Transcripts
1. Introduction: Abstract art is one of my own very favorite kinds of art to create. I love experimenting with different supplies, different mediums. I like to mix them up. I like to play in watercolors. I like to do some mark making. I'm Denise Love, and I'm an artist and photographer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. Today I have a super fun project that I know you're going to love. We're going to create what I'm calling mosaics, watercolor mosaics, mixed media mosaics. You can do these with any type of art technique that you'd like to try. They turn out really beautiful. We've got some small ones that we'll be creating. I've done a couple of different colors just to see what it is that I wanted to play in when I got to my big piece. I'm going to show you the supplies I'm using, the easy technique it is to create these. I think when we're all done, you're going to be really excited to maybe create a few of these of your own. So let's get started.
2. Class Project: Your class project today, is to create a few of these small mosaics in your sketchbook so that you can figure out your color palette, and then come back and share those with us and come back and share the larger piece that you decided to create, once you narrow down the colors that you loved. I can't wait to see what you come up with.
3. Supplies I'm using in class: Let's talk about the supplies that we'll be using in this class. I have our project sitting here. I've kept the supplies very basic and minimal. I'm working in a sketchbook for one of the projects and this can be any sketchbook that you prefer. Its 110-pound watercolor paper is what's in here. I'm also working in class on a 9 by 12 watercolor paper pad. This is academic grade, so it's a lesser gray watercolor. I also like using just as a reference, nicer Arches watercolor paper and I think it would be fun to experiment with different types of paper. I'm using cold press in class, that's what I really enjoy working on the most, but I also have some hot press, some rough grain, and some cold press in the arches. If you want to move up a grade in your watercolor paper, that's the one I use a lot. You can also use Strathmore watercolor paper and again, I usually use 140-pound watercolor paper for this project. The sketchbook is 110, but the watercolor individual sheets are 140. If you use that weight, you'll generally have a steady enough piece of paper to still be nice and flat when you're done, doesn't buckle. I'm using some watercolor paper, sketchbook I recommend 110-pound, and in this single sheets, is 140-pound. Then I'm keeping it very simple today we're using painter's tape and that comes in, usually the blue painter's tape. You could also use artist's tape from the art store. Have that also, it comes in different colors. I don't use this as much, because the painter's tape is usually cheaper. The blue painter's tape is what you mostly see people will use, and it comes out the paint department at the hardware store. Purples painter's tape also came from the hardware store, and it's made for sensitive surfaces, and I'm using it today because I have it. I thought it'd be nice to go ahead and just use that until I use it up, and it comes off of the paper really nicely. I recommend the blue or the purple painter's tape from the paint store so that you're less likely to tear your paper as you're removing your tape. Also am using watercolors, and I'm using my favorite watercolors, which are some that I have mixed myself with pigment. You are welcome to use any watercolors that you have. They can be an inexpensive full set, they can be Daniel Smith, it's an LEA, Winsor Newton really any or just fine. Pick out a variety of colors that you want to experiment with. I played with pink and orange and blue and green doing this different project. I've also played with a few other colors I thought were fun, like yellow and magenta. Those were fun. I want you to experiment with some colors that you think you'll love and then once you find some that you're ready to create your project with, whatever you happen to have is fine. You can do this with watercolor, you could do it with acrylic paint. You could do this with neo color crayons too which is water-soluble and then add water to them to create a watercolor look. This project really lends itself to a lot of different materials. I'm also in addition to watercolor using a couple of things to make marks. Again, use what you have at home, you can make marks with any colored pencil. I like using a graphite pencil. This is just a regular leaded pencil and have a great piece of graphite. Either of those are fine you could use posca pens, which I use in class. You can experiment with your mark-making tools and whatever happens to be your favorite thing to mark make with. I also have just a 3/0 Raphael soft aqua brush. I'm just using a medium brush head. It doesn't matter. I could have used a larger number 12 aqua paintbrush, I could have used this number 6 aqua lead paintbrush, these I got from Michael's, this one I got from an art store. Whatever your favorite brush head, watercolor brush to work with is fine. You're just filling the squares with color and water and letting it dry. That's basically the supplies that I use today in class. I kept it simple. I want you to pick two colors of your favorite paint medium and do two-color mosaics, and just because you're using two colors doesn't mean in the end that two colors is always see because we will be blending those with water and with each other and getting lots of variation there. But it is fun to experiment pick two that you like. I found that when I tried to do three or four colors, it was almost too much. Start with two and then add from there as you progress, and you want to do different things. That's the basic supplies I'm using today in class. Hopefully, this is stuff that you already have in your art supplies, and you can just pull out some paper and experiment. I'm looking forward to seeing what you create today. I can't wait to see you in class.
