Transcripts
1. Welcome: Hey, I'm Denise Love and I want to welcome you to class. Let me show you what
we'll be doing. In this class, I'm going
to show you how I create some really bold
little abstract pieces and you could do this
much larger too. I'm just working on smaller
papers to film in class. But I started out working in
my sketchbook before class, just creating beautiful
little abstract pieces where I was experimenting
with color and mark-making. Just testing out new supplies
and different ideas to see what it is that some of
these do and what colors, how they react to each other. In that, I want to show you, we're going to create
a couple of pieces in the same techniques
so that you can experiment with
different supplies too. We're using watercolor, we're trying out
some walnut ink, or you could use coffee, we're trying out some
little colored pigment which you could use or
you could do something else in it's place and some favorite colors out
of our little deck, I'm using a little bit of
graphite from my mark-making, which you could do that
or you could use pin. But I really like
experimenting with different supplies to
see how they react with each other and how I can create some fun little
abstract pieces, and then when we're all done, we put a little frame on these, you can see how beautiful these would be
framed up and hanging. Definitely want to see some of these after you're
creating them. I hope you enjoy this
technique and it let's you really get loose and
not get so stuck on. Do I want to do this or
do I want to do that? Or maybe I don't like
this or whatever, I just want you to
create and you have permission not to like the
pieces when you're done. But I guarantee if you
do three or four and you come back tomorrow
after creating, you'll think, wow,
those looks so much better than I
even was thinking. Because some of these, especially in this blue
color, are so pretty. I just love these. I think you're going
to love it too. It's all about experimenting and playing with
color and letting yourself just go without any real expectations
here and seeing like what can I create with a bold mark-making element and some color and some
different supplies. I'm excited to have
you in this class. These are really fun. Abstract is what really
makes me a happy camper. when I'm playing
in my art journal, and I come up with
little pieces like this that inspire whole series, that's what really
gets me excited. I hope you enjoy doing these, and I will see you in class.
2. Supplies: Let's talk about
some of the supplies that we're going to be
using in this class. I'm doing a little
abstract pieces on £140 cold press,
watercolor paper. I've just got a nine by
six book from the Michel's that was £140 and it's a medium grade
watercolor paper. It's not your artist grade
or your cheapest grades. It's just a medium grade. I liked the hunter £40. It's a nice weight, and the cold press has a
nice watercolor texture. You could try hot press, you could try rough pressed. You could definitely play
there with different papers if you wanted to
really experiment. But at the minimum, maybe some £140 watercolor paper. If you've got the big pads, maybe cut those into a size
that's manageable for you. Then I'm also using
some walnut ink. You can use walnut ink, which is the pretty brown
here on these abstracts. But you don't have
to use walnut ink if it's harder to find for you because I had to
get mine online, you could use coffee. Just get some instant coffee
mixed with hot water. Get it nice and strong so that when you put the
coffee down, it's a nice, pretty brown color that you could dilute with water or not. That's a nice alternative to walnut ink if you
can't get that. Then I'm also just
randomly experimenting at the very end of these pieces with a little bit
of acrylic ink, I have Payne's gray, and an iridescent copper here. I also experimented on these
and particularly love it, these infusion colored stains, and I recommend it in class. What this is, is pigment
and little bits of pigment and little bits of
brown walnut crystals. So it's the walnut stain, not like the walnut drawing ink, but it's the walnut crystals. You can order those online. If you wanted to make your own because you can't these
are still available. I've looked them up recently and you can still get
infusions colored stains, but if you want to try your own, you could get colored
pigment from the art store and walnut crystals and mix
up some of your own stains. That's a nice option. If you don't want to
get some of these, you could do some of your own. I'm using just a couple of
colors of watercolor in class. I was using this Mayan red,
and this yellow ocher. Sorry, that's Venetian red. I was using these two colors, Mayan red and yellow
ocher in class. Just because I thought,
let's just play with these and see what we get. That was on this one. Then on these, I was playing
with the rare earth green, which is these are
Daniel Smith colors. I love this rare earth green because it's more
of a turquoise, like aqua color, not
quite turquoise, but more of an aqua. Aqua is my favorite color. So of all of these that I did
and even though I did work outside of my comfort
zone with the red series, I really loved the blue series
and I love all of these and I did some of them lighter and some of them darker, and just played with
