Unlocking the Power of Composition in Abstract Painting

1. Introduction: Hi everyone. I'm Denise Love. Are you tired of diving into your abstract paintings without a clear path only to end up with a piece that feels directionless and lacks focus. In this class, we're going to unravel the secrets behind crafting abstract compositions that truly captivate. We'll kick things off by delving into the world of composition, why it matters, how it works, and the incredible impact it can have on your work. We'll explore some of my favorite ways to select colors. And through engaging samplers, we'll witness how colors play a pivotal role in your composition's success. Then we'll tackle larger abstract paintings, implementing the techniques we've learned and bringing our ideas to life on the canvas. Get those paint brushes ready, and let's dive into the world of abstract art with confidence. 2. Class Project: For your Cla project, I want you to create a series of samplers of your own focus on different compositions and color choices. Then I want you to pick your favorite combination from the samplers and create a larger abstract piece or set, and come back and show us what you've been creating. 3. Supplies: Let's take a look at the supplies that I'm going to be using in class. I do have some videos showing you a couple of things that I've got here. We talk about color and color palettes. I like using color palette cards. And I have some of the color cube color palette cards that I like to refer to a lot lately. Really makes it easy to pick colors and see what might go together. And not as much with a color range colors that you could use to deep dive into a palette. Because sometimes you'll pick two colors because they're complimentary, then you might get stuck with, well, what could I put with those two colors? Where could I go from here? What I like about these is say like these are colors that are side by side on the color wheel. It expands that idea and makes it a more complicated and interesting palette for you. It's my goal is to play in different color palettes that I would normally not use or pull from, or think of, And make them four or five colors or six colors instead of, say, three colors. I'm finding it really helpful to use something like a resource like this, which you can get ideas on Pinterest. You can search color palettes on Pinterest, and that's a free resource, and I do that too. You could also make your own color palettes. And I have a couple classes here on skillshare for making your own color palettes. Vintage sources, or using antique fabrics, or using the old Master's paintings. There's lots of different ways that you can draw ideas from color. Then I also mention Confident Color and Artists Guide to Harmony, Contrast, and Unity by Nita Leland. Because this is such a beautiful resource for really diving deep into all of the color concepts that you usually want to learn when you're making art. This is such a good book, I do show you that. You don't have to have that book. I just like to show you some resources that you could possibly check out from the library. Or maybe you do want to add this to your home library, but they're just such good resources. Another thing I highly recommend that you might have is a color wheel. I like this color creative color wheel because it's two sided. But any color will fine. Because when we talk about color, we're going to talk about different color schemes. And how you could pull a color scheme together yourself if you're not using some of the resources that I like to use. I'll also be using throughout class this Canson XL watercolor paper. It's a nice student grade paper. It's good for experimenting and playing, which is what we're doing in class. We're learning composition and playing with color. This is a good paper for just experimenting, and that's what I'll be using all through class. I take these down to artist panels. A lot of people ask me what these little panels are that I use. I use artist panels. You can get off brand ones or you can get some from ampersand. Then I'm also using to tape my stuff down, painter's tape from the paint store. I'm trying to keep it simpler and not use like every thing I have here available in my art studio. Because if you like edit down what you're going to use and restrict yourself to say, one type of paint and one type of mark making something. Pick a few colors. As you restrict the options that you have, the more creative you are when you're creating. It's weird because if you have too many choices you have, you get paralyzed from choices. I like to pull the color palette card, pick five colors, and then pick what I'm going to mark, make with. And then let the piece guide me. As I'm going, I'm going to be using these little Liquitex basics. Acrylics, which are also a really nice student grade paint. What I like about these little sample sizes is once you use a color, then you can go buy a big tube of that. And then you'll know, oh, okay, I love this color. Let me go buy the big one rather than buying lots of big ones. I've been using the same set for a very long time. I switch back and forth between supplies too. I do have a big pink, several things that I've gotten that I really love that I've run out of. But these are so good, they go a long way. I also like having just something sharp to mark make with. This is a clay tool with a real sharp point and like a little scooper point, that's good for just dragging through a piece. Also, drag through a piece with a mechanical pencil. That's favorite little tool. I also like using matt pencils and stuff to draw lines on. I also recommend the neuro color two crayons if that's going to be your mark maker of choice. And you wouldn't have to necessarily put any finishing spray on top of this type of crayon, and it comes in lots of colors. It's one of my favorite mark making elements. I'm going to be using some soft pastels in class. If you use the soft pastels, you do need to finish those. I use the senile soft pastel fixative. The powder always will shed. Generally, I will test out, make a test piece, spray it, make sure that I like what it does to the colors because sometimes it darkens the colors. If I'm okay with the sample piece, then I will go ahead and spray my final pieces. But I have sprayed final pastel pieces and it changed the color completely and ruined it. I want you to do a test piece if you're going to be using pastels. Normally, if I'm doing pastels on top of acrylic paint, I can't even tell that it's been sprayed. When it's dry, it's perfect for that. That's how I finish those. I also am going to maybe use some Posca pens. What I like about these is they come in lots of different colors. You can get really creative with your marks and your colors. White and black are the ones that I like just at a minimum. And then I'll also be using some Princeton embryo paint brushes and maybe some other paint brushes to gather some of your favorite paint brushes. And that's what I'm going to try to use on the different projects today. I'm going to try not to overwhelm you with the million supplies that you could be using. I want you to pick some and then start creating. All right. I'll see you back in class. 4. Composition Ideas: I want to jump right into composition for class and talk about different compositions that you might consider why composition is important. Composition is important because it shapes the viewer's experience of your art. It drives the viewer through your work and the different points that you wanted the viewer to see in the order that it was meant to see. It's a big part of what makes a piece eye catching, dynamic or calm and soothing, or disoriented and off kilter. If you look at different pieces of artwork, you might start to then think, how does this piece of art make me feel like? A lot of times, if a piece of art has the subject shoved right up to the side, it almost feels like that piece is going to fall off of that. Maybe it makes you feel nervous. Maybe it's a tranquil ocean and maybe it makes you feel soothing and it's got to rising down low or maybe it's got a lot of angry lines in there that are radiating out from the center. Then maybe you're like, okay, I'm a little bit frantic with this piece. We need to start looking at different pieces of art, trying to figure out what was their composition in this and how does that make me feel? I'm going to go through some different compositions. I have just drawn these boxes on a piece of Kenton Heritage Excel paper. I just cut a square out and just drew some squares in here so that I was keeping it uniform. I could have drafted it out with my rulers and stuff, but that's a lot of work when I could have just done little boxes. The goal here is not perfection. The goal here is to create yourself some cheat sheets on composition that you can then hang up on your wall behind your art table where you're working. You can look up and refer to that and make some decisions about where you want to go with your piece of art, what you're trying to convey, and you'll have some guidance in how to get there. Let's talk about the different basic compositions that have come up through history. You've got the cruciform or the cross, which is basically what it sounds like. It is a composition that comes out in a cross shape. Doesn't have to be a perfect cross. It can be a little off center. It can be perfect. It could be higher, it can be lower, but it's basically a cruciform or cross shape. The next composition is a horizontal, something that's got horizontal stripes or horizontal things in the piece. I like doing a lot of junk art collages. Those are horizontal or vertical compositions. For me where it's different stripes of different art. That's a composition that I actually use quite a bit. The next one is frame and frame. That's where things are overlapping. Maybe they're framed within each other. Maybe you've got some different things going on. We also have a spiral or radial. Think like snail shell, something that's spiraling through the piece of art. Another one