4. Choosing a color palette: First thing I'm going to do before I start creating a piece in our sketchbook to get started, is I'm going to pick out a few of my favorite watercolors. You can do this with watercolors, you can do it with acrylic paint. I'm going to be playing in some watercolors to start with. Then this is a great project for adding different mixed media materials on top of the watercolor. You could then play in crayons. You could play in the Neocolor crayons. You could play with your POSCA pen. I like playing with a mechanical pencil and making marks, something. You can really get creative here with the tools and supplies that you're choosing to play with. I also like playing with my pastels, but I'm going to start off with the watercolor. I want to decide what's my color palette. I'm going to start with two colors. I'm going to look at them and decide, is that the two colors I want to go with? I want these pretty mosaics to look a bit like stained glass. I want to see how the colors are mixing. I'm really interested in playing in say blue and green, maybe orange and pink, I don't know. I'm thinking out loud here. Then I might add some water into my little color samples here. Then as these dry, I can really see what they're going to do for us. Maybe even a red and pink, I like red and pink. Let's see how some of these mix, and then we'll know what it is that we want to do for our final piece. Getting started, I was saying I do want to start off with two colors personally, but you don't have to limit yourself, but I do find it for me, it works better. That way I can get some solid color squares, and I can get some mixed squares where I mix the two colors, which is why mixing them here on my little sample pallets. Am I going to like what that does? Do I want to go in that direction? I'm really feeling the orange and pink and the blue and green. I think for me, that's where I'm going to play in class. We can start in our sketchbook playing with these. I'm going to let this one dry, and we'll get started here on our sketchbook pieces. But the very first things first is deciding on a color palette. I'm going to let these dry and we'll see what they look like, and then we'll start on our first piece in our sketchbook.
5. Small mosaic art in sketchbook: These are mostly dry now, so I can pretty much pick color. I love the blue and green one that's by far one of my favorite and I do love this pink and orange. I'm personally going to work with these two color palettes. I would tell you what pink and orange that is, except these are some watercolors that I made from pigment. That's my favorite ones to play in, and that's the ones I'll be using. But you can use any paints you desire really in this project, it's the perfect mix media type project. I'm going to be using some painters tape. Usually your painter's tape is blue, but I had a role of this and I'm just going to use it to get rid of it. It's painter's tape for sensitive walls. It's purple and I'm going to tape off a square, because really I love more than anything peeling tape off my art. A piece of art that is created basically with a bunch of tape just makes my heart happy. I'm going to paint a square. I want to be pretty even, want to get as straight as possible. I'm just eyeballing it then has to be perfect. This is our sketchbook. This is the place to play and experiment and just have some fun. See what our art supplies we'll do before we turn this into a larger piece. I've got a pair of scissors handy, and I'm just going to tear some of this, I want it to look like a piece of stained glass or mosaic pattern. I'm going to cut out some straight pieces and line this off a bit. But I'm going to cut these into little tiny strips, I don't want the pieces in between my watercolor to be gigantic. The smaller the piece that you're working on, the smaller you want to make these strips. Because if they get too big and the piece is small, the white overwhelms the color. The goal here in my mind is to have beautiful areas of color separated by white. It's separated almost by a grout line or if you're doing stained glass by those lead lines and that's what I'm going for. I want this to look like a beautiful piece of stained glass or piece of mosaic or something really fun like that. I'm not putting these in any particular place, I am just going with the flow as I'm going, doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be exact. I do want clean lines and I want them to have a stopping place. On this one actually the tape stopped short, so I might just extend it a little with another piece of tape. Doesn't have to be perfect. I want them to look a little bit organic. I want to use all the little bits of tape. I personally don't want the tape to go over like it didn't stop where it should have, so I'm going to just eyeball that and decide what I want it to do. Then also, I'm going to put little pieces of tape here and there in this to the little pops of surprises, little shapes in there that maybe we didn't expect. We thought, oh, look at that fun little surprise. Any of these pieces that I'm cutting off or tearing off, don't waste those, use