pistle but what you don't want to do with an oil pistle is this probably needs to be the top layer because you're not going to really be able to layer more on top of the oil pastels in the way that you can some of these other pastels that we've used. That's a crazy color and that should have been introduced. Now I feel like I need to put a little of that somewhere else so that it didn't look like a random mistake. So go ahead if you've got something weird, that you're like, oops, spread that around and just make it part of the piece and just don't even be mad about it. Because in the end, are you even going to notice it? Probably not. The goal of this is the entire piece when you're done, not the individual piece as you were going. So it's more like stand back and look at it and say, Okay, that did not detract in a way that I thought it was going to and then just make some peace with it. Oh, I like that. I love these. What else do we got? What else do we got? We got this greenish color here. I feel like I need to come back in with some of that. I love it. I don't know if I love that, but we did it anyway. Oh, my gosh, maybe I want it down here. Oh, I do like it down there. But you can see how now we can bring some definition back in where we've lost it. If you really lost what's going on in that circle, that square, you can pull some of that back in. It's not gone, gone. And really, the more crazy that you make something like this, the better it probably is gonna be when you're done. Just, you know, have some fun with it. If there's a color in there that you just love love, and you're like, oh, I need to bring more of that out, then go in and do some little detail work and just pull that color back in there. If you've lost it somehow in the range of all the color mixing, pull that back in. Go back in and add some and introduce that color back in there somehow with the pastels or the pencils or maybe with some more watercolor paint. Um Let's see what we got that we can do down here. I like the texture and the vibrancy that oil pastels give you on top of, say, watercolor. So that's why you see me going back and re emphasizing some spaces with the oil pastel because I love the difference in the intensity and the fun that it gives a piece. I enjoy that extra pop on the top of that. Whatever your favorite bits in your artwork are, pull that into this. It doesn't have to all be something that the master used. This is pulling this into how you enjoy working and the bits that you enjoy pulling into your study. I'm really loving that, thinking that this could be my piece, so let's go ahead and peel the tape and see what our concentric circle looks like for today. There's more. You could come back in and keep working it. Actually, now that I've said that, I do feel like this one needs a little something extra that it didn't get. I don't know. Let's see. You could continue working on them, but I don't want you to spend forever on this one project. It's meant to be fun and just see. And you can do this in 1 million different color ways. It's so fun. And I have pencil marks on my outside edges because the first one I drew was crooked. I didn't want this to be crooked. So in a case where you've done that, once you peel your tape, if you come back with a high polymer eraser, we can just pull those lines off of our edge. This is one of the better ones for working on watercolor paper without damaging the paper, but really cleaning pencil marks off. So this is the kind I'd recommend the high polymer. This is the pentail high polymer one, but it gives you the cleanest cleanup. In my opinion. Because I've got several erasers, but some of them just do not do the job. And I didn't have to tape it off, but I like peeling tape and the piece being a final presentation with a white rim around it because I don't think on condenses, he might have been doing that on Canvas, though, when we were doing that on paper. Okay. Oh, my gosh. Look at our concentric circles. Holy Moly. That is super cool. I love the project that we ended up with, and I think that we embodied the project that we were attempting to do and in the spirit of experimentation and play and color, which is what Kandinsky did. I'm super excited with how my concentric circle end piece came out. I'm going to totally frame this I'm delighted. I'm going to spray it with the oil pastel fixative just to make sure that sets up, and then I think we're done. I don't even think it needs any extra marks or details or anything. I hope you enjoy this project. This is one of the most fun things that I think in a project I've done. I hope you enjoy this and get as excited as I do about doing some fun concentric circles for yourself, and I'll see you guys in the next project. 12. Dynamic Composition: Thirty: This project, let's concentrate on's 30 painting. What this is is 30 squares of black and white boxes with the opposite in some mark making. It was just a fun exercise in testing out different ways to come up with some abstract marks. This project explores Kandinsky's approach to movement, rhythm, and balance through dynamic composition. His painting 30 from 1937 is an excellent example of how he combined geometric and organic shapes and lines and color contrast to create a sense of energy and motion. Through this exercise, you'll experiment with spontaneous mark making, layering to build a balanced yet expressive abstract composition. You can choose to do this project in black and white or a color. So suggested materials. I've actually been playing with the different blacks that I have, and in the end, I've decided that the acrylic paint is going to be the one that I want to work with. These are Higgins Black Ink. This one is the kerataki zero black, which is supposed to be ultimate black. They just they kind of thin down and look gray in the way that I'm going to be moving them around on the paper to make a square. The acrylic paints really did give us the cleanest look. Suggested mediums, acrylic, watercolor, mixed media, watercolor paper, mixed media paper or canvas. I'm going to be working on watercolor paper personally. Um, different tools that you can consider brushes, palette knives, sponges, or even unconventional tools like credit cards or fabric for texture, and other supplies masking tape, a spray bottle for water effects, or collage elements. Some of this assumes that you're going to vary off of his original design, which in a master study, you might choose to do his original design or you might choose to veer off of it, but take in the different elements that he incorporated. So your choice there. So prepare your canvas and your mindset. Kandinsky approached painting like composing music. Think of this as creating a visual symphony where different shapes and colors harmonize. Start with a loose gestural underpainting using diluted paint or soft pastel marks. Begin by placing three or four dominant shapes to serve as focal points. Consider the balance of circles, triangles, and organic forms to create contrast. Think about asymmetry, Kandinsky's hallmark to add dynamic tension, use free flowing lines to connect elements in the composition, try different line weights, thin and delicate versus bold and assertive. Add marks that mimic musical notations, dots, dashes, sweeping strokes. You could possibly introduce color and layering, choose a limited color palette to create cohesion, work in translact parent layers to build depth and complexity, if you want, experiment with overlapping colors and shapes to create a sense of motion. These are all just ideas on how you could venture off of this painting into some other elements to your art. Um, you could incorporate texture and contrast and then step back and adjust and assess whether it looks symmetrical, feels balanced. Does it have visual rhythm? Do your eyes move across the canvas naturally, and then you can add any final accents that you need to finish it off? Bonus variations. You can do a spontaneous composition challenge, close your eyes, make random marks, and build a structured composition from them. You could do layered collage experiment and cut out shapes from painted paper and arrange them before hearing. You could do color and energy studies. Create two variations, one using only colors and using only cool colors