that we can have is a high horizon. And this might be a landscape where the horizon is in the top third of the piece, we have low horizon, that might be where it's in the bottom third of the piece. And another popular composition is shape. That's basically what it sounds like, it's something that is going through and shape windy roads, things like that. Another composition is triangle in shape. We can think just like triangle in the piece that's not completely centered, but you get the idea. It's something that has a triangular shape in there. Actually, that bugs me. Let's make that a little better. Because I'm keeping this, I'm going to hang this on my wall. But something that comes out in a triangle as the composition in the piece. Maybe there are different parts of the composition that hit the points of the triangle. That's what you're going for there. Then another one that's really popular is like an L shape. Something in there is shaped along an L in there. Then let's go on to the next page. I've made this where I can really scan these in for you guys and give you a copy to have. The next one is strata vertical, which is similar to the horizontal, but everything's going up and down. That's a real popular one. Another composition is mass or central, something big like right in the middle of the piece. That's one that I don't use so much because really everything that's in the center is usually the least interesting. But you learn all these rules so that you can figure out when to break them. Another popular composition style is things on the diagonal, things that are going through the piece. On the angle that one's really popular. Another one is something that's like a Y shape coming through. Maybe it's roads converging, like in a landscape or something like that. Another one that you might do would be like things that radiate out. Maybe you have things that radiate from the center or lower center. Then one of my very favorite types of composition and use this a lot in photography, also is the rule of thirds. This is basically where you split your page into thirds, going on the horizon, on the horizontal and the vertical. Then the most interesting composition within the rule of thirds is to put your subject on one of these, where they cross over this one. I actually want to focus on some more because there's lots of things that we can do in the rule of thirds, we can, for instance, cut off the piece at the bottom third. Then we could also cut it off at a third, coming up. Then maybe you could put some interesting item right here on that third line. That's a really good one. We could also cut it at the bottom, come up on the third from this side, and then come up a third from here and have different elements in there. These are some rules too that work really good with collages. If you'd like to do collage work, these might be good collage compositions. We could also split the paper into thirds and then put a large element or focal point on the third, crossing those lines. That's another idea. Another idea is we could cut the paper into thirds from the left. We could cut it into a third from the top. Then what if we put something interesting over here on the side, some focal element? We could also cut the paper into thirds. We could have some element coming through the center at a diagonal. That's something that we could do. Another idea is cut it from the third. Let's come from the third this way. And then maybe have a third up from that and have some interesting element in there. Let's see, what else could we do? We could also come up from the center, which I don't usually like stuff centered. But what if we came up from a third on each side? That would be very interesting. We could cut the paper into third and maybe have something in the diagonal coming up in that third piece, Just that center section, perhaps that might be interesting. Another thing that we could do is cut it from the center. Maybe cut it from the third over here. Center from the third going up in the third over. And then maybe have a big element crossing over that could be interesting. We could even do a third from the bottom and we could have something crossing that line and having like a mass in the center that could be interesting. You see how many different ways that we can split this paper into thirds and then into thirds again and overlap with elements. This is why Rule of Thirds is one of my favorites because we can keep cutting papers into different thirds and different ways and coming up with different places to put paint and marks and texture and elements and things that are interesting. I'm also going to leave you some boxes that are blank and a blank sheet for you to come up with some more ideas of your own. I'm going to scan this in and make a copy for you as a PDF so that you can print this out and have this piece that we created in class. Keep this and hang it up. And come up with different interesting compositions. Or refer to it when you feel stuck or you want some ideas on what you can compose that would be interesting. So I'm going to go ahead and put this undo your projects and resources. And we're going to use this throughout class to guide our abstract art pieces that we create. All right, I'll see you back in class. 5. Exploring Color: Now that we've talked about composition, and edged out and drawn some composition ideas that we're going to consider in our pieces. I want to talk about color and how we go about choosing colors for our pieces. The easiest way is to get yourself a color wheel, to start playing in the different color schemes that are known to be interesting and dynamic and will work well together without you really having to think very hard about it. This is the creative color wheel. It's got colors on both sides. These are the lighter shades, these are the darker shades. This will go from the pure color to the tint. These are tints, the lighter shades, from the pure color to the tones. The darker shades are tones and shades. And tints tells you on this color wheel, what you're looking at. I like using this because let's say orange is my favorite color, and I'm thinking, what can I put with orange that would be super interesting. What it gives you is different color schemes. Complementary, split, complementary triad, monochromatic, analogous, analogous, complementary. It gives you some terms. It tells you what those are. It directs you right here on the center of the triangle, on how to get those colors. One of the most dynamic ranges would be the color and the color that's opposite it, which is its complementary color. Another way to do that would be the color and the two colors that are split on either side of that color, directly opposite of it. Another way to do that would be to pick a color a third of the way around and use those triad colors. You can see how we could get some interesting color ways by doing that. We could also pick colors that are side by side on the color wheel for interest, I do that a lot. Orange and pink and red are some of my favorite combos that are right next to each other. Picking here in this range might be something that I would like to do. I also like blues and greens. That's another go to for me. And you'll notice that they are also next to each other. Here on the color wheel, I want you, at the minimum, to invest in a color wheel for yourself. And start looking at these and thinking, okay, what interesting thing could I do in one of the color schemes that are known to be dynamic color combinations? Another thing that I like to refer to is books. I love looking at books. I have a big library of art books and design books. I find endless amounts of inspiration. This is a newer book that I've had. This is Color Confident, An Artist's Guide to Harmony, contrast, and Unity, by Nita Leland. I actually really like this book because she breaks a lot of these color terms and things down really nicely for us in this book to get a deeper understanding of color. These are some of the sources that I like to go to and then think, oh, okay, how could I use that green, violet and orange? And what would that look like? It gives you really nice inspiration for color. And then talks about color and design and values and hues and different contrast of the color in that way, the intensity, the temperature. There's so much to know with color that this book is a really nice deep dive. If you want something that you can refer to, it gives you the different color schemes that we just talked about. If you're wanting to deep dive and do some extra study on your own. This is an excel***t book for breaking all of these down and having beautiful examples. I just wanted to share that with you just in case maybe you could get one from the library also. There's a good choice. That's another way that I like to deep dive and study color. Then from some of the classes that I've posted, some of the other things that I do, I have dove into my own personal project this year, which will go probably for many years, is color palette cards. And I've been using the Color Cube by Sarah Renee Clark. I also like using the Design Seeds website. I also like searching color palettes on Pinterest. I also like making some of my color palettes as I knock things off. These are sitting right here up on my desk. I like making some of my own color palettes. From some of my photography, I have just become obsessed with finding pictures that I already find very pleasing. They're very interesting. These are my own photos, and then these are photos from the color cube. I like chal***ging myself to use a more complicated color combination than just say, two colors or three colors. I find that by using color palette inspiration, like photographs, I can now get into 5.6 color palettes that are very interesting. They have a lot of depth. I've already seen that they match really well together. This has been the way that I have started experimenting. Deeper with color is different color palette cards and sources see like this one even has like six. I find these are expanding my own confidence in playing with color. It's making some really interesting abstract art that I never would have made before. This is another source that I've always also encourage you to explore. Pinterest is the easiest, least expensive way to do that. You can search for color palettes on Pinterest and then pull those up. You can use them at your art table if you have an ipad or a phone, Or you can pull that color palette up and just visually look at it and match things to it. Just trying to give you ideas of different ways that you can play with color. Some all the way down to free By searching color palettes on Pinterest, all the way up to some other options you might consider. I find that color is one of the most difficult things for everybody. There's a couple of people out there that just naturally pick perfect colors. But the rest of us need a little guidance and help, and little prodding in one direction or the other to be like, oh, check out this. Or here's what I learned. And you may not like everything that you try. That's of the learning process in figuring out what you love and what it boils down to what you want to use going forward. So these are some of the sources that I'm going to use for picking colors for my abstracts. I just wanted to share those ideas with you so that you could take a look at them too. All right. I'll see you back in class. 