those as little spots that you can then create. Let me tell you half the fun of doing this project, is peeling the tape off. You just don't know what you're going to get and that's what makes it so much fun. I'm telling you. I love stuff like this. I like things that are a little bit serendipitous. Things that are a little unexpected. Things that you don't have as much control over. Because in your art, that's how you get into more authentic creating. How you get into creating things that are unexpected, are beautiful, and peeling tape is a little bit about like opening a present. That's my favorite part of creating art. I love, even if I'm just creating a little abstract, having taped edges so that I can be all messy and want to appeal that tape. It just magically turns into something more like it just turned into something amazing when you peel the tape off. I've got some fun little things go in here. You can be as exact and careful or as messy as you want in your creating. Then also I'm going to do, some another little piece of tape, we'll just put that right there. I also want a piece for two that's unexpected here. Maybe that look, oh look at that. I still like this. This just brings me joy. I can come to my art table. I can be feeling blue and create something like this and all of a sudden the day got brighter. Because wait till we paint this and then start peeling off some of these edges. You're going to just love how pretty these are. You don't want a giant piece of tape in the middle of these smaller pieces because then it really does look like a gigantic white blob when you're done. But these pretty little pieces are fun. We are ready to paint. I've got my watercolor here. I've already taken just a little bit of water and sprayed the paint colors. I'm working in this blue green for this one. Let's just work in the orange, pink because really it's a little bit outside my comfort zone because the blue, green is really my favorite. But let's work in the blue, pink and then I'll go back to the pink and orange, and then I'll go back to the blue-green for the large piece, I think. I have experimented with these. Just to show you an example, and this where I'm going to go with the pink-orange. Look at this really beautiful blue-green one that I made. So beautiful that I now want to tear this out of my little sketchbook here and go have that framed. I can't wait to make some larger ones, but let's make this smaller one first. We're going for pink and orange. We can go real heavy, we can go real light with the water color. My goal here is to not have solid color. I really want to let this color do its own thing. I want it to be watery, I want it to have color dipped in it, I'm going to dip some water on some of these, I'm going to have puddles that we're going to need to let dry for awhile. I don't want to use a heat gun on these usually because I want them to do their own thing. I want them to spread and puddle and give me variations in the color that I'm not normally going to get when I'm painting the color solid. I want this to look a little bit more stain glassy, I want it to look as if we have water filtering through that color, I want it to be like there's light coming through, doing different things and so two colors. Start with two colors on this project and just see what we can create. I'm going to actually have more than two colors when we're done, but I'm going to do that by mixing little dabs of water at the other color dipped in. We'll start off say, with the pink and when I'm working with the orange, I'll come back and maybe dip some orange, like that one might be pretty with some dips of orange. Let's go ahead and maybe get some of these pink squares laid in here so that we can then see where we want to go with the orange and with the dipped in color. Let's start there, let's go with some orange. I think I want to dip some orange. You want to dip them before they dry. I might do some pink with orange dipped in and I might do some orange with some pink dipped in. Let's just play. I might want one or two of these to be vivid and more solidy, or at least more pigment in that box. If you put a little bit of color and then dip in a lot of water, we'll get that thin down, so that's real pretty. If you want to go ahead and think about composition, you could be thinking that too, where do you want the dark, where you want the light, where do you want it to meet up with the variations? You can think about these things. I want this one to be a little more organic really and not think about that and then when we peel the tape, just see what we get. I want that serendipity. I want that surprise when we're done. You see I'm just lightly dipping some color, I might come back and dip some water. I might want these to just blend and do their thing and turn into something else that's not necessarily the pink or the orange that we started with. Even though you start with two colors, you may end up with a little range of colors in your palate. Then we could come back and add some more if we're thinking that maybe we didn't get enough color, or we had too much water, or whatever, we could come back and