and the other one with warm colors to see how color impacts the rhythm. Kandinsky's work is about feeling the movement of a piece rather than over planning it. Let yourself explore spontaneity, contrast, and motion in your own way. Then, of course, when finished, please come back and share those. I'm going to probably stay fairly close to the original in that I'm going to do black and white squares, and I'm working on a nine by 12 piece of watercolor paper, so what I'm going to do is mark off squares. It's nine see if we were eight by 12, we'd really be even in our squares. But I think I'm going to do the nine by 12, just like I did on the concentric circles and we'll have 12 squares instead of 30, but that will definitely get us into our piece in an interesting way. And I'm marking just a little off of my mark because I'm going to take this off again like I did the concentric circle. I'm just going to go ahead and draw my grid because we can use the high polymer eraser to erase marks off the edges when we get there. I'm just marking it slightly off of that 3 " to account for my tape. So just visually looking at it, it'll look even because I'm taping just a tiny bit of the edge. I like using a little mini T square because it makes it faster than trying to line up lines. I love a little T square. Oh, my gosh. I didn't even know they had many little T squares like that, and, you know, I did drafting in college, so I like a T square just to really simplify how fast you can get a straight line without marking it, marking it, lining those up, eyeballing it. You can just get the edge of the paper to do it. And I didn't even know they had a little mini ones. I just haven't looked. And I found one at the at the art store one day, and I was like, Oh, my goodness, I gotta have that. All right. I'm going to be using acrylic paint. I've just pulled out my blkmtacrylic paints because I like them. I use them a lot. They are a higher quality student grade paint, we'll call it because they're nicer than a craft paint, but they're a lot less expensive than a nice paint that like your artist grade paints, but they're very pigmented and you get a lot of good color. I'm going to just go ahead with my Princeton umbrella 58 inch square a tip here and we're just going to paint some black squares and then come back and paint some white squares. I could just leave the paper white, but I don't want to leave the paper white. I'm just going to go ahead and Oh, my gosh, already got into my white there. But I'm going to go ahead and come back and you could tape off each one and really get exact. It's really not about perfection. It's about catching the spirit of what he was doing. So it's not perfect, don't despair. I'm going to paint every other square black and every other square white and get us started and then we'll be ready to come back and playfully hopefully playfully make on top. We'll see. But, you could take these off if you feel you want them perfect perfect. Any way that makes you do the project, enjoy the project, and when you're all done, you're proud of the project, whatever that is for you. Wonky is fine with me. I like wonky. I spent so many years using graphic, using CAD software to design blueprint kitchens and bits and stuff that now, if I never see a straight line again, I'm okay with that. I get way more enjoyment out of the play and the crookedness than I ever thought I would. So I embrace that now. All right. We've got all our black and white or black squares painted. I'm going to let these dry and then I'm going to paint the white squares in the exact same way, and then I will be ready to add some fun mark baking so I will be back. Right, so I've got my black and white squares painted. It's not perfect. If you need perfect, feel free to tape them off and go slow with painting them. Then I've got my inspiration piece over here and I'm going to just pick. I've got 4812 of the 30s. I'd be doing this set or this set or pick out a selection of these and just see what you could get. And if you want to work with paint pen, I might work with a Posca marker on some of these black areas we could test out, is that going to work? Or not. And actually, it does look like it'll work okay I shake these up and really get that paint nice and thick. I think that actually would work pretty good. You can work with paint. I've got some paint up here also. It's just all about creating something fun in the spirit of what he's created. I like this I like a lot of these. I really like this line thing here also. I think I'm going to create the lines. I've got a dot there, so whatever we do is going to have a dot right there. But I think I'm going to create the lines and create that little grid on our sample piece there. Again, if you need straight lines, feel free to use a ruler and do however it is that's going to make you enjoy your project. This is a really nice way to do a sampler of favorite mark making, also, just playing and seeing what you can create with some of your own favorite marks in a grid like this, what feels good, what you would put next to each other. Would you do this in a set of colors rather than black and white? I love it. I also really like this organic shape that he has got there. Why don't we where we've already got a white dot here come in with this organic shape, something similar to that. It doesn't have to be exact, but something fun and come down and come up and come down let's come over here and over this away. He's got some of these little things. Then this came over this away. Sure. And then we've got some fun little circles drawn in there, but I'm going to make them dots. You could use a fineer pen if you want it to be a finer line than what I've ended up creating here a fine line. One would have been a good choice because then we could have got really fine lines, but I'm good. I really like this water and half eagle and arrowhead looking piece. So now that I've talked about the thin line one, do that. Let's just do that right here. I'm going to start off with like that big thing, and then we've got about right here and then another little triangle. These go off in a feather shape. That was more of a triangle. Then we've got this one little arrow shape here. Mine looks more like a jug that maybe you would collect water. We'll call mine a water collecting jug. Then we've got something that implies a stream or water floating down. That's fun. Then let's see what else we got on here that we I like this one here just because of the movement and the marks and the lines. Maybe I'll put that here. We've got this that goes out this way with some different lines crossing over. And we've got this one that kind of comes out down here. Wow. Again, some random lines, and then we've got a series of dots and a square. Right, that's super fun. Definitely is interesting. I hope these are dry. I really like this one, where we've got part of a horseshoe. I'm going to do this down here. We're going to have two lines. I got part of a horseshoe. Maybe we've got a line and then we've got some pieces that come off of that. Then above that, we've got some dots that should have been taller because now I've got too much space up there. Then we've got some different size lines over here. Let's go ahead and put us some lines. Then we've got some coming out this way, a little different sized ones. Then a little square down here. Because I have left space above this, I think I'm going to fill that in by going up a little bit different than what he's got going on here I might come up a tiny bit above this one here. You're looking to fill the square, be shape and balance and not be too far off of any of it, so it's way out of bounds, but don't fawn if it's perfect or not. Okay, so because I did kind of that one over there, kind of wondering do we want this one with the great big Prinss there and a little music thing. I kind of like that. Why not? Let's just do that one. We're going to do this with the large kind of I apostrophes. We've got some lines coming out here. It's a music thing because he was all about music and art. We've got a square down here and a line, and we've got two lines and then we've got a curve and a line and line and a tall line and then a curve over here and a little line and a tall line and a little line. It's like