6. Mark Making Ideas: Let's take a look at some mark making elements that we might consider as we're creating. I have mark making sheet that I keep up on my wall with different sizes and different marks and things that are interesting. I want to make a new one just of some of my most favorite marks and things that I want to consider using in the pieces that we're creating today. I want to give you some ideas of different things that you might be that you might like. Then you can start looking around at different ideas that you find interesting. I posts, I neocolor to crayons. I like lots of different elements to make. I like using paint to mark make. Which is why I like the pens because these are acrylic paint. In these, all I've done is draw some squares here on a piece of that watercolor paper just to start giving myself some ideas and things that I might want to use in our projects. One of my favorite marks is some dots. That's a really good one. Another favorite mark that I are just rows of lines like that. We can have several rows together. I've got a stencil that looks like this also where it's just rows of lines and it always looks good every time I use it. And we can get the exact look. A fat paint pin, that's two favorite things that I know I like. Something that I've been doing recently that I really like on more delicate pieces. This is a black posca pen with a 0.9 to 1.3 millimeter tip. It's not the finest tip, but it's a nice tip. This is the little 0.7 millimeter tip, which I really love this for doing lines and dots and different things like that. It gives you a nice fine line. A lot of times what I like to do on these lines is come back and put little pearls. It just makes it a nice whimsical little detail. Another thing that I like to do with a line, a lot of times is put little leaves on the lines. I will do some little lines with pretty leaves. That's a good one. It's real easy. You can make the criss cross like we've crisscrossed the. You can make them do their own thing, but those are super fun and I use that a lot. That's a favorite mark that I like. Let's see, what else can I do? I also like birds. I've been doing little V shapes a lot lately in some of my art. That's a favorite mark that I've been going to, especially if I use these vines or these lines. I like little areas where maybe there's little marks like that. I love that. Another thing that I love is little circles we can fill like a color in with another color of neocolor to crayon. Like if we did a light pink we could do red circles on top. That's another thing that I enjoy doing as some of my marks lately. Let's see what else is there sometimes if you've got what I really love doing is random scribble. Let's get some scribble. That's definitely a favorite thing that I enjoy doing. I like holding my pen or my pencil way far back when I do those, so that I have less control. I'm looking for the least amount of control. I don't want it to be a straight line. I don't want it to be exact and precise. I want it to be as messy as I can get. It's what else do I love? I also love doing big, heavy splotches of color. You'll see me do this a lot with the pastels. That's another favorite thing that I like to do lately. I want you to start thinking. And I'll give you a copy of this sheet so that you have a few of my favorite lines. And I'll leave you a couple boxes to do some of your own favorite lines. I want you to start gathering your own reference library of marks and things that are some of your favorite things to do and add your art pieces. These are the pieces just off the top of my mind that I can think of that I've used recently. This is the one I keep on my wall. I'll, I'll give you this page two for more ideas. I want you to continue creating some of these yummy ideas for your own art. And then hang them on the wall along with your composition pieces, your composition sheets, Because these are valuable artist resources that you're going to keep using for the life of your art creation. I want you to have some good ideas to sit up there and be inspired by. These are some of my most current favorite marked things. And so every time you come up with a new favorite thing you like, do doing add that to your sheets and then you'll have your own reference library to go with. All right, I'll see you back in class. 7. Samplers - Color & Marks: Let's talk about color and mixing some color using a color palette that maybe you've found or you've decided on whether you've picked it from your color wheel, or you've picked some of your favorite colors, or you've taken one of the inspiration cards from Pinterest, or design seeds, which are both free resources, or the color cubes, or you've made some from your own photos, Lots of choices. I'm using these because I can hold them in my hand while I talk to you about it. We can look at these colors and see does it fall along any of our parameters here. Because we've got like a yellow ochre. And in that yellow ochre, if we're looking here, we've got yellow reds and pinks. We almost might say this is more of an analogous color scheme with some neutrals added in there. I like that because I like the yellow, orange, red side of the color wheel. You can look and say, okay, what do these colors fall in? We're going to say colors that are side by side on the same side of the color wheel. Then some of these, I'm using acrylic paints. I'm using these Liquitex basics acrylic paints because you can get a whole set of these little tubes and you can test and play and have a lot to pick from. Here's the whole little set that I took them out of the box, but it's like a little box of colors and you have a pretty good selection. Then what you can do once you decide, okay, I love these colors here, then if you start to run out, you can buy bigger ones of your very favorite. It's a nice way to test out lots of colors without investing in lots of big tubes of paint. Then when you get low, you know what your favorite colors were. I have picked out my goal with something like this is not to be exact. Like, I'm not trying to get this exact shade of yellow. If your goal in your project is to learn to mix colors, then definitely pick that, that exact color and get it as close as you can. My goal is to work within a color palette. Even if I'm a shade off here or there, I'm still working within four or five or six shades that I was trying to work in. Just seeing how close could I get? You'll notice on this set, I've picked a lizard and crimson for this dark color. I have picked magenta, medium magenta for this lighter color. And I need to maybe add white to it to get it a little tiny bit lighter. I've also got bleached titanium. I went ahead and picked raw umber, which is way darker than this shade here. But I can mix it with white to get a lighter color. Then this last shade I have is yellow ochre. Then I've got titanium white out here. But I also have white Eso. I like having Eso on the palette. White Eso and clear Eso, both minor Liquitex. I like having those out here because I like mixing my acrylic paints with Esso that it makes it less plasticy when it's finished. It gives it a little bit of a matt look instead of shiny. It makes it where you can layer stuff right on top of it. Let's just take a look at what these colors actually look at, actually look like as I put each one out here. And maybe I'm going to mix this one with the pink, then we can see how close are we getting there to our color palette and see if this is what we want to use. I did like this unbleached titanium just like it was then. I'm just using a Princeton Umbria Filbert. I think this is the number eight here today with this Brown. I want to mix it with the white and get more of a tan. Oh yeah, see. Perfect. Then for this last color, I'm pretty good like it is. I'm going to use this clear Jess out here. I'm using the Jess even in my little color swatch so I can see exactly how it's going to perform. The Jess makes these easy to b***d. Let's see how we did. That's almost spot on there. With every single color, I'd say we did pretty well picking five colors from our Swatch. I'm going to start making little samplers. My very favorite way to do that is to take a big piece of paper and cut it into roughly three or four inch squares. And start painting different compositions. Or a lot of times I'll intuitively paint and not even worry about the composition. But on this one, I want you to focus on some compositions. Play and practice. I want you to look at all the options that you have been given in your guide. Because I did make you a copy of these and think, okay, let's try some of these out. Are we going to do Rule of thirds and split it into different rules? Are