add some more. You can play in this base for awhile. You can use whatever kind of paint you want to play in, whether it be acrylic or water color like I am, or pastels or oil paint. This is a technique that you can play in for awhile. Once you think that you're ready to let it do its thing, set this aside and let it dry completely. I think I'm going to add some splatters in here just to see what they do. Set it to the side, let it dry completely. I don't want you to using a heat gun on these, I want you to let it do its thing and dry and let the water run around and create the patterns and the color blooms and some differences in here that I'm not going to get making it dry too fast and using a heat gun on it. I really like to let it do its thing for a bit. As you're doing some of these, you could come back in and dip more color in, but try to stick with two colors to begin with. We're going to let this dry and I'll be back. Look how yummy this is starting to turn out. This is mostly dry, there's a spot or two that's a little bit heavier with water. The reason why I want you to resist using a heat gun a little bit because you'll miss out on the heavy pooling of color and heating up the tape will sometimes release it so that you don't get clean edges. I want you to be careful if you're trying to use a heat gun or something. But remember we did some splatter of color, and because everything was still wet, my splatters basically blended in. I wanted to come back before we were completely dry and throw in some orange and pink splatter for our composition. Then I'll have to let this dry again. It's almost better if you do this and maybe do a whole little series, maybe work on three or four or five at a time, and as you're letting one dry, you have another one to play with, if you're finding it too hard to leave that one alone. I find it really good to work on many pieces at the same time so I can try them out, or get it to a point that you think, okay, I need to not touch it and walk away, go eat lunch, and then come back and be ready to do your next steps. I can tell you right now, just by looking at what we have already, I love it so much. I think this is going to be another piece that I'm going to be tempted to tear out of my sketchbook, but I'm going to let it dry a bit and then we'll come back and continue on.
6. Making marks on small mosaic art: I've walked away from this for a bit because I'm just as tempted to touch them as you are, and I don't want to add any extra marks or color techniques, anything that you want to experiment, lay on top of it. I do it before I peel the tape, so now's the time to do that. I'll like to come in and just make marks. This is just a regular mechanical pencil. I always have one of these that I'm playing with, and I just come in and I start making marks, lines, just things that you might not see as well from far of. But the closer you get, the more interesting details and yummy things that you'll see, so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to play just for a minute here with some mark making. It's the perfect time to get out other supplies if you enjoy working with your Posca pen, which I love my Posca pen, so I definitely would maybe take this moment too to add some fun white dots. I also have other colors of Posca pen. I have gold, I have silver and I have white that are my favorite. If you like black, they also make this fun paint pen into black, but it's just your choice there. Where do you want to add some extra details and some marks and some lines and some color. Even though I was keeping it to two colors, you can see the range that we have in there, so we've still kept it very exciting by allowing these colors to blend and having some different things go on with the watercolor. Look how pretty that is. I love it. This is so yummy and I love it so much. But I think for the moment that's where I'm going to put it, so let's just take a little closer look and enjoy that. Let's start peeling tape because let me tell you this is the funnest part. Now if I did good, I won't have lots of bleeding under my tape. I'll have some nice clean lines and paling of the tape, it's really is like the most fun part. Using the painter's tape and peeling slow and resisting using our heat gun, you can see how easy this tape is pulling off and it's not tearing my paper. You want to peel off when the watercolors dry also because you don't want to peel tape when your paper is wet. Definitely resist getting into a hurry because you're so excited to see what it's going to look like because, trust me, I get that feeling. Resist pulling the tape off when you have stuff that's wet. You'll really regret tearing the center of your paper, the art part. I mean, if you're tearing the edges and you decide you love it and you want to frame it, you can still probably frame it if you tore or the side of the paper, you could mat that in. But if you tear the center part, you're going to be very sad. Look at this. These just make so much fun, my goodness. Little tiny squares are being stubborn here. I broke a nail, so I've cut all the nails down short to the same length and I miss them, ready