a music grid there. Now we've got all our black and white. Now we're going to come back in with a black one I'm just using a scrap piece of paper to get mine started. I like this grid. I really like this grid here and I like this line thing. I like these swirly things. I like this swirly thing with some lines. I just like a lot of these actually. I might counteract this one right here with a grid. Let's just go ahead and do that. A Alright. And then I really liked I like the swirly things. I'm feeling swirly thing here. Let's do that over here. You got to do little noises with that. It kind of goes with that like. I kind of fit with that. I think that he would approve of that with the music and the lines and the noise. Okay, so I'm loving that. I really like kind of this one over here with those funky swirly things. Maybe we'll do that here. So we've got W let's just make some noise. I know he would approve. Got some little eyelash things popping off of these almost. I got a little half curve. Got some little thing here with some lines coming off the side. And then a dot and a dot. Okay. Now, that looks like a little bit like a dragon. Do you feel dragon out of that or a snake? Could be a snake, dragon or a snake. Okay, I like that. Feeling good there. I'm really digging this big Wu zigzag. So I'm feeling zigzaggy. Let's do that up here. So we've got, a. Dude, you got to make noises with me because it adds to the whole feeling that we are trying to convey here with his music and sound and that whole little I really adds to the experience. Now we've got our little W there. I feel like I need something else. I'm missing something here. I'm not completely centered, but I'm going to go with it. I actually really like the big arrow that's facing up. So let's do that. I'm going to do a big arrow facing up. I go right here. This is a whole lot more fun with a posca pen than I think I would have had with a paint brush just in case you're wondering, which I know that he did not have a posca pen available to him, these would have all been painted. But in the sake of, I want to sit and have fun in an afternoon and play. I really think if he had had these tools at his disposal, he definitely would have embraced them. Let's get two of those little marks there. We got a little square over here and I got a little dot up here, little square dot. I like that. Then we just need one more. What else are we feeling here? I'm thinking that this square thing is fun, let's just do that. We're going to do a square right here. You can do all your own marks in here. You certainly don't have to follow his, but I'm just having some fun here experimenting with some of the things that he created and enjoying that and trying not to put my hand in them. We've got that. We've got this triangle thing coming out of here. Then we've got two lines right here and a line here and a line here. I really feel like on some of it, if we do something that he did, we really get the feel of what his abstraction was. Whereas on some of the other things, I like to change it up a little bit and use his ideas in a way that works with my art. Then we've got this little thing here and it goes off like that. What like that? Oh, my gosh, that was the last one. Look at there. We have a fun all black and white. Little thing here. And in the spirit of his piece, I think we did excellent. Let's peel our tape and see what we got. This has actually been super fun. Now I can see doing this project with your own mark making and ideas in different color ways, definitely, like we did with the concentric circles and just seeing what could we create? This would be a great art journal exercise to do different color ways and having a mark making library. Again, I like the high polymer eraser to get rid of any pencil lines that we have outside in our framing since I drew it before I taped down. Cleans it up quite nicely. A lot of the other erasers do not, you could probably use the needed eraser too. I've got one of those over here also. Alright. Oh, my gosh, check it out. That is our version of the painting 30. I hope you have a whole lot of fun with this project. This was actually more fun than I even was anticipating, and I thoroughly enjoyed looking at his different marks and saying, Okay, how can I create that and see what I can come up with?es hope you enjoy this project. Definitely come back and share these with me and I'll see you guys in the next project. 13. Abstracted Landscape: Houses in Munich: Project, I thought we would take a look at houses in Munich. So this is a gorgeous painting. I love how simplistic the buildings are. I like how he lines things in black. I like how there are some things painted in maybe not colors that are normal, maybe the sky. Well, I guess it could be a sunset, but a lot of times he'll paint things that seem to be should be one color, like say, a green tree, but he'll paint in a different color, maybe it's a blue or tree or a green or red tree or something else. He'll paint things in colors that are a little different. So this project focuses on re imagining a cityscape using Kandinsky's approach to abstraction. Bold colors, geometric structures, houses in Munich, 1908 to 1909 captures his transition from representational to abstract art, emphasizing simplified forms and vibrant contrast rather than realistic details. In this exercise, you'll create an abstracted landscape inspired by his unique style. The project guide is here to give you some extra ideas and things going forward. You can paint houses in Munich for your project, which is probably what I'm going to do. Um, but you could also have a picture of a cityscape. A lot of the European cities have some really cool rows of buildings that would be appropriate for something like this. You could do your Town Square, wherever it is that you live. Just get creative and maybe the first painting you do is the painting I'm doing. And maybe future paintings, you'll use this guide to push you a little further. So suggested materials. Acrylic watercolor of collage or collage. I'm using acrylic paint today for this. Services, watercolor paper, I'm using watercolor paper. I'll be using the Honamle paper, which is my favorite paper to use. I always have a pad of that available. And then tools. You'll need brushes, palette knives, maybe, fine tip pins, pastels for details, your choice there, and then maybe some scissors, glue, if you using collage, masking tape for clean edges. And what I've done here on this one is, I think I want the cityscape to be within the page and a great big border. So I have taped close to 2 ". It's probably an inch and three quarters because I have two rows of tape there. I thought that would be cool. Choose your landscape, inspiration, select a cityscape or an architectural reference, a photo of your town, a famous skyline, an imagined village. Observe basic shapes rather than small details, think about reducing buildings to geometric forms. Sketch a simplified composition. Lightly draw the most essential shapes, rectangles, triangles, curves, arrange the elements in a way that feels dynamic rather than rigid and experiment with overlapping structures and exaggerated angles. Introduce Kandinsky's color approach. Instead of natural colors, pick bold contrasting hues. Example, blue trees, yellow houses, red sky, consider color harmony and emotional impact, warm versus cool contrast, and block in colors with loose brush strokes focusing on energy rather than precision. Add lines in movement use black or dark outlines to define certain edges, much like Kandinsky did in his early works. You see, he's outlined everything in some dark color there, experiment with mixed media, and then step back and adjust as needed. Painting does your painting capture a sense of structure yet abstraction, are the colors vibrant and expressive rather than realistic? Then consider adding small accents or mark making to enhance the piece. Bonus variations, nighttime cityscape, collage experiment and dramatic angles, distort perspectives. That's pretty cool. Then some final thoughts and share your work. Kandinsky's landscapes weren't about reality. They were about mood and structure and energy. As you abstract your cityscape, allow yourself to play with bold color choices. When finished, share