we going to try out low horizon, high horizon things in stripes? Do we want to try out that cruciform frame and frame, what is it that we're wanting to try out? And you can even sketch some of these out on your paper. If you think, oh, I need some help here. Maybe we're going to do one with the center mass. I like that. Then maybe we're going to do one in say, a Y shape. We want to do something with this cruciform somehow. We're just going to get some type of shape going on there, like a cruciform. Maybe I want something interesting with a horizon line. Maybe on this one I want to go shape through it. Let's do something with an S shape then. Maybe on one of these, I want some big items. Now we've decided, here's what we're going for. We don't have to have exact, doesn't have to be perfect. The goal here is to just start learning and experimenting and figuring out what we want to do. Then after you've done some of these, then we can mark make on top of it. And we can just decide we've already got some color palettes here. I want you to get started with some of your colors and just see like, where is it that we can take each of these pieces? I'm just jumping right in, just seeing like, what can I get if I do whatever it is here that I'm thinking? I like to be loose and messy. I'm not trying to get exact, I don't know where we're going to end up, but we're going to at least give it a try. This is totally different in the way I usually do some abstract stuff, but always time to learn and play and figure some things out. What's really cool about, don't dip your hand in the paint. What's really cool about playing and experimenting in this way is when we peel this tape, we're going to have some cool stuff that we didn't even know we were going to end up with. I like that. Then as we go too, we may then come back and do some stuff on top of this. We may hide and bury that composition a little bit, but I want you to at least start with a composition that you think, oh, this is interesting. Let's just give it a go and just see where we can end up some of that out of the brush and we'll pick up another color. Let's see, let's pick up this yellow. Oh, I'm just messy. Ever were today, maybe I'm going to come in here with this over there. Maybe I'm going to start filling some colors in here. You might see your pieces turn into something else after you get going. Like maybe you start with one composition, but as you get going, maybe we work in stripes and you're like, oh, got to stripe. One another thing I want to think about too is marking as we're going, we don't have to just mark make on top. We could go right now and start dragging some stuff through, getting some interest with something sharp or a pencil or I do love mark making on top of stuff. Oh, yes. See I like all that. All right. We're getting somewhere here. We are getting places. All right, let's come in here with some. It's my goal to make sure I use all the colors in the color palette. Usually, when I'm doing a color palette like this, my goal is to start with whichever is neutral and I think I can grow from that. Or whichever is my favorite. Whatever color you're avoiding, use it as a little tiny accent. You don't, you don't have to make it like a big feature element. But I do want you to make sure you use all the colors in the color palette you choose. If you're using some type of color palette card like I've got here, I do want you to make sure that you use all the colors on the card, even if it's just a touch somewhere here and there, just a dab, I still want you to try and use it. All right. I like where we're going, I'm going to get over here in this darker color and see. I can't tell you that I'm going to like all of these. I like doing multiple pieces at a time because then I usually like one or two. I usually don't like at least one. I usually love one or two. And it's those one or two in the multiples that I'm going for on that paint day. Because then every day is a good paint day. I like to paint a little more intuitively I do more than one because then I know I'm going to do something that I love that day. Now I'm just layering paint on. I know we started with a specific composition. Some of these are going to lose their shape, but I am making an effort to keep those. You may not be able to see what that was when I'm done, but I did start with an effort. Learn all the rules and then you'll know how you can break them. That's one of my favorites. That's why we learn the different rules so we can see stuff you may not be able to see when I'm done what I started with. But at least I'll know there's some interesting things in there. Maybe there's some elements that just brought it all together. I really like this darkness of this color here. And I want to make sure that I'm actually keeping some of that. I'm holding my brush really loose a lot of times on purpose I don't want to be so super tight with what I'm creating, that it's very stiff and I want to loosen up. Holding your brushes or your tools looser help help you do that. If you're using nontoxic paint, don't be afraid to get your fingers in here and do some of this stuff with your fingers. Got some nice dirty water over there. Let's see, what else can we come back with? I need to come up with some more color and let me get some more of this. White. Just like white. Just because now I can look at it and think, does it need anything else? Do I want to do any of this with my fingers? Look at that. Finger painting is fun. Gives you a different shape and some other things going on with the different compositions. A lot of time the goal is to make sure that you can still see it. If I lose my compositions in my intuitive painting here, I apologize. Sometimes when you're painting, you just got to go with that flow and see where it takes you. I can still see the Y there. Oh, X. X is another take on the cruciform. Could have done an X on our little sheet there. You might add that in. Okay, I do got a lot going on here feeling like maybe we could do some work making on top. We could do that with pastels, We could do that with neocolor, two crayons. I generally like using pastels, but let me tell you, they make a mess. We could do that with Stabilo, we could do that with acrylic inks. There's all kinds of things we could do it with Posca, so much that we could do on top. But what we need to do is let this layer dry a bit. Let me let this dry and I'll be right back. All right, this is quite a bit drier than it was thinking. I'm going to do some pastels in here just because I'm going to still stick within my color palette and pick colors that I like out of here. I can see some of my compositions. I had a circle that was center. This one was the y. This one was like the cross. We had high horizon, we had the S shape. Then I think we had some rules of thirds there, maybe. I don't remember what I put there. I'll have to watch the video to see like what did we have there. But now I can come back and I can start mark making on top of my piece. I can keep in mind like the things that I had as my composition. Or if I got way off of the composition that I was trying to do, I can now veer off into a composition that I think is going to be interesting. I different marks, I like using stencils now. I never used stencils before this year really. I had a bunch of them from years ago, but I never used them. But I'm all of a sudden obsessed with stencils. I like things that look like lines and dots and dashes and some different elements that are some of my favorite things already that look like abandoned lines and things that are scratchy and things that aren't perfect. That's what I seem to like. You can do these marks here and different shapes. You can do those with acrylic paint. You can do them with Posca marker. You can do whatever it is that you're thinking hook at that. I like that. For some reason lately I really perfect circly things like this. I love that. I just like coming in and playing at this point. If I end up way off of where I started, that is just fine here. These are scene pastels. These are the half sticks that I'm playing in because I got a box of half sticks and found this lovely antique drawer that they sit in very prettily over here on my dresser. I love this items. One of my favorite possessions because it's all colorful and pretty, that's pretty cool. This one had like an S shape. I could come through here and pick up some of that shape, again, with some of my marks that are coming through. If you lose some of your elements of the composition, you can have your marks bring those elements back with some imperfect lines or dots or shapes or whatever. That's something to consider. I like this yellow mustard pastel. It's pretty. Let's do this one again. This is our, our high horizon. See how I can pull some of these back in where we've lost what it was. Don't despair if what you end up with is a little different than what you started with. Let's see what other colors we can do could do this. Dark, reddish? No, it's too red, burgundy, Like this burgundy shade. I think that's too purple. Let's go with it. That's the closest one I've got. We'll just see, maybe we could pull some darkness in the edges or in different spots of the piece. I'm just playing nothing exact here. We don't have to be perfect. I might pull some of these in over here. Oh, look at that. I like that. Okay, that's good. Let's see, maybe we want something interesting over here. If you don't want to deal with powder, then definitely do this with something like the neo color to pastels. And I could have used that. But man, I just love what these look like. They're just so yummy. All right? I'm loving that. Okay, I'm feeling like maybe I want a line to come up through this one way. Yes, I like that. Okay, super fun. Maybe we want one of these over here, just like a side piece. It's just about play. I'm not worried about ruining something. I'm not worried about where I've gone with the pieces. I'm having some fun. I'm enjoying where we're going. I do keep a microfiber cloth here in my cleaning