for them to grow back long. I hate breaking one of my nails. Look at this. I'm telling you, this makes me happy. Now when I'm peeling the sides, I'm going slow, I'm doing it at an angle, and I'm being really careful just not to get into a hurry because ideally, I'd like not to tear my paper. But look how magical it becomes when you start to peel the edge. It just elevates everything you do into a finished ready-to-frame piece of art. I just love having those edges like that. A little bit of white around it. Look how pretty this is. Now I can't wait to do a big one. I love this color so much that I'm glad I went with pink and orange. Look how pretty. Oh, my goodness. That's so beautiful, and if we pull back out, the blue and green one that I did when I was playing around. Look how pretty both of these are. I hope this inspires you to do a little piece before we jump into a big piece. I'm working in my sketchbook, and these are sketchbooks that are watercolor paper, and they are 110 pounds, which I think is the 300 gsm depending on where you're at, and it's the perfect weight for doing something like this. If you'll just let that watercolor naturally dry, your paper will stay fairly flat. Then as you close up your pad, your watercolor flattened completely out. But I really like when you have color mixing, we have blooms of color. This one really has pretty blooms of color over here with the blue-green mixing. I like the dots of color that I came back and added in after the fact. I like the little marks that we made. These are just so fun and pretty. This one, I did smaller lines of tape than this one, and I like the littler lines on the littler pieces, and then the bigger pieces we can do bigger lines because we can scale up. But look how fun those are. Hope you enjoy playing in your sketchbook doing this little project, and then we'll go and do a bigger piece next. I'll see you back in class.
7. Creating larger mosaic abstract art: In this project, we're going to do a larger piece. I'm looking here at the samples that I did and I encourage you to do lots of these in your sketchbook as you are playing and experimenting with color. I encourage you to definitely play and experiment with color palettes until you're like I'd like to try this or, I'd like to try this and then do several of these so that then when we get to our larger piece, we can say, Oh, I love a larger one in this color, this color, whichever color set that you decided to go with. Again, I'm going to use a two-color palette to start with. I thought in my mind I was going to do the blues and the greens but the more I look at this orange one, I think I'm going to go ahead and do a large set in the orange for class. Then this will be one that I'll visit again later. I'm going to be working on a larger piece of watercolor paper, this is 140-pound. This is a lower-quality watercolor paper that I'm just doing as a project in this class. A lot of times I will actually be using the Arches oil paper, which is the nicer watercolor paper and I've got several different types. I've got rough grain, rough paper, which is like almost sandpaper feel. I've got hot press, I've got cold press. I do like experimenting on the different types of watercolor paper. After you've played with this technique in your sketchbook and on a larger piece, then you're like, what can experiment with next? I encourage you to then add in some other art supplies and to try out different papers. I'm using the 140-pound for this because it's a nice weight and it'll hold up pretty sturdily without too much warping and stuff. I've already got a piece torn out. I'm using the number 12 sheets for this project. You can use 11 by 15 sheets or whatever size works for you, but this size, I can fit on my screen. I went ahead with my painter's tape and I've got blue painter's tape too, but it was not open. This one is a painter's tape also, but it's for sensitive walls. Since I had it, I thought I'd go ahead and use it. I like painter's tape. You get at the hardware store in the paint department. I went ahead and just did exactly like I did with the small pieces and cut up the tape and put the pieces out just like we did in our sketchbook, but I didn't want you'd have to sit through me taping up this piece, so I went ahead and did it first. I made my squares a little larger. If we look at what we did in our smaller piece, I tried to keep the lines smaller so the pieces I was cutting into strips, I was keeping them smaller for the smaller piece but I didn't really go much bigger here on the bigger piece either, let's just see how that works out. I just tried to play around with composition, do something a little different. I really wasn't thinking hard on the composition more as I'm going to let it do a little bit of a serendipitous thing. This is the project where when you're done, maybe this looks better up like maybe this was prettier up than the other way around. We can decide when we're all done which was the best orientation but as I just flipped the model sketchbook around, they all look good no matter which way it went. This could probably end up being the same way but I think