your work and observe how others have approached to abstract landscapes. All right. Super cool. We're going to go for this one. Um I'm going to compare. This one's a tiny bit wider, but not really. This one just making sure I've got all the pieces in here. I'm going to take a pencil and because I'm working in acrylic paint, I have picked out some bold colors here. I'm just using the Blick mat paint. I like these because they are very high quality, nicely pigmented high quality student grade paint. They're less expensive than, say, artist grade paint for doing studies and all the things I like to do in my sketchbooks and play. There's a ton of colors. So if you like playing with convenience colors, which I do, there's plenty of colors to pick from, and they are not much more expensive than a craft paint. I'd rather use something like this than a craft paint if you're looking for paints to use and keeping the cost down. I've got blue violet, deep, deep blue, red deep, orange deep, and yellow oxide as my color palette. Those two blues are very similar, but I can add white and black because I always also have white and black in the mat paints. A another reason why I like these is because they are matte. They are not shiny, which to me is a bonus because I don't like shiny paints. I do a lot of times mix in gesso to my paints, which makes them more spreadable. I might put some gesso down here, maybe some white gesso. I like the liquitex gesso, makes them more spreadable, and gives them some nice grit. If you wanted to do more pastel work or other things on top of the paint, you very easily could do that. That is my color choices. Then of course, I've got some lovely Filberts around in the Princeton umbrella. Line and I'll just be working with some number sixes. This round one is a number ten, and this Filbert this is a flat 158 inch flat. I just got a variety of choices here for my paint brushes. Then let's go ahead and sketch out a little simplified city scene and then we'll paint that. I've got my inspiration piece. You could work with any piece that you get that you've already got a photo of. We've got a little road right here. And then I got a few people sitting out here. We could say there's some people out here if we wanted to put the people out here, I'm just simplifying the forms here. There's some people walking. I'm not trying to get anything specific there, just the representation that there are people sitting there. And then it looks like there's a buggy, like a cart or horse and buggy, so I'll come back to that kind of wanting to just get a some buildings out here without being too super exact, doesn't have to be perfect. We're not looking for perfection here. We are looking to observe and just get an idea of how they create when we do a master study like this, just learning to simplify shapes, which is why on something like this, it might be easier to look at one that's already been simplified so that the next one that you do, you can be like, Oh, okay, I see how I could simplify that. Putting in some of these. Windows, just giving myself some placeholders there's a little fireplace off of this one and this one comes around. Then we've got coming down here, And then there's some kind of tree or something in here, so we might put that tree in there. And then there's other things kind of on front and some little trees over here. And some little bushes or trees over here, down on my thing. But again, it's not about perfection. It's about just capturing a mood and a feel and then this up here is sky. Then I think we've got enough in there to at least get us started and then you can continue adding details as you're painting. Now I'm going to just start playing and mixing and moving some stuff around. Feeling like we've got some green down here at the bottom. I didn't pull a green, so we could very easily make a green with some blue and yellow. And I could put some gesso in there. It's probably not going to be a green green because that yellow is a puky color. I might pull some more green out. I'm just going to start laying some color down. It's not about perfection. I might come back and put these people in after the fact. But it's about just getting stuff moving, go fast, lay those marks down, have some other colors in those marks. It doesn't have to be just the one color. That's way too much of that color. This is a good way to test out what are your paints going to do for you? What is it when you're mixing that you're going to get the layers and stuff you can keep layering on here. It's just about the play for me. Then we've got coming up through there, we've got a little bit of this here in this building. Maybe a little bit over here in this tree. Then I might just get another Filbert handy because I've got reds and oranges and stuff going here, so maybe we'll mix in a little of this yellow with this orange for the top of this building. You can spend as much time as you need playing and working these, but I want to go a little faster and just kind of work it a little bit faster and not spend, give yourself, 30 minutes to go a little faster and just see what can you create? Can I need a smaller I need a smaller brush. That's not going to get me what I want. Let's do some sky up here. Maybe a bigger brush that's not going to give you what you want is actually the better way to go. Now that I think about it, maybe that's the way to get yourself to loosen up and be abstract about stuff because if you're too close to it and your brush is too small, you're just less likely to be loose and abstracte and fast and motion and movement and getting all that in there. Things to think about as I'm painting. Okay, I like that, actually. Let's do this down here. It's a little bit of pink and a little bit of blue and a little bit of red. So, this would be a fun project like set yourself a timer and say, well, how fast can I go and still get what I'm trying to get? Can I do a fun painting in 30 minutes? Can I do it in an hour? Can I do it in 5 minutes? Try five minute one. That might be fun. I'm going to pick up a brush here. It actually has some black coming through the road, so we're going to define some spots here with some black. I could have done the black after this dries, but that's okay. We're just going to go ahead and work it a little bit as we're going. Now, I might come back up here. I think I'm going to leave that one mixing that one all into lots of stuff there. I kind of need a little tiny brush. Maybe I'll pick up a little one. These are just the random brushes that are up there on my brush thing. Nothing specific here. It's actually some blue right here, so let's throw some blue in. I actually need that brush to be stiffer than that. Let's see what else I got up here in my random little brush dash. I want a small stiff brush or something that'll at least give me this size actually for some of these black details. Let me pull that one down. That's a sketch box Filbert number four. I think, I want this one. That's what I want. This one is a little corneln 18 11, three eighths of an inch. I think this is what I want. Let's just put that Felbird up there. I want it to be stiffer. I need some stiffness. This is more almost like an oil paint brush. It probably is. But I need that stiffness. I want the looseness and the stiffness and I want to be able to get some stuff going in here but scrub my paint around. As you're playing with these, these will be how you discover what's going to work for this painting? What do I need this brush to do? And just play with your different brushes and stuff that you've got and just see what can this do for me? It's really fun if you're not usually into representational, the buildings and stuff, I like more organic. Things and just working my way around something. This is really fun for testing you out on something that you're not normally doing, working with brushes that you don't normally work with and just playing around and seeing what can you create in a different style. Even though I do mostly abstract mixed media work, I do like abstracted landscapes and stuff like that. If I ever created something that I really loved, I definitely would be tempted to framing and hang it up because I could be like, I made that. Okay. I need a smaller one than that. Where's that little