different things on top. A couple of colors
of watercolor. I've got some
watercolor brushes. These are the Aqua Elite, Size 10, Size 12 that
I was using in class. You can use any
watercolor brushes that you happen to have on hand. You don't have to go buy
any if you don't want. I was using a twelve
bold drawing pencil to make my marks because
I like graphite marks, but you can do other marks with different pens or pencils or whatever you have on
hand if you use a pen, my favorite pen is the
Micron, Pigma Micron O5. These are archival ink. They're are black. They do have these
and other colors. But if you're going
to use an ink instead of a graphite pencil, that is one of my favorite. That is basically the
supplies for this class. You know, you want a paper, some coffee or a walnut
ink, little watercolor, little pencil, and then
just let yourself be free, do some mark-making and
spread the color around. I want you to not think
very hard about these so that you're working a
little bit more organically and you're not trying to come
up with some exact outcome. I want you to put some
bold mark-making in there. It can be any mark-making
that you happen to like. I do show this
little cheat sheet that I keep up my desk of
different types of marks that you could consider. I do like add to this as I
see something and think, oh, I like that mark, let me add that to my
little idea sheets. So keep yourself an idea sheet. Then you'll have different marks and things that you
might consider doing. You might like doing
little x's and o's. O's or zeros or
circles or squares or, I mean, there's all kinds
of mark-making you can do. You don't have to do the
exact same that I'm doing. This just happened
to appeal to me and I love how these
pieces came out. I think you're going to
have fun doing these. Keep the supplies extra basic. You could do these
on the kitchen table while you're watching TV because it's not really
very many supplies and a couple of colors, a watercolor brush, some
water and you're set to go. I hope you enjoyed
this short class. It's not a real long one, but I just wanted to show you this technique to get
you experimenting with. I will see you in class.
3. Abstract project - Color blocking: [MUSIC] In this class I want to do a few more
watercolor abstracts. I'm obsessed with little
watercolor abstracts. I've done lots of them in
my little art book here. I've got a couple of books
that I just experiment with, different ideas and
laying down color, and design and just
seeing different things that I might want to then
continue and experiment with. Just flipping through to show you different things
I've just played with. Some of these worked out great, some of them didn't
work out at all. But I like using my sketchbook
for flushing out ideas. I really love these abstracts
that I've done recently. I wanted to show
you how I did them because I'm going to play in
this technique for a while. I think you're going to
enjoy making some of these because it's just fun to experiment with
new art supplies. This is using some watercolor. I have out my two palettes
of different watercolors. Most of these are Daniel Smith. These are Sennelier, these are some of this
Grumbacher artist Academy series that you can find. It's a medium grade
watercolor or is the Sennelier is
the higher grade. Most of these are
Daniel Smith colors. I've just pulled these out of some bigger boxes
of color that I have. I'm also going to be playing today with some
walnut drawing ink. That's how I got started. This one was the walnut ink. This one right here before that was just all watercolor and experimenting with the
color being watercolor. This is walnut ink and color. What I like about playing
with something like walnut ink is if you
don't have walnut ink, you could play with coffee. Most people have coffee, or you could play with
really super heavy, strong tea. Keep those in mind. I did have to order the
walnut ink at some point, so it sits over here
in my cabinet and I thought I should
play with this. I have a walnut ink out, got the watercolors out. I've just got a couple of larger watercolor brushes that
I'll be playing with. Then I also have out some of this fun product called
infusions, colored stains. What it is, it is pigment
mixed in a walnut crystals. This is a product that I have
found that still available, I've had these for a while. But if you can't find
this exact thing, you could make your own. You could get artist pigment, which you can get that
from someplace like natural earth pigment
and it would just come as say a solid
color like this. You can order walnut crystals because they're
available online. You can mix your own pigment with crystals and have a little jar of that
if you wanted to, or some you made up yourself. Because what I like about this
is it's real fine pigment and brown speckles all
mixed in there together. On this one, it just adds to it. You can see the
brown a little bit, you can see the
color a little bit and added an extra texture. It just made it really
fun to play with on something like this and
add an extra dimension, an element into the work. I bought a box of
different colors, so I have all kinds of colors
here and I just put a hole in the top with my art tool. Then you can just tape the top when you're
not using them. I haven't used all of these, it lives in my cabinet