I'm going to do the pink and orange. I'm going to start just like I did with my sketchbook. I'm going to get these wet with a little bit of water to activate them. Then I'm going to start randomly making some completely pink, some completely orange, and then some mixed with the pink and the orange and just see what we can come up with. I want to have some that are lighter in paint consistency and some that are darker. I want to add some water on some of these in different colors so that I'm almost getting more of a stained glass feel I want it to look like light could come through. I don't want them to be solid. I want that mosaicy feel, that's why I've put the tape lines in and want the two colors because we'll end up with more than two colors, but I don't want to overwhelm myself what the color is right upfront. Because I have a tendency to be like, " Oh, let me try this color and let me try that color only put this color. Oh, crap that one ruined it." If you pick out color palettes from the beginning and you start with two colors that you know you're going to like, you take out some of that mistake of the third color just not being the right choice and now you're unhappy because you ruined it because I actually did play in these even before those ones that I showed you, the blue and the green. At some point, you know, I was doing more than two colors and then I'd be like, "What are the color can add in here? Oh, that was a bad choice." So I'm telling you this because I did it. I seemed to have to try all different ways to come back and be like, this is the one that worked best for me. The pieces that I love the most are the ones where I kept that to two colors. Then when we get further along, we could add more colors if we wanted. We don't have to stick with the two. Like if we're doing some mixed media stuff, we could come back in with some other colors later. We can mix the two colors like I just mixed that right there on the brush and I got a third color. You're not really limiting yourself to only two colors, but we're limiting our choices to seeing how we can get these two colors to do something for us. That's more along the lines of what I'm doing. How can I get these two colors to create amazing things? Then later, I can decide to add in other stuff. When I get to after this is dry and we're adding some marks and some different materials in if we want, then we could come back and say, what else can we do? But I found if I add too many colors in the watercolor part of it, I ruin it at that third color. Then once it's a color palette that you're familiar with, then you know for sure you're going to love it. I'm going to go ahead and paint in and you want to make sure all your tape is stuck down pretty good. I like the edges that we get from these little tape pieces that are centered but if it's not stuck down, that'll sink under and you want to resist using a heat gun because the heat gun will lift parts of that tape in spots that you really weren't expecting or intended. I'm going to dip some orange into my pink. Sometimes I'm going to dip some pink into my orange. Going to make sure I've got enough water because I want these to blend and give me water blooms. You could add salt to some of this if you wanted. Those salts sprinkled looks, I mean, there's all kinds of fun stuff that we could do here. I'm going to continue painting my pinks and my oranges here. Now, I'm just sprinkling on some color, and because it's still wet, and we know this happened in my sketchbook, these are just going to blend in. Then I'll come back and add some more color splatters once we get this dry. But I know at the moment they're going to blend in, and that's exactly what I'm wanting it to do. I just want to have those color options and that blending going on right now. Then also, I'm wanting to have some of this water moving around, because that'll create different patterns and lines of color that we're not normally going to get. I'm wanting the water to move all over and create those. I don't want it to sit still and be an even color. I like it when I get these water blooms and splotches of color and the different things that we've got going on. I like all that. That's part of the purpose of these, and so that's why I keep coming back in here, maybe adding some water. I want to move that color around and have all those variations in there. Really makes it look like some type of glass or something that we could see through. I love that. I'm even coming back, adding a little water on top of some of these other pieces just to see what we get. I like this really light one here, so moving some of that color around is fun. Once you think you've got it where maybe we can let that dry, we can always come back and add some more. Once I've got this dry, and we'll come back and add some splatter. For the moment, I'm going to let this dry and then I'll be back. We're not completely dry, but I thought now would be a perfect chance to come back up here and start drawing on here with some of our tools. I'm using a mechanical pencil. You could do all kinds of different materials to mark on here. You can do posca pens, you could