one? Let's do this one here. To, it'll teach you something like detail brushes and is the brush that you pick the right brush? Maybe not. Maybe you need a smaller one like I need. Then we might put some of these little windows in here and they're fast and not real super specific. So now I'm just kind of mixing around some colors and getting some stuff going. This one's got black on it. Let me get this off there. I want to come back up to that kind of fun orange sky up there and get a little tighter in on a roof, maybe. I just throwing some more color on there. It's not perfect. I'm not trying to get perfect. It's more like when you look back, when you stand back, do you get the abstraction that you're seeing, just the geometric form and abstract look there. Right now I'm still blocking out large abstract squares. Then in a moment we will come back in and it doesn't have to be exactly identical to his, but I'm trying to get at least close. I'm just letting this paint really mix up real good on my brush rather than using a clean brush because for me that helps me stay loose and not concerned about the colors as much. But you could separate out your colors if you needed to really be more exact about it. I got a tree in here, so let's pull this tree. And we got this bush over here. Oop. I've got some more. I got another building back there. I can add in. And that building's kind of yellowy then we might not can tell that's trees and bushes, but it's not a big deal. We've got a big yellow. We might even need to let some layers dry to add onto that as we're going. If you're not getting enough color and definition where you want it, I'm going to put some of this back here on the road. Like that. Then I want to come back in with maybe my black brush, start adding in some details. If you really want to keep yourself from overthinking it, put yourself on a timer and just start moving and going faster and just seeing what can I create in this limited amount of time Okay, now I'm putting in windows and stuff, and we'll come back in with some other little mark making here in a moment. It's almost like he used the black to really define, I'll put a building here or this is a separation. It's how he figured out adding in separations when he was creating. This has got some other little marks here. Let's just put some of those in there. I got a little pinky mark up here. Get some of this There we go. A little pinky mark. Got some other little marks here on this one. Then we've got some green up here on these. We've also got some yellow as little sashes up here, so maybe we'll do some of those. What else do we got? We've got some other little colors down here on this one. B I don't have nearly as much brightness as he's got on his that might be something where we come back and add a whole other layer on here later, adding in some brightness. I got some lightness coming in here. Maybe we'll come back on the road with some little bit lighter. Got some here that I didn't outline in the black. I need a green green and we can come back on here with some mixed media. If we need to come back on top of that, that would be fun. We've got some street lamp right here. That's fun. Then he goes back in with some blue. Details here. Maybe I'll pick up some blue. You got a little bit of blue. And we had a car right there or some kind of buggy. Okay, my buggy is being drawn by a Datsun. And then we've got some wheels on that buggy. An extra leg on the dog. Then we've got some people down here, so I could come back in. Walking in the dark, we can put some more color on them. Getting a little bit of maybe some implication of some clothes. Then we had some people sitting down over here. I mean, I don't have to be perfect. Just a little implication that something's there is fine. And then you can sit back and start looking like, how did you do versus your original? It's the very first abstracted landscape that I've ever done. It was fun to experiment and play. It's not what I would normally think to do, but I'm going to peel the tape and just see where did we even end up? We could keep adding details, we could let this dry and keep adding stuff on top of it. Matter of fact, I might go ahead and just dry this some because we could bring some brightness back. We could put in some details, but it's not really what this exercise was about for me. It was about abstracting shape, just kind of seeing like what is in the frame. How did he outline stuff versus what I might normally do? Just kind of interesting to experiment there with that. Let's just peel the tape and see where we're at. And this is something where if you like abstracted landscapes, then you could go around taking pictures in your own city and make this a project. This would be a great 100 day project. Set yourself a 20 minute timer and then start abstracting your shapes down to some basic shapes and color and see. What did you get? What could you end up with? And this is why I wanted it to have a great big frame, too, because to me, some of these landscapes look really better with a frame, and it's like, ha ha, you're finished. If it's framed out really nicely. Let's just see. I always have one project that's like little wonky. When I did the clempt one, I had a wonky one, the tree. When I did the color palettes of the masters. Some of those were less wonky because it was still in my style. How fun is that, though? I wasn't too bad for a first go with, say a 20 minute timer on us. His a little brighter. Now I can look back at the different things and say, Okay, he's a little brighter. I've got a few more details in there. I could come back with some other mark making and goodies on top, pencil, color pencil, No color to crayon, cause at this point, I could let this finish drying and then I could come back in here. And maybe start adding some more detail to make it look a little more more depth than defined because at this point, it looks a little flat and maybe it needs the extra definition of more color and playing with some No Color to crayons might give that to us. You can really see some of that too when you dry the painting and then you're like, now I can see what else I need and where else I can go with this and start to play and experiment the lighter one. You can start to define some elements a little better, just getting more color in there. My paint's not completely dry, but what I like about the mat paint is you still have a surface to draw on, whereas with shiny acrylic paint, you don't. Even though I've got a little bit of gesso in here, it's not a lot, but I've still got enough that it's going to let me draw on here with other materials. I like that about it. I actually like that house a lot better now that we did that. Let's do it's a some yellow here. It's given me some of that brightness that we're missing. Don't be afraid once you've painted if you're like, still dark and dull. Add some stuff on top to bring some of that color back out for yourself and mix the colors because more than one color in there will give it that depth that you're missing. I like that better. Brought that out a little better. Again, I'm not taking my time, I'm not going slow. I'm still working a little fast. I'm looking for energy for movement. I don't want to get hung up on perfection. And I want it to look choppy and kind of fun. Oh, I like that. Okay, so what do we want to do here? I need some blue in there. How about this blue? I still got some wet paint. I'm moving some of that white around, but that's okay. This is definitely adding the extra that I needed just with the paint itself was super flat and that kind of bothered me. But now, now I'm getting the fun variations and differences that I wanted that we definitely see over here in his piece that I was missing. I mean, that's another interesting observation that you'll do as you're going. Why is yours flat? What can you do to give it more energy and depth and maybe mark making with crayons on top of it is what you're needing. Then this, I want to go back to this red color. Well, maybe the orange And then that tree needed green, but I think my tree is wet. But I can come over here to this one and add some in here and I'm trying my best to stay in the frame, but I might get out of the frame accidentally. Then too, down here with all this