room. This is the best tool in my cleaning room, in my art room. The best tool ever for getting all this stuff off your fingers. And then you're not going to be getting stuff everywhere. Let me put this over to the side. I think I have a whole lot of layers going here. What we could do at this point is peel the tape and look at it. But let me tell you how I deal with pastels. Before we get too far, I forget if I'm using pastels on a piece. I do use a fixative on those pieces. I use the senile soft pastel fixative. And I will hit these with this fixative and set that powder. I don't blow you notice the whole time I've done this, I've not blown powder all over my surface. Usually what I will do is take a paper towel or something or take it outside. I don't want all of this powder all over my surfaces. I will just tap that powder off and then we are ready to go. Usually, before I peel the tape, I'll set that real quick with the fixative spray that'll set the powder so it's not always shedding. But for this purpose, I'm going to go ahead and peel the tape. And just see what we got. They may be recognizable in our compositions and they may not. That is just the way that I create. I just go with it. I might start with one idea in my mind, when I'm done, we may be there or we may be beside there. But I think by starting with a composition that's interesting, then you're setting yourself up for success. And you'll notice after we peel the tape and cut these up, they're still going to be very interesting because we tried look at these. Wheeling the tape is magic magic. If you have trouble peeling tape off your paper, different papers react differently. You can heat the tape with your craft gun and that will release the adhesive. If it's like tear in your paper, then I want you to do that. Let me tap this off in my trash can. We can get our cutter. I like using this little fisker paper cutter and just cutting these up. You can also just cut them with scissors. Oh my goodness, I feel like we got off some of our compositions and they still came out amazing. That's what I love about we start somewhere, we get going, and we're having fun. We're getting inspired. And we might end up a little bit to the left where we started. Man, look how good these turn out good paint, they already area. Look at this. Okay, so that was our big item in the center. I kept it with the extra marks on the top. Love that this one was our horizon near the top. It's not as defined as say, a landscape, but I still love it. This one, I don't know what was this one? This one might have been in the third. I forget what I did, but look at that. Yum, yum. What was this cruciform? I think I can see the cross underneath it. We didn't end up with a cross in our thing, but we still kept it in mind as we were working and still got something very interesting. You can see if you start with at a direction, your stuff is so much more interesting than if you're just willy nilly painting and wondering why it's not working sometimes. Okay, look at that one. This one I might could add some more marks to. I'm feeling like it needs a little extra. And look at that. Lovely, lovely. Let's see how we did compared to our inspiration color palette, which we're going to call analogous like side by side on the color wheel. Look at these, oh my gosh, look at these, the inspiration colors that we were going for. I think we hit that right on in a color palette that was beside each other. Here on the color wheel, we were right in here with some neutrals. I think we did pretty darn good. Today, I want you to do bunch of these. These are going to inspire the larger pieces that you're going to create after these. If you have some pieces that you're like, check out this composition. I really like how this worked out. I want to go with this idea as we get a little larger, that's what these little pieces are, meant to inspire your larger pieces that you're going to make later in class. I want you to do a bunch of these. I want you to try at least three different color palettes. Make at least three different collections. Study in the different compositions that we came up with in class or some of the ones that maybe you've thought of. Also, I want you to at start with this, even if you don't completely end with it, I want you to at least have a direction where you started. So that when you get to the end and you have a piece that you're like, whoa, look at this, it worked out so good. Or whoa, look at this, it did not work out at all. Where did I go wrong? You have some evaluating that you can do. All right? So I'll see you back in class. 8. Half Sheet Abstracts: All right, in this project, I want to do some half page pieces. And I'm still using that Canson Excel watercolor pad, a nine by 12 pad, 140 pound cold press paper. This time I've pulled a palette in the blues and greens. So we've got that nice color palette where they're all sitting next to each other. Again, this is in the shades of blue and green that I don't necessarily have all those exact colors. I've put them in range like this because I think what I can do is maybe take some of this green and some of this a tan color and come up with that pretty green color. I think I can mix these colors to fit better what I need them to fit. Now that I've got that going in there, it's really good fit in there. Let's just mix a bunch there for ourselves. You see how we can get the right shade just mixing a couple colors. I think I can that green and maybe this blue with a little bit of this tan. And I'll get some of this blue too. Oh, yeah, see perfect. I can just go on down the line with these mixing a little bit of this color in with that color to get the right color. Then of course, I want to have some white and clear Jesse. I do like to mix and make some lighter shades. I will be putting some Esso down. Also makes my paint where I can put stuff on top of it and it makes it more b***d. Those are liquid, so I have pulled raw sienna black, the two ends there. I have pulled this low cyan green for this darker color. I've pulled hookers green for that lighter color to mix. Then I've got turquoise blue in the middle to also mix. I think I can get there fairly close with these five colors or it will be at least close enough for me to get there. Then you just have to think composition wise, are we looking to do like some type of rule of thirds? Are we looking to maybe do some type of S shape? I feel like a lot of times I like to start abstracts with a color coming in from the edges. I'm going to work on the diagonal. Let's just jump in and do it. Let's use some of this green that I just mixed. And just get in there with our fingers if we need to. If you've got non toxic paint and I'm just going to start spreading color then on the other one, do we want the same composition? Do we want to vary it up? Do we want to have something coming in? A lot of times I have something coming in from the side, then I fill in the corners on the other side and snake through like our S composition. But a little, tiny bit of a variation on that. You can see I've already started laying out my thoughts in my composition. I'm going to have to maybe do more than one layer because this green was semi transparent. So we'll be layering things on top of these. Part of what makes abstract so interesting is the layers. And it's also interesting with the marks if you get where you're like, hm, that's not quite what I was thinking. You don't have enough layers. More layers. Just going for it. Just throwing some stuff out there. Because I know the more I do, the more layers I get, the better I'm going to love it. Let's do with this darker green. I want it to stay in the same color tones, that blue that we created. But I don't want it to quite be as black as the black. I come back with some of that. I don't know where I want this. Oh, here we go. Oh, look at that color. Sometimes it'll take a minute to get your rhythm. That's normal. Don't get discouraged, just keep going. Rolling my brush sometimes. That's always fun. I've got my mark maker tool over here. Oh, look at that. We can, while the paint is wet, don't forget to start creating some interesting marks. I'm doing that little scribble thing that I like to do, that I showed you in the mark making. Then we can come back and we can shed some out our brush here. Just we'll get there. Let's go back with this green, even lighter. Can we make it lighter and pull some of that in? I know we just got off our color way a tiny bit spine. Because now you get in here and we can start mixing colors and discovering new things. And just deciding like, oh, what are we going to get today, these colors now that I've started work, this is exactly why I like experimenting in color palettes. These colors are crazy. I don't know if I love love them or if I'm thinking maybe not. Again, I don't know, do I love them? What do you think? Do you hate them? Are you thinking hot mess? Because at the moment I'm thinking hot mess. Let's go ahead and mix some a lighter blue. I'm just keeping the same paint brush. It's fine if you get where you're painting and you're like, wow, what is going on there? Just remember, layers. Layers is the secret here. Then we could take our finger and come back with some white. We could let this dry. I could've let this do a little bit of drying, but I can start manipulating a little of that color with some white and just see like what are we going to get? Don't forget to, you can use other tools to paint with. You don't have to paint just a paint brush. We could paint with some catalyst wedges, like what about that? What if we come back in here a totally what I want to do, some mart making, we're in the upper third, keeping that rule of thirds there in mind. Or maybe we can drag some of this paint and see what that does. I can still see my curve going there. If you lose some of that composition after you get going, that's okay. The goal here is just to have a plan when you get started. As you're going, that plan changes. But that's okay, because you had a plan when you got