do the stabilo pencil if you liked working with stabilo. I think this is my marks all stabilo pen. This black, I like the little bit lighter look of the graphite. I also have this fun larger graphite crayon looking thing, which I could try this, because this is a bigger piece. It'll give me a little bit bigger line, and it's fun to see different sizes of things. I like it because unlike the stabilo pencil, it's not black. It's not so dark that it's black. I can come back with the lighter lines and add to it. Some of this is not things that you'll see from a distance. They're more of some interesting lines and marks that maybe you'll see as you get closer to your piece. Then you're like," Oh, look at this interesting things that we discover as we get closer." Some of the lines that I do, that's why do them, it's things that we'll discover as we come in closer. Then I think I want to do maybe some white dots, so I'll just work in a few little areas here that are already dry, and I know they're for sure dry. Because we have these yummy blooms of color doing interesting things, I might take my posca pen in just certain little areas and not over the whole thing. That's just my preference. You can certainly pick and choose where you would want to put different marks and dots and lines and whatever your signature little lines and dots may be. Then I'm also going to go back on here with some splatter, because now I've got enough dry that I can splatter on here and get some variations, and you'll see the splatter. I love this one right in here. This would be fun too if you want to do something like an abstract flower or some kind of design, you could do a whole painting, pull all the pieces up, and then it would look like a piece of stained glass or a piece of mosaic tile work or something like that, which is the look that I'm going for. Some type of mosaic feel, whether it was tile, stained glass, whatever it is. I want those different things going on, and you could do a real picture. You don't have to do abstract here like I'm doing. I think I want orange splatters, so let's get that loaded up. I'm just going to lightly tap the brush. Then I may do a few pink splatters. Load it up with some water and some pink and just lightly tap. Then we'll let that dry. Now, I need to let that completely dry before I can consider doing anything else, so we'll be back. I've left this alone long enough that we are nice and dry. Look how pretty this is. I'm going to go ahead and pull the tape off. I don't think I want to add any other supplies to it. This was more of a keep it simple kind of project, because sometimes I can tend to overdo it and then I've done too much. But really interested in seeing what will end up here. Let's just put our little one here to get us inspired there. We'll start pulling the tape off. Again, I want you to resist using a heat gun on making these dry faster, because a heat gun will release the tape from the paper and paint will seep under. I really love having these beautiful clean edges that we get as we peel these off, so if you could let it dry naturally, you get the most beautiful variations in the colors. You don't have it seep underneath. You get these pretty edges. Look how pretty that is. I'm already excited. Because I'm using a painter's tape, it really just comes right off without damaging the paper. Depending on what kind of materials that you used, if you used pastels or something that'll smear, just be real careful where you're putting your fingers and what you're rubbing against as you're pulling your tape off. You don't want to smear those bits. This is a project that I definitely want you, after you do the basics, I want you to experiment with the different supplies and see what different yummy looks and colors that you can get. I like these with the little confetti pieces. We'll call those confetti pieces. I love how our little mark overs that we do skip over the white bits. That's why I like doing everything before I put the tape on, but you can definitely experiment with doing some of these fun additional bits after you take the tape off. That might be interesting also that you do pencil work and extra marks on top that go through the white lines, whereas the color stops at the white line. That could be interesting also, and I will probably experiment with that adding marks afterwards. Again, you could take the side pieces of tape off also and let it roam over as a continuation of the art. Really, it's endless what we can do here. When I'm pulling the tape off the sides, I'm pulling at an angle pretty low to the piece so that I'm not grabbing and tearing the paper. You really want to make sure, when you're pulling tape off, that your paper is dry. Don't pull the tape off while watercolor is still wet or while the paper is still wet, and that's why I encourage you to walk away, go eat dinner or something in between being tempted to continue playing with your piece while it's still wet. There we go. Look at that. I flip it over, it's pretty. Put it this way, it's pretty. Look, it's another one that can basically go anyway. But looking at it now, I'm feeling it like this. How