movement that we've got on this bottom part, we can come back in down there too and start marking in that. So what you might do is block it all off in the paint like I just did and then come back with crayons or color pencils or posca pen or anything that you've got to then start adding some details and color back in because that's making me much happier now with our landscape is getting these other bits in there that maybe my big fat paint brush wasn't allowing me to get. I love adding the details now. I'm getting some good fun variations now. So that's super fun and we got a little more close to the brighter color that's in there. It's not about perfection. It's not about getting it exactly like your piece that you're getting. And if you really want to kind of change things up, you take pictures around your town and come back and abstract those buildings into some geometric shapes with dark lines for windows. It's just about playing and abstracting it down to something that you're like, that's fun. Then when you stand way back, you're like, that's a city center. That's the goal there. And so there was a tree in here. I still got some wet paint, but might not even be able to tell that's a tree, but we've got the tree somehow in there. Now, there we go. I don't think that was too bad for say a little 30 minute challenge, lay your big blocking out with your acrylic paint, and then come back on top and abstract it out with some brighter color with some crayon or something. That's a super fun project. I want you to look at this as an adventure. Doesn't have to be perfect. Might not even be your style of painting, which certainly is not mine, but we learned some interesting things by observing and then adding and saying, Okay, I'm getting closer to there, how did he get the brightness? I had the dullness with paint. How did he get to a brighter point? I can see that for me, getting to that brighter point was coming back in with you know, some type of brighter on No Color two type crayon. I got some stuff in here that I didn't get in there, but that's okay. It's not about getting every single element. It's about figuring out if it's dull, how do we make it brighter? How can I get some more movement? What colors might add in there? What happens if I do something like crayon on top? It's about the learning and the abstraction. It'll be really cool. If you try this, I'd love to see it if you try your own cityscape or something you took while on vacation that had a really cool row of buildings in Charleston. There's like Rainbow Row. I took pictures of that one year and that would have been a cool picture to dig out of wherever it is. I've got it hiding. That would have been cool. Whatever it is that you choose on that project, set yourself a timer, 30 minutes an hour, whatever it is. I don't want you to spend days and days on this, I want you to move fast, get the energy going, make the problem solving within that timer, set yourself in actual timer so you feel that rush of, I got to get to a stopping point. Let's go ahead and move a little faster. You don't get caught up in the details, and then I'd love to see what you ended up coming up with. I hope you in project and I'll see you guys in the next project. 14. Upward Motion: Upward: This project upward, this is one of his paintings that are looks to me like watercolor and such, but it may be some different stuff in there. This project explores Kandinsky's later abstract style, focused on upward movement and symbolic meaning. His painting upward is a prime example of how he used geometric abstraction and layering composition to create a sense of spiritual ascent and dynamic energy. In this exercise, you'll experiment with shapes, brushstrokes, and layering to capture an upward flow in your composition. This painting was 1929, and it was oil on cardboard. So I'm going to do watercolor on paper because I think I can get these yummy tonal variations in here with the watercolor just fine. In this project, you can either try to do something similar to his original piece and you can tell all the elements. You've got this triangle that points up and then you've got these pieces that continue to go up. Upward motion is what this one is leading you to and it's got this little black piece that leads you that way. So that is the idea. Suggested materials. If you want to do something similar but not exact, acrylic mixed media ink. I'm going to be using watercolor, paper of your choice, brushes of your choice, plan your composition. Think how can you create a sense of rising energy? This would be through stacked forms, vertical brush strokes or ascending lines. Light get your composition focusing on layered geometric and organic shapes. Kandinsky often use triangles, arcs, and intersecting lines to suggest movement. Consider incorporating these elements. Select a limited but impactful color palette. Diski's later works use refined color harmonies to enhance movement. Choose three to five colors that evoke a sense of elevation, light blues, yellows, contrasting reds and blacks. Consider using gradients or fading effects to reinforce the transition from grounded to elevated space. Build movement through brushstrokes and shapes, introduce contrast and visual tensions, final details and refinements, bonus, variations. You could do a minimalist approach only black, white in a color for high contrast. You can do collage and mixed media, add torn elements and layers to emphasize structure, expressive ink washes, create fluid ink based shapes that bleed upward for a soft dream like motion. There's some different little variations that we have suggested for you that we can do there. Kandinsky's upward captures an abstract sense of growth, transformation, and energy. As you create your own piece, focus on the feeling of rising motion rather than replicating exact forms. When finished, share your work and see how others interpreted this. I'm actually going to maybe do something similar. It doesn't have to be exact. This one actually has very structured lines and so you could use a ruler and structure those out if you wanted to do that. I'm using watercolor, we're going to be able to see these lines and just got to keep that in mind as you're going. And there we've got our initial thing and I'm going to use my polymer pencil, my polymer eraser, pencil my polymer eraser to get that going up. I'm going to go and grab a circle templates. I'll be right back. I found one of my older drafting templates. I had to go look for that. I'm like, Where did I even put these? This actually has a line that goes up and it actually goes up almost to about right there. Then we've got a half circle on the one side that goes probably three quarters of that way up. Let's see. It doesn't have to be exact, but I just thought we could get close. Maybe this one. No, wrong one. I was looking at the different lines at the top and the bottom. Let's try again. Which 1:00 A.M. I actually lined up with? I'm actually lined up with that one, that's the good one. Let's do that. And then there's also this one here that kind of starts about right there and goes all the way to the top there. So let's see where did I say? About right there. So is that one going to go to the top? Let's see. A that's close enough. I'm going to pick that one and then trim my line. Down to where this one stops, we'll call that one. Good. Good enough. I'm happy with it. I actually see that this goes a tiny bit further and gives me a line. I could have actually extended that further over. Maybe I'll do that. Let's do that. Let's extend that one further over. Because I just want to create this line right here and go all the way down. It doesn't have to be perfect. I'm just getting close to the elements that he's got in there and then we'll paint them. Then we've got something straight through the middle here. Then we've got an eyeball over here. Then we've also got two elements that come out about right here. And one that's thinner, but longer about right here. Then we'll just cap those off. Then we've actually got a square right down here. Then we've got some weirdo thing right up here. I think I got all the elements in there, so now we're just going to replicate or just get close with color. And I think I'll use a round brush for that. Do I have a smaller round one? Yeah, I have a smaller round one too. I'm thinking big color that can do its thing and dry. And then little color in these. There's one mark right here. We're going to get rid of that. Then we'll just see what we get. I've got some kurataki paints here and I'm going to pull out maybe some of these colors. I've got ivy green, and then I want some pretty blue there. Which looks like a teal all in here. I might pull out this turquoise blue because remember, we're going to mix these and get them to blend and flow. There is another color in there. Is it the dusty blue? Could be. This is the grayish blue six oh one. Maybe we'll mix all those colors together to get that. Then we've got some dusty pink there, and we've got a lovely orange there. So this is a Lazard in Crimson three oh four, Mars yellow. I think the Mars yellow is that. We've got some ochre in here. I'm definitely going to pull out some ochre. Yellow ochre 44, get that color in there. Then we've got black and there is a black in the Kurataki it's number 20 black. This looks like the yellow ochre and maybe some of this tan color. 