started. My goal is to be abstract art. At some point, you do want some focal areas, you want directions for the eyes to go. But I do tend to move along and do some other stuff too. I think I like a big took, this like this, I didn't like that. What if we did this? Okay. Yeah, I like that. This is pulling that third rule where we've got third, third, third. A little bit interesting though, with that little mark layer in there. Now let's add some layers on top of this. Feeling good about it a little bit here. Just see where we can get this to go. I almost want to pull stencils out, but I want to resist. What if we start mart making with some paint? Like what if I start doing just interesting lines, whatever floats your boat there? That's pretty cool. I could do get my edges back over here still. Just playing, mixing in my color. That's fine. Oh, I won't paint all over the brush. I'll get that everywhere. All right. What if we started doing some with some white? Oh, see, now that I'm loving that. Just with the tip of the brush, just getting some interesting marks and movement. That might be my favorite area, just get creative and where you put stuff in, some marks that you make. Now I'm liking that, that was exciting. We could come back in, could go ahead and do a little more mark making with my sharp, whatever it could be a pencil. But I like the layers that we get when we drag that paint and we can see what's under it, especially right there. Did you see that? Look at all that. All right, that's fun. We could come back in with some more, more layers. We could decide, I have some little catalyst wedges over here. That's catalyst wedge. This is a master's touch brush. We could do some marks with this. See now. I like those. Oh yeah, those are good. Do we want to do let's let this dry a little and think about it. I almost want some circles. I have some of these little show off special tools for stencils, little dauber set, that's what I'm looking for, it's a Uber, I have some of these like a little dauber here could come back with some dot with some white over here. Doesn't have to be white. It could have been green. It could have been black. But I like circles. I like, I'm a circle dot girl. Think of some different things that you have around your house that can give us some interesting texture. If you've got some of these little craft tools, they're fantastic. I'm not trying to get exact, but I do find the different things interesting there. Let's do that then. I just usually just wipe these off on my microfiber cloth and then I just set them back over here and use it again. Those are easy to clean up and use. I almost feel like we need some contrast over here. I might come back in here with my brush with some black on it and put maybe some of our contrast back. Then I might look at it and think, does it need any pastels? Does it need like neocolor, two crayons on top? Maybe we could now start doing something on top of this. Let me let this dry. Let me put those paints over there before I get paint everywhere. Tell the worst of that, maybe we'll get some little neocolor, two crayons out and I'll be right back looking at our pieces. Now, our compositions. This one was a curvy thing, this one was on the diagonal. I've lost a little of that composition as I'm going, but I do have elements to look at, draw you through the piece. I'm okay with that. We could come back and see, will the crayons do anything if we color on top, I could come back through and start adding some marks and some scribbles still on this little diagonal would be interesting. These definitely are on the paint really easy because I've got that gesso in that paint, but they're not really standing out. This one we did that circle around. I could actually come through with these marks along that path if I wanted. That's pretty fun. That didn't stand out nearly as much as I thought. Let's just do some random stuff on here. Part of abstract art for me is the experiment, the having the fun, not worrying about where it's going or how I got there. It's all about what makes it interesting. Colored circles, Not something I do a lot of, but look at this, that's pretty cool. That's an element. I'm actually digging there. We just made our composition go up this other side, so we're still on a diagonal. Just go with me here. I like just experimenting playing. A lot of times I do a lot of intuitive work without really having like defined direction and stuff. And I'm okay with that because I've been doing stuff for so long. I tend to do things on the rule of thirds because of my photography background. For so long I did art for so many years and then rebelled against art with photography. Now I'm rebelling against photography and going back to art because I'm a little burned out on photography. Doing it every day for 11 years, basically, in one very long 365 day project. Now I'm swinging back to my art roots now we can see a little bit of a curve. We just curved it differently. I really like big heavy lines. I'm just doing some of the things that I was showing you on my mark making sheet that I like just because I like them. You don't have to do these. This is more in that blue range. I just want to see, when we peel this tape, is it a hot mess or does it turn into something very interesting way different than anything I've been doing lately. I love that about it. All about what feels good that day and in the moment today, this is what felt good, I guess. I also like paint, pin dots and all kinds of stuff. But now I think I've got a lot going on here. Maybe we should just peel this tape and see what we got. Because peeling tape is magical, turns every piece into magically like a finished piece of art when you're like hot mess with all the tape on it. But I will say too, on this one, I wanted a fatter border, so I did cover as much of the white as my tape allowed me before running out of tape because I wanted it to be like a nice framed out, whatever it is that we did. Oh, look at that. All these are crazy. In like a very interesting good way because as the tape comes off, you can really see it tighten up the composition and the color and we get right there into look at those. See, I almost thought, almost thought I want to scrap these, but now that we've peeled them, check it out. I'm actually digging that. These are a crazy, a little more scribbly, little more urban art feel. I am totally digging that. You can see my composition started off going this way, but I've actually made it go this way. We'll say this is a little bit on the diagonal with some rule of thirds hanging out in here. This one, we started off curving, pulled the curve back in there with the black over here leading the eye back into the frame. And some other elements as we're going. There's just a lot of interesting, yummy things to look there. I like it when it's like a set of two or a set of four, or a set of six, because then you have like a whole little collection that pulled your pieces together. All right. I hope you enjoyed this color palette in the blue green on the same side of the color wheel. And I can't wait to see what you pull together for your little half page pieces. I'll see you back in class A. 9. Searching Out Compositions: In this project, let's take a look at one of my favorite ways to create. It freezes up in the near future of worrying about composition. Then as we finish this piece, we're going to cut it up into some lovely compositions. And then we'll be able to look around the piece and decide which parts are really working for us. I'm going to be using this color combination here. This is one of those looking at the color wheel that's all along this path here on the same side. Some analogous colors, if we look at what that really means, 3-5 adjacent hues on the color wheel, sharing a common color such as blue, violet, violet, red, violet. With the possible addition of violet, blue and violet red, it just means all the colors that are sitting next to each other. As you can see here, we're going from this purple shade all the way over here to these oranges. It's the perfect analogous color scheme, without us having to think too, too hard about it. I pulled some colors out. I've pulled the deep violet for that purple, and I've pulled Alizarin crimson hue. For this one, it's a little brighter, but we can darken that down with some purple or we can just use it brightly. My goal is to get close to the color palette, not match the colors exactly. I've pulled this red oxide for this middle color, which is more pink. I may mix these two together or mix it with white. Then I've pulled out cadmium orange for these, which I can mix white in. I've got a little titanium buff because I thought maybe that would mix right here with these. What we're going to do is paint the whole page and just see what we get. One of my favorite ways to get started is to do some mark making. Because then you start the page and you get past that white page paralysis. And you just, whatever feels good, we may not see it at all. But it is fun to get something on the page, and now it's already ruined and you're not scared to ruin it. I'm not sure why. Why are we always afraid to attack that white paper? It's just, it's just paint. Why are we scared of it? All of us. Are we all have this issue and I wonder why do we have this issue? Paint cheap paper is cheap. If we don't like it, we can start over. Although I guarantee you if you start painting with the intention of cutting stuff up, you do get to a point where you're like, oh, I like way more of this than I ever thought I would. I'm just going to pull out some paint brushes. Got the Filberts. This is a 34 inch square one. We'll just see what we can do. We're just going to paint and just put stuff anywhere we want. It's what feels good, not what looks good. We're not worried at this point about where things are going or what they're doing. I like painting this way because it's very freeing. I also have the white and the clear Jess, so here and I do that so that the color mixes a little easier and I can layer