because I thought, I want that and I want to do whatever experiment that I was watching them do with it
and then I never did it. Basically, you just
punch a hole right in the top and then you're
ready to sprinkle it out. That's how I'm going to be
using that today in class. That's super fun. Just get creative here I'm
using watercolor paper. I'm just using some
pre-cut 9 by 6, a medium-grade watercolor paper. I like this Grade 2 for playing round that the
Michael's carries, but any cold press
under 40 pound, watercolor paper is fine. I thought I'd work on more than one at a
time because you want to put some layers on here and perhaps let them dry before
you try to draw on it. Because I will be
drawing on these. I do like drawing and
mark-making in my abstracts. You can see I've got fun little hash marks
going in there. That's what we'll be
working on today. But I love the walnut
ink to experiment. I'm going to lay down, let's just start one. Going to lay down some water on here so that I can really get this pigment to move around
in some abstract ways. Then I might just drip some
of the ink down on the paper. I'm trying to see
where the water is in the shine of
my light over here. But I'm just going to move that around and I'm
twirling my brush. I like to do that
a lot just to get some different looks
there. I like that. Then I'm going to dive
into my watercolor, but I actually might do
this on another one. We'll let that dry before I jump into the watercolor a
little bit because I don't want it to
completely disappear. Let's just go ahead
and do that again. I'm being real organic here, I'm not really trying to
do anything specific. I want to just experiment
and play at this point. Let's set that one to the side. I like working on more than
one piece because when you're throwing lots of
water on your paper, you want to give
some of that time to dry a little bit before, unless you're just wanting
all your colors to blend together and I'm not
necessarily wanting to do that. I might even want darker walnut ink and I might come back and
do another layer. As these dry a little bit, I could come back in and
then add a little more in here for some darker
areas, spots, dots. I might do some a
little brush speckle while I've got the walnut out. I might do a little speckle and all of them, I
like that speckle. I like that. We're going to let these dry a little and then I'm going
to get into the watercolor. This is a Daniel Smith color. This is rare earth
green thinking. I think I'm going
to try one of those and we'll try one in the yellow ocher, Daniel Smith. I might even I like
this Mayan Red. I like some of these greens. We'll just see. I don't want
them all to be the same, but there are certain
colors that I'm drawn to. Let's go back into
this one because it looks like it's
a little drier. I'm going to start in here
with this rare earth green, which is a really
pretty light aqua. I'm building the layers here. I just want a
little more pigment as I get higher up on this. Then I might let that dry and come back and add some more. Maybe I'll do another
one in this color. I love this color. This is my color, aqua. [LAUGHTER] I love it. Now see if you don't let
the underlayer dry enough, you really do get it
blending right in. So let's do a little bit of
that and then let that dry, and then maybe we'll come
back with a different color. Let me get the walnut ink up that we have right
here on the table. Then maybe this one we'll do with the yellow ocher
and the Mayan Red. I'm not sure I'm
going to like that, but it's always
fun to experiment. This is how you figure out
what you like and don't like. This just really
doesn't do a whole lot, doesn't sit right on top a
little bit. Let's try the red. I really think the aqua
ones are my favorite, but you never know until
you try something new. You know what you're
going to like. I may need to let that dry a little bit to come
back for another thicker, heavier coat of color there. So let's let that dry in. Then I'm going to
get my heat gun and dry this a little bit. [NOISE] Look how pretty this is. That's so pretty,
I don't even know if I want to keep
going with more color. That's so pretty,
but let's go ahead. [LAUGHTER] You can also play with other
things at this point, you can play with acrylic inks. You could play with
acrylic paints. You could stop right
there and start mark making with
different materials that you like to mark make with. You could do that with pastels. You could do it with
charcoal, graphite. That's fun. I like this color. You could do that with quite
a bit, just experiment. [NOISE] Let that a little drier, a little more color
on the top of here because I'm really trying to layer this
color up in this one. This is not a super heavy color. Some of these colors are super heavy and you get
a ton of pigment. This one I'm having to work a little bit on getting
that pigment up. Then before this dries too good, I might want to come
back with my infusions. I like this color, it's
in the right shade. Just add some of
this in there for an extra interest in texture. I'm being a little more
specific in where I shook that. You can see a little tiny
bit of texture there. What we can do at
this point is take our pencil and move
some of this around. This is going to really give