16 kr beige. I think we're pretty much there. We've got some darker a rust color in here to go along with that one there, so maybe 46 burnt sienna. And, okay, I think we're kind of there. I think that's where we're going to sit with our colors. So I actually got most of those out of the Art Nouveau Kotoki set and some of those out of the larger set, but I feel like that's our colors. So that's we'll set these to the side, and we'll put some water on those and just see. What can we create? Again, I'm not looking for perfection. I'm having fun. I'm identifying what we've got out there. I'm going to start with the blue green, I think, the blue green turquoise and just start missing the colors around and letting them blend and flow and do fun things. I'm just going to mix them all in together as I'm going. I do see that I stopped that in a different place and he stopped his, but I'm not going to get stuck on exact details. We're close and sometimes close is good enough just in something that we're experimenting with and playing. Don't get hung up. If you get to the end of this point and then you're like, Oh, wait, that line went the other way, don't worry about it. It's not a big deal. It's about the observation and the playing and the experimenting and just having some fun with the project without getting hung up on, it's not perfect or wherever it is that we get stuck. We get stuck when we're doing a painting. I'm just mixing all these colors together and quite a bit of water just so that they do this funny molting thing that it's doing in that painting. Is why I like working too with the round brush with a tip because it does let me get that tip in corners and edges that I'd like to get it. You could use a square brush if that is better for you. Make sure I got some water in there. I want to mix some of these. I want to do some granulating and some tricks. I want some trick paints. I like my paints to do tricks. Then when it dries, watercolor, it's going to work its magic. We could do this in mixed media. If we get this drawn on here and we're like, I need some Mart making in some mixed media, you can certainly do that. These projects are up to interpretation. We're not duplicating the materials that he worked in. I'm duplicating a look and a feel in materials that I already own and have on hand in a different size because again, it's all about observation and play, not being 100% exact. Now a lot of master studies do get exact, but that's not the way I like to do a master study. I like to play experiment and make it doable and easy for me to complete and actually enjoy. Without being 100% a copy, I'm not good at actually, you know, copying a painting, really. That's not my thing. But I do want to learn from the different techniques and things that a master has to show us. So I enjoy studying the master, even if I don't replicate everything identically as the master. Okay. Now that we've got the background in there like that, I'm actually wanting that to dry before I go in and add the next colors, so I'll be right back. I just realized when I was painting, I skipped that part right there and it's almost completely dry. I'm just going to come back in here and add that in before before it's done because I need it. I need that in there. I'm just adding extra water. It's just going to add into what we've already got going. I don't think it's going to look bad at all because we've already got quite a bit of the Yummy molten color going there, which is exactly what his painting is doing. I love it. Because we're definitely getting this whole yummy look that he got in that painting. I think that's pretty cool. That was pretty easy to replicate here in watercolor. So I'm just adding that on there and then it going to go ahead and let it finish drying. I did not use a heat gun on this at all. I wanted it to do what it was going to do. So now that I looked at it and I thought, Oh, no, I forgot that part. We're going to let that dry. I'll be back again. All right, this is 80% drive. I've got one little spot there that's being stubborn, but I can paint around now. I think what I'm going to do because I've got some places like this little gray piece right here, I'm going to also use some acrylic marker because I can get a color that I want and it can just be right in there. I've got some little Arty markers over here and we'll just turn this into a true mixed media piece because look how fun and easy that was, and it's got a little black line around it. I've got some fine liner pins. This is the prisma color fine line marker pens, but we could mark around some of these with marker pins. What did I just pull out? I pulled out the 03, which is a nice size, and I can very deliberately make that very thin Black line. I love it. I love it. Yeah. That made that so much easier. I also have the black, so I might as well come up here with the black. I'm going to go ahead and move this around so I can really control that. I do a straight line best if I'm moving this away. I know this. You might as well move the paper around to get however it is that you can get a straight line the best when you're doing something like this. Or you could tape it off, but that's way more than I'd want to do on something like this where I'm doing a fun little study. At least, it should be fun. It shouldn't be so hard that you're like, I don't even want to do it. I want this to be enjoyable and we're learning something and we haven't made it so hard that we don't even want to get started. Let's do that. Then there's some yellow line going across up here, so we're just going to pick a yellow and make that line yellow. It's already rimmed out with the color pencil, so I'm going to leave that. Well, we could go ahead. I mean, it is rimmed out with black, so we could come with our little fine line pen and very finely make that line. Of course, now it's a tiny bit larger than it was originally. There we go. I'm feeling good about that. Now, feeling like I could take that black right down here to this, which now that I see, this goes to the tip, so I need to tip that. What did I do with my pencil? I need to tip that right there. Instead of where I put that line, that needs to go right there. It's going to be a little bigger than we originally had it, that is just fine. And then we get our true point for going up. Ah, got it. I know I'm silly. Alright, so what else do we got? Let's see here. So now I'm going to start over here on these. I've got orange and kind of this maybe some ochre and that cream. And this orange on this part, I'm just looking here at our piece right here, I've got those. I can see a little bit of pastel or mark making on top of these. After we get the watercolor doing its thing, we can come back on top with other mixed media which works perfect since I have started the mixed media game with my markers, the acrylic markers. I like that they're acrylic paint, they're not regular markers, so we're not veering too far off of painting a piece. We're just using a different material. I'll go ahead and line it out and then we'll mix in some color variations. It does have a slight line around it, so we might line it when it's dry with our pen. Again, I'm