stuff on top. I am using that in here. This purple is even brighter than I thought it was. After you get your color set and picked to worry about it, my goal is to work within a color palette in a range of color. And it doesn't really matter if it was exactly right on say, those sampler cards that I like to play in. It's okay. The goal is not to be exactly exactly the goal is to work in that color palette and just be creative and experiment outside of your comfort zone. This is definitely one of my favorite ways to paint and play. Getting outside of what I normally like to do, it leads me to bigger projects and normally classes because I discover new techniques, new skills, new things that I'm like, oh my gosh, I love this so much, I'm ready to make a class. So it's a lot of times how I get to my next classes. What if, while we're painting, oh, oh, did you see what that did? Let's totally drag our little paint brush through that paint. Look at that. That was super fun. Let's go ahead and do that over here too, just to see if I can get any fun dragging. I like that it made a stripe there. That was super cool. Trust me, you're going to see these and think, oh, this is a hot mess. I don't know about this. That's the goal. I'm looking for some hot messes. Let's just see where this can take us when we're done. At the very end, I always end up with stuff that I'm like, oh, who even knew we were going to get there? I love coming up with random color palettes like this too, because you never know how it's actually going to look and work on your paper. Like this is not what I was actually expecting it to look like. Not at all what I was thinking I was going to get. Maybe just come back in here with some of this white and I just use that white Esso for that because that's basically white acrylic paint with some grit in it. It's fine to just paint with it. Also, if you want to just use that as your white a little bit, not a big deal. While this is wet, don't forget, we can make, we can draw stuff in our piece. We can do little hash marks, little tick marks or something can pull some lines through it. Because remember, it's all about the layers at this point. I don't want you to worry about where you're putting what. I'm not trying to create a specific composition at this point. I'm to give lots of interesting sections and areas that I can pick from. Basically. Super fun, that was a bunch of good stuff. I'm going to come back maybe with some. This is a point too where I like to use some stencils. Sometimes you don't have to use stencils, but I'm just throwing that idea out there. I think it's fun to have some repetitive areas you can make with different tools that you have. The end of a paint brush who see there, that's fun. Let's do that over here after you get going. If you're like in a color palette and you get inspired to use something else that maybe you didn't start with. Like say if you want a dark color in there, like black or some color that really gives you a pop. Something different than you've already got going on. Don't be afraid. Go for it. Go ahead. Let's use some of this purple here. Be brave. I have some T shirts printed for myself and I'm going to start wearing those at my art table that say, be brave. I don't know what the heck I just did there. I just threw that purple on there like it was just wanted to like fly through it. I don't think I like it, but I want you to do stuff that you're not sure about because this is how we're going to get to more interesting things and figure out what do we like to do when we're painting? What's our favorite ways to paint? Just throwing some marks in here, different colors. Okay, that's crazy. We can take the end of paint brushes and do some, Oh, look at that. Oh, that was some good dragon dragon dragging. We can get some yummy show through under there. Don't go all the same direction. Oh, yes, See I'm liking that. Here's where we're going. Just to give you an idea, I like to take little pieces of mat that are either pre cut or that you cut out of a piece of watercolor paper. Then I like to search out compositions within my larger piece. This is my favorite way to create. I like to paint and not worry about the hot mess, and then come back and figure out what works and what doesn't work. Then we can start to identify areas that were like, oh, this is very interesting. We can turn things around, not do it the way that we painted it and think, oh, look what we got here. This is my favorite way to paint and search things out. Just figure things out. What do we like? What do we not like? Do I need more stuff on here? Do like the little dabs. These are little craft daubers from Michael's. They got like a little spongy piece on the top. I've decided I like dots and things that make dots, and I've decided these little daubers make great dots. What you could do if I'm not sure where I want to put something. If you get to a point where you're like, I think I'm ready to cut it up, but I don't think I've done. Go ahead and cut it up and then you can evaluate what else does your finished little piece need? You can finish it off at that point. I love doing stuff like that. You know? This is like doing dots with your paint pin, but it's a much larger surface. I do like little dots. I'm a dot girl, give me some dots. Don't stick your hand in the paint. How, How many of you have to remind yourself of that? Don't put your hand in the paint. Terrible. And then I just wipe it off on my little rag and it's ready for the next time. That's super fun. I've also some white acrylic in. I'll throw a little ink in here on you. This is the Liquitex, which I might not have mentioned in the supplies, but I want you to keep your mind open to everything that you've got. What I like about the inks is we can draw with them. I can draw onto this. Something interesting, perhaps, maybe not, but we're going to do it anyway. Be brave. You're going to hear me tell you that now. The next time you do something and you're like, I don't know, I'm scared. I'm scared too. And I got to tell myself, just go for it, just paint. What helps? Also, if you start painting with no expectation in mind, that helped me out. That's when you're the most disappointed you're painting. When you're all done, you had this picture in your mind, let's say like you wanted to draw a tree. And you're like, okay, I'm going to draw a tree. And you get your paper out and you start drawing and your tree looks like something a five year old did, which is not what your intention was. Then you're really disappointed because it was a failed tree attempt. If you start off your abstract pieces with no expectation, nothing really in your mind, you don't know where it's going. Then when you get to the end of it, you're excited because you're like, look what we got. I didn't even expect this. That's my favorite way to create. I want to eliminate some of the expectations and the pressure that we put on ourselves. When I paint, I want to paint, I want to have fun. I want to make a mess. It's like slapping paint all over it. And then in the end, I want to see what I can achieve by maybe cutting something up. I'm going to have to let this dry, then I'll be back. Okay, This is dry. I just peeled the tape off and took it off my board because I now want to start looking at this with some viewfinders. This is just a piece of Matt that I got at the Michaels. You can get it at frame stores, craft stores, they come in different sizes. This is like a five inch by seven inch size. Just like a 3.5 inch by five inch size. You can make your own like three by 3 ". You can make different sizes. Some people also like to take little strips of watercolor paper and then you could get different sizes out of that. It's out there, I've tried it. What I like to do now is start looking at these and searching out interesting compositions. And if you're thinking well what's interesting, this is where we'll start looking at the composition pieces, ideas that I gave you on the resources, the project resources page. Let me make sure that, here we go, You can start looking at some of these and thinking, okay, I'm looking for things that are not centered. Maybe there's some stripes in there. Maybe it's got some movement in it, or it's on the diagonal. I'm looking for interesting things. If I'm going to off center things, maybe there's some things in there that's interesting. That's what I'm thinking. What have I created within this larger piece of hot mess that's going to give me something interesting If I stop right here now I have some stuff on this third of the paper. There's some interesting stuff on this third of the paper. Nothing's really directly in the center, which is what I go for. I don't want the subject to be centered, that's the least interesting, unless it's on purpose. Generally though, I like it to be a little less going on there and the action coming in on the upper third, I've got lots of good action. On the lower third, I've got lots of good action. That's a good candidate. Also, like this one here. What I like here is we've got some horizontal lines in here, we've got a shape coming in from the side. We've got some decoration over here. Overall, we've got tons of movement in this piece that leads our eye throughout the piece. Now, I'm not done looking, I want to pull this every direction that I can say, okay, what about this? Here we've got action on the upper third, we've got action on the lower third. It's a little simpler in the center, I'm liking it, that's a possibility. What else do we have more than anything? I'm moving this around, looking for things that catch my eye. If you're using a big piece like this and you're like, okay, I'm not getting it with this size. Go smaller, you don't have to have a bunch of big pieces out of this. You can go smaller and start searching out interesting things and say, okay, now I, I've got some vertical lines, I've got some movement coming in from the side. I've got these yummy dots. I'm loving that. Now that I've gone smaller, you don't have to go larger. But as I was moving