us some beautiful marks and lines while that's still wet and we're moving
that pigment around. I'm just using a 12B pencil. It's a really soft, really pigmented pencil
here, really soft graphite. I'm being just organic there. I'm not trying to create
anything specific. Then I might set that to
the side to dry a bit and come back to it in a moment. Oh, I love this. I want a little more
of this blue on top. That's real fun. Then I might want some
more infusions on top. I think I'm going to go, there are several colors here. I don't have to go
with the same color. There's a brown in here that
might be nice. Let's see. A different color of blue. It's pretty green. Here's a black. There's
lots of colors in here, is a different color of blue. That's too green. This is a real pretty color. It's a different shade
than this color. Let's try that. I'll put a
hole on the top of that. This is how you figure out what these different things do, and what colors they really are. You just get them out
and start playing. I love that. Then again, I'm going to take my
bold drawing pencil. I've got some ink over here
that's still not mixed. So let's just go through
all of this and get some fun marks in there that are not any particular shape, I'm going for just really
just completely random here. If we end up with
something that looks like a shape like
this right here, looks a little bit
like a flower, then that's just a bonus. [LAUGHTER] Now we've
got this third one. I've let it dry quite a bit. Let's add a little more
of this Mayan Red. Not quite the one I
thought I was picking up. That's a little brighter, pinky red, but that's okay. Then I might want some
of these infusions. Look how pretty
this terracotta is. Let's go ahead and
get that in there. Then I'm going to again, just take my pencil and start moving some of that
pigment a little bit. I want to draw some
more on these, but I want it to
get a little drier. So I'm going to dry these
and then I'll be right back. [MUSIC]
4. Abstract project - Adding details: These are mostly dry, and I think at this
point I'm going to go in and do some mark-making. Then I did notice on my
piece of my sketchbook, I was a little bit
lighter handed with the watercolor and I do like this lighter bit a lot. So definitely think about that as you're
being heavy handed, practice with being a
little bit lighter with your color and a little
bit heavier with your color and just
experiment with that. Sometimes I just have a
lighter hand than other terms. So I'm going to start
this off with just doing the rows of lines. I want it to run
all the way through this piece because I like that. But you could do
lines going this way. I've also experimented
with lines going other directions
and all the way through the piece and
that was super fun. You could do completely
different marks than I do, my little cheat sheet
that I keep up here. I like this one right here. That's what I'm doing, it's the little rows of lines. But look at some of the
other things you could do. You could do long lines, you could do little crosses or cross hatches or little x's. You could do circles,
bigger circles, x's. You could do
botanicals on these. I've got a class where I do botanical drawings
on top of watercolor, and that would be a really
good thing to do on top here if you'd like the
botanical aspect of things, you could do little
m's, little xo's, little lines, scribble, kinds of fun stuff
that you can do. You might look around
on Pinterest and just take note when you see an
artist doing different marks, which marks interests you. On Instagram, there's
several collage hashtags, and one of them is
like collage fodder, F-O-D-D-E-R, I think. Where people just do pages and pages and pages of
different types of mark-making to then cut
up to use in collage. But all the mark-making is what interests me on looking
on those groups. So you might look up collage pieces or collage making or collage fodder or
something like that on like Instagram or Pinterest and see what comes up
and what marks look interesting and make yourself
a little cheat sheet of marks to use later
for pieces like this, or for abstract things that
you're enjoying doing. [MUSIC] See there
now there we go, It doesn't have to be perfect, but I love the element that a big strong set of
marks adds to a piece. You could do that in ink, pen and ink if you
wanted to work in ink. My favorite ink to work in are the Pigma Micron pens the
05 is my favorite size. It's archival ink. It can draw on the paper first or on top of
the watercolor, and it doesn't smudge. So I really love that pen, and it comes in
different colors if you don't want to
work in just black. So that's the pen I'd recommend. I'm working with graphite. I've got lots of different
graphite pencils and things. You could work in
charcoal if you wanted, but you'd have to
be careful about the charcoal smearing later. I like that about the pencil. It doesn't necessarily smear
without a finishing spray. That being said though,
these pigment powders, if you ever got this wet, you're going to spread
those around some more, and they could
easily react later. So you'd have to just
be careful there. I might just do a little bit
of implied writing in here. It looks like riding a might've
been writing something, but maybe you don't
know what it was, and you can't really read it, but it's almost letters.