going to let the watercolor do its magic, so I'm not going to dry. I'm not going to use a hair dryer on any of these. Okay. I like that. I like it. I like it. This right here, this line right here is actually black. I'm going to go ahead and put these in with my marker. And this one's black. I definitely don't put your hand in the wet paint. That's what I'm thinking there. I got to do this one down here with this creamy color and then dip a little tiny bit of that orange in it because I can see the color variation down here. And then these are more of that reddish orange, maybe even with a tiny bit of pink. Way too much on my brush for that tiny spot. It turns a little more pink here. Then even a little more pink, excuse me, I've got that little plate that we were using earlier over here, might just get that pink and add water into it to get that really light color. Then this turns into the orange. Even though I've got it on the other side of the line and that one had, I'm still going to follow mostly what it's doing, it's more of a pinky orange, so I could just go ahead and get that pinky orange. Oh yeah. Look at that. It's going to go down into that pink a little bit, but I'm okay with that we're going to come back and line those with a pin. Then it goes up into this yellowy, creamy color. God, don't want that right there. Let's just pick a tiny bit of that up. Pow. That worked great. Close enough, and that went down into my orange. Let's try that a little bit. A you let me push it back up. That was kind of fun. And while that's doing its thing, it's not completely dry, but it did let me push it back up, so that was nice. I'm going to go ahead and make our little round black eyeball with our marker. Not perfect, close enough, though. And we've got pretty blues on this side and pinks down there. So we could take the pink in here with some water. I got to take a tissue and I'm going to pick up some paint because it's real light at the bottom. I'm going to go ahead and let that lightness be light. Actually, I like what that did right there. Then we can just let the rest of it dry because it's, it's darker and it's lighter, so I'm going to let that do that. Then I don't want it coming outside of that, though. There we go. The same with the blue. I'm going to use this dusty blue to do that. Then we've got a little extra blue line around the eyeball and we could actually do that with a paint pen. There we go. Well, I like it. All right. We're going to let this dry. Then the last thing that we're going to do is take our fine line pen and we can fine line mark around our elements, and then I think we're there. Let's let this dry and I'll be right back. Okay, so while that was drying, I did take my fine line pen and just draw along all the edges like I can see in his original. Now I think we are ready to peel the tape because this one was actually super fun and I really enjoyed making the colors blend and flow and look modeled there like his do. I thoroughly enjoyed this project. And I would definitely play in this style again, drawing some elements like that and then painting and filling them in. That ended up super cool and really close to our inspiration piece. So in this project, you can do what he did and just take in all the elements because then it makes you observe where the lines are and what the different pieces are doing. Whereas if you're just looking at the painting, maybe you don't see all of those elements, which is what I like about a master's study, you really actually study it and you think, Oh, how do I get this or oh, look at that little black outline that I might have missed had I not been doing this. W. Look at that. Oh, my goodness. Now, I would say, for a replication, I did the best job in this project out of all the projects, so that was actually super duper fun, and I enjoyed this one thoroughly. I hope you enjoyed watching upward motion and you look through your project guide for possible variations and ideas, or you could do like I did and paint the original in maybe some paints that you like. This was a fun one. I hope you enjoy doing this one. Definitely come back and share your projects with me and I'll see you guys back in class. 15. Recap Of Projects: We could do a quick little recap of everything that we did in class. This class was super fun, and I love that we started off with a warm up of his different ideas with the black and white and all of the mark making, and then moved on to some fun just play and color and experimenting and movement and just really having a whole lot of fun and then turning that bit of fun into the most lovely concertina book that kind of plays out. That's the coolest thing, and I hope you enjoy that project because what you end up with is the coolest little book to put in your art library. And then I had a whole lot of fun doing 30 with you guys with black and white. That's pretty cool. I think that one came off super duper good. A project that I will continue doing over and over personally is concentric circles, and I love that on this one, we varied the colors up a little bit off of the colors that he used just to kind of show us that we can veer off of what Kandinsky did without losing the point and practicing his different ideas. I loved my project there. Fantastic. Then we did the painted abstracted houses, and when I finished it, I was like, I think I love it. But now that I was looking over at it on my table and looking back at it, I it. I think I did great for something that I'd never done before. I never done an abstracted cityscape. I actually think it turned out pretty darn good, and I'm super happy with that after we added our extra marks on top with the Neo color two crayons. So this one I thought turned out fantastic, too. Then this last one is probably the one besides the 30, the black and white one that I did probably the closest to his actual painting. I thought, good that turned out. These were some good paint projects, and I tried to pick out ones that I thought these would give you some wins. You would be able to implement the things that we learned. You'd be able to if you wanted to replicate one of his projects, it wouldn't be so hard to do that, and you could do it in a one paint session, and then you could take those learnings forward. I hope you enjoyed studying the Wil Kondenski with me. The couple books that we went through at the beginning, you could take one of these. This one's my favorite one, the VasiliKondenski. Around the circle, it has more of his art in it, and I just feel like it's a better representation of his works to look at and study and maybe duplicate. Then has the lovely ink drawings in here that you could pull from like I did the one that we pulled from. I do like this one best out of those. I hope you enjoy the different projects. Then using the project guides to take you in a different direction and maybe study a few of the other project guides that I've included in your class and just see what can you create, where can you go with it and what part his philosophies and paintings, can you move forward in your own work. So I hope you enjoyed this class, and I will see you guys next time. 16. Final Thoughts: We wrap up this master study of Willy Kandinsky. I hope you've gained a deeper appreciation for his revolutionary approach to color and form and abstraction. Kandinsky's work wasn't just about creating visually appealing compositions. It was about expressing emotions and energy and movement in a way that goes beyond words. Through four painting projects, you've explored how he used color to evoke feeling, how he built dynamic compositions, and how he transformed familiar subjects into abstract expressions. More importantly, you've had the chance to bring your own creative voice into the process. I encourage you to take what you've learned and keep experimenting. Try combining Kandinsky's techniques with your own style or explore new ways to express emotions through abstraction. Don't be afraid to push the boundaries. Kandinsky certainly wasn't you created a final project, I'd love to see it. Share your work, reflect on what you've discovered, and celebrate the progress you've made. And remember, the most important thing is to keep painting, keep exploring, and most of all, keep having fun with your art.