it around, I'm loving this right here. Now I've got the swoop of something coming through the piece. It's leading my eye somewhere and you're thinking, oh, where does that go? What is beyond the frame? I've got some dots coming in, I got some interesting things on this third coming up from the bottom, we've got some movement. Now look at all these things that my eye is looking at. And I know that it continues because some of these things go out of the frame and I'm like, oh, what does the rest of that look like? It piques your interest and to see what else is going on that maybe you can't see. Let's see, is there anything else feeling like this was the one that I really, really liked because I like this thing swooping through that when you get one that you like. And the reason why I like this double frame is because I can go a little bit bigger. There's p***ty of room to frame this now. All I do is I just take a pencil and I draw out the square of whatever I'm going to cut out. You can do this with scissors or paper cutter, whatever you're more comfortable with, then we just cut this. Another favorite thing to do, we might as well, while we're talking about cutting up art, might as well do it because it goes right in with our stripe composition. I like making things that I call junk art collage. That's basically using all of these pieces that you either love or don't love. You cut off of the left over the junk. We make something out of it. Here we go, Check it out. Oh, look how pretty that is. All right. I'm loving that. We're going to keep that one. What if we took our paper cutter, cut this up into stripes? And I want them to be hope there's no wet paint still on it. We'll cut this off here. I think there is a little bit of white paint that's still wet, So I'm just going to be careful. We'll cut this off here. We'll cut this off here. All right? Oh, look at that. Look at that. Maybe I like that instead of cutting it up. Well, I still want to cut it up though. I'm going to get a piece of paper. What did I do with my pad of paper? Here we go. Stuff on my fingers. But I got some paper here and I can get a clean piece. I can cut this piece down to a size that I want to use preferably, that is going to fit the piece that we're working with. If I'm working with a piece that's this size, I might want to cut that right about here. Then I know that that's going to fit. Let's put that there. Now here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to cut this into different sizes. Let's get a big one in there. Let's just get this one here. We can cut some more up if we need to, but this will get the point across. Now what I want to do, reorganize these into some format that it didn't actually get painted in. Pull the stripes differently than what we painted. And we can move these around, we can think about it, then look what we got. I like to leave a little space in between each one and then we have a super fun junk art striped collage with slightly different than we painted or it could end up following the direction that we painted. But we could also turn some of these around. If we're getting to much the same of how we painted it, we could just re arrange them all together. But I like when we start turning them around because then, you know, they're going to be different. Look at that, then I just glue that down with some glue. I have yes, paste that I like because of the thickness. I like a thicker paste. But check out that, how super fun was that? Looking at compositions, we're doing that. Horizontal strata, looking at this work, at the movement, and we talk through what was so appealing about this to me. That's what I like about doing these. I like going through and cutting out the appealing pieces and going, okay, here's what is amazing about this section. Even if the whole piece wasn't amazing, that section was, let me tell you, it's very liberating to cut up art when you've never done it before. You just all of a sudden free yourself from all the stuff that you just get stuck in. Then cutting them up into something like these stripes and gluing those down, that's super fun. Those look really cool. We didn't have to actually follow any of the other rules. We've got lots of movement. We've got the, and we've just got the interest that we've created in how we've laid these down on the paper. I hope you've give both these a try out. This is two of my favorite ways to create some abstract without getting bogged down into heavy thought of composition and color. And just have some fun. All right, I'll see you back in class. 10. Finishing Sprays: Let's talk about finishing our pieces. If you're just doing acrylic paint and maybe the neo color two crayons, you probably don't need to finish those, I generally don't finish those. I will just store those in a clear archival are like I've done some of the pieces from the other classes. I will keep those in that sleeve until I'm ready to give them away or use them for an example, for a class, or to sell it, or to have it framed. Generally, when you're doing abstract work, you'll want to go ahead and sign the bottom right corner and maybe put the year. Maybe sign the right corner and put the, sign the left corner and put the year on the right corner, whatever floats your fancy there. And you generally do that in pencil so that archiver can tell it was an original signature and not a print or a stamp. Generally, you would do that before you take it to the framer so that you know which way is up, because I can't tell you how many times something gets framed. The framer looks at it and thinks, oh, let's frame it this way, and then you get it and you're like, oh, it's upside down. If it doesn't have anything on it that's going to get on everything. I generally don't do anything other than store it in a clear plastic archival art sleeve. If like I did on some of the pieces today I use chalk pastels, then I almost always use a soft pastel fixative on it to set the pastel. This is generally when I've just used the pastel as a mark making on top of watercolor or acrylic paint, like I've done today, I will fix that pastel so that it's less likely to smear before it gets framed. It won't continue to hopefully shed in the frame. You do want to do a test piece before you do your final pieces to make sure that it doesn't darken it or do something funny with the supplies that you've used in your pieces. Do a little test piece and spray that test piece first, because I've ruined a pastel piece that I did on pastel paper that shouldn't have been sprayed. And I didn't know any better. And I'm like totally made it all dark. Now I'm real big about doing test pieces to make sure I know what to expect when I use it on final pieces. Soft pastels get soft pastel, fixative bili. If I use oil pastels, which I do a ton, I'm obsessed with oil pastels lately. Then I will use the oil pastel fixative, baila. Because the oil pastel never really seems to dry, stays tacky. This will help that set up and create a film on it so that it doesn't continue to remain tacky forever. Let's say you're not using pastels and you're using all acrylic or using all water color. You're using materials on top that don't smear, smudge shed. Then you're welcome to not finish it and just store it in a sleeve. If you're working with something that's got layers and you need to layer on top of it without that layer changing Cry on Workable fixative is a good choice for that it protects pencil pastel and chalk drawings prevents smudging and wrinkling, allows you to easily rework things. It's acid free and archival safe. You can get these at the art store. You may can get them at the paint store. But I tend to think that the paint store are the paint ones, but you just have to look. But I always want to say acid free and archival. Because if you're putting this on a piece of art that you want to keep an archive and it looked good for years and years. I don't want to have the cry on paint clear stuff because those could yellow. If you've just got to have something to go on top, then I do have the Mar varnish that I've used on lots of pieces. It's a good art varnish. If you're doing oil paintings, Gam var has a good varnish for. That really just depends on what you've put on your piece as to if I finish it or not. If you need one, go for an art varnish. This you spray spray layer, You let that dry. A very thin layer. You don't hold these on the art piece and let it build up. It's a very thin layer, let it dry, very thin layer, let it dry, very thin layer, let it dry. And two to three layers is what you're going to want to do there. Then I wanted to say acid free. I also usually wanted to say, now this is non yellowing protection for oil, acrylic, and water color. It does not reactivate your water color. It's not sitting on the water color wet long enough to reactivate it. Generally, it's a thin layer that dries almost immediately, so don't worry about that. So those are the finishing options that I might recommend, other than just storing it in a sleeve until it's ready to be framed. That is most of the time what I do if I don't have pastels on there. All right, I'll see you back in class. 11. Final Thoughts: As we wrap up this journey into the world of abstract art and composition, I hope you're feeling as inspired as I am by the possibilities that intentional composition and thoughtful color choices bring to our creative process. Remember, every stroke of your brush, every hue you select, and every shape you create contributes to the story your artwork tells. By focusing on composition right from the start, we've unlocked a powerful tool that guides our creativity, allowing us to craft cohesive and captivating abstract pieces. As you take these new found skills and insights into your own artistic endeavors, I encourage you to keep experimenting and pushing boundaries. Thank you for joining me in this exploration of abstract art composition. I can't wait to see the incredible works you'll create, armed with the tools and techniques that we've covered together. I'll see you next time.