I love doing that. If you have good handwriting, and you want to put quotes or scripture or something
in there that you like, that'd be the perfect
time to do that. I also think now that I've
got this one where I want it, maybe I'll come back and drip some walnut ink on top and just see if it'll
do like a splat somewhere. I don't really want
it to be dropped, so I want it to be
more like a big splat. Be like some little splat. We could even make them
run down the paper. Like do we like
splats with runs? We're not. That's fun,
not going that way. Total to the point of
experimenting here. I know when you do something, and you're like, I
don't want to ruin it. I think the same thing, but now I didn't mean to put that all the way
down in the ink. [LAUGHTER] But now I'm
just like, You know what, I'm just going to go for
it and see what I get. That's fun at it. Completely different
mark in there when it dries and lighten
up a little bit. Let's just see what
we end up with. So in this one, I'm still going to
do those marks, but maybe a little different. Maybe I'll make it run
through the piece this time. I like using the
same elements in different ways in a
series that I think, because that's the way you
get interesting pieces, but not all the exact same. But cohesive like it made
a collection or a set, or you could tell they were
all part of the similar idea. With like the other
abstracts that I do. These elements like this are just little tiny
elements and bits that add to the overall piece worst on this particular technique, I would like your
mark-making pick one element to become a super dominant part
of that abstract. I want it to be a
feature in all of that. I don't want it to just
sink into the background, and you're coming to look at it, and you'll see it
when you get closer. I want it to be an element
that draws the eye and really becomes a
dominant part of that piece. That's my thought behind these. Look at that. I love it. If you tape off your piece, then you'll even have the
pleasure of pulling tape and it being in its own frame I
did not take these off. But if I were to pull out
my piece of mat board, which I'll do here
in just a bit. Let me go find it. I think I've put it in a drawer over here. If we put a piece of
mat board on this, it will instantly
elevate anything that we do to a piece of art
ready to be framed. In some of these aren't
artists just experimenting. For years and years and years, I was afraid to
even get started. I would see that piece
of white paper and have white page paper paralysis. I wanted to create a masterpiece and
couldn't create anything. I just got stuck. Now I free myself from that because I just start throwing
something on the paper. Not worried about
if it looks good. I do want it usually to be
some colors that I like, and I like to do more
than one at a time because if one of them
has a color that I hate, which I have some over
here, I've thrown away. I'd have to dig them out
from under the tape. But they're truly terrible. Well, they might have
been yesterday's trash. I thought I hate these colors. No matter what I do, I'm
not going to like this. If you do something like that, give yourself permission to say, Okay, I like these two, but I don't like this
one or set it to the side and come back
and look at it tomorrow. It doesn't have to be something that you have to
decide on right now. I like to let things sit for
a day and when I come back, I'm usually like, oh, that's so much better than
I thought it was. Sometimes you're just too
close to it. Look at that. Super cool. I'm liking that. Maybe a few marks out here. Maybe we'll come back
with some of this. It could even throw
another thing in there. I've got some acrylic ink here. We could try to throw
some acrylic ink in here. Let's see. We would get doing this on a
little spare piece of paper. I'm just trying to see like what that would look like
if we spotted that out. We could splat it
out, move it around. Oh, never mind. Let's just plot
it out and let it do its thing because I could do that and then run this through
it for some mark-making. This is a coppery
color acrylic ink. Look how pretty that copper is. I like that. Let's let
that do its thing now. We'll let this one dry. We're going to set it aside
and let it dry for a bit. We will come over here
to our third piece. This one I think is my favorite. I'm going to, let's see, what do we want to do here. We couldn't even do our
lines a different way. So I think I might do that. [MUSIC] I don't like it when it's a little
bit off the piece and then works its
way into the piece. That's why you're
seeing me go into the white and into the
color with my marks. [MUSIC] I like that. Let's come up a little higher. I like that. Okay, so we might lose same
little technique that we did with that last one, but maybe let me shake this up, maybe with Payne's gray and
just see what we can get. Like just randomly
experimenting, so the Payne's gray
is not a stopper. Maybe I'll stick my brush in it. Seen at the craft store there daubers like that where you can squeeze it
and squeeze stuff out. I probably just need to
grab a couple of those. It's like that, but I wanted
them to be more of a splat. Like a missed spots
too but just go and work these in with
our mark-making here. That's fine. Look at that. Let's let these
dry for a minute. I'm going to find my
little frames and think there's anything else
I want to add to these. I will be right back. These are mostly dry used
a little heat gun on it. I have noticed as a
little tip there if you're being impatient like I'm doing here because I'm
filming something and using a heat gun to dry
in between your layers, then your paper tends
to warp a little bit. It's not a big deal. You
can stack these under a heavy set of books for a couple of days and
that'll flatten back out. I have found if I do
this a little more organically and walk around and leave each layer to dry on its
own that the paper doesn't do what it does when you're heating the
paint up like that. Just keep that in mind if
you're getting it where there wrinkling and you think, well, how do I get
that flat again? Just stack them up
and under a flat, a big heavy books
for a couple of days and that will flatten
back out for you. As promised, here is a set of mat board that
I got at the Michel's to use in this exact way so that I can then look at stuff
and think, am I done? Doesn't need something else. Would it be beautiful framed? This is a little bigger
than my frame is, so it's going outside the frame. But still, as soon
as you see a piece of mat board around
a piece of art, you instantly think that
finishes it off so beautifully. Then you can decide, stand back and look at it. Are you done or do you
have more to add to it? I really love how
this one turned out. You can turn these
different ways to see, do you like it one way
better than the other? Or do you like it the
way that you did it? A lot of times too, when
I'm working on abstracts, I'm turning things in
different directions as I'm working and
looking at them, but see when it really goes
off the page like that, how it finishes off
the piece of art, rather than if I had
just stopped it right there in the middle where
the color was, I love that. It goes off the frame
with my mark-making and became a really dominant
part of that piece of art. Actually like this one, more than I thought, the blues and the greens
are my favorite colors. Usually when I'm
working on stuff. I do like the blue
tones the best. My inspiration pieces
that we were looking at, I like the lighter bit of watercolor versus
the heavier bits. So experiment with
that quite a bit. I really love experimenting
with the shapes. This is a heavy
layer of watercolor. These infusions, colored
stains that have the walnut crystals
in it is in there and then a really big swath of that. See if we put these on here, that instantly elevates
even our scrapbook pages to pieces of art that
are ready to be framed, like, look how beautiful
that is if I'd kept these bigger
ones within my frame. Look at that. That's
like my very favorite. Some of these really my art journal pieces are
my most favorite pieces. Even when I go on to do more
off of that inspiration, sometimes I go back
to the art journal, peace and love it the best. Sometimes I'm going to tear
these pages out of here and maybe have a frame
because look at that one right there.
It's my very favorite. But it's just a little
bit lighter color than our bigger
ones that we did. I really love this one. I really love this one and the acrylic ink that
we added on top, I mean, these turned
out really fantastic. I hope you will give the
experimenting a try. Work with some coffee
or some walnut stain or just brown watercolor if you
want to just simulate that, put a color on top of that, do some bold mark-making, maybe some acrylic inks, some of these infusions type pigment if you wanted to
experiment with those. Just see what you
can come up with. Let yourself go free, don't get real rigid
and your expectations. Then see what you've got and
then come back tomorrow or the next day and see if you didn't love it one day
do you love it the next? Because I always come back
the next day and really love things that I wasn't
so sure of where I was questioning the day before. I hope you enjoy
trying these out. Can't wait to see
what you create. I want to see some of your bold, abstract pieces with the bold mark-making
running through it somehow I want you to pick some bold mark-making something and make that be a
dominant element. I want to see what you create. Definitely come back and
share those in the projects. I can't wait to see them.
I'll see you next time.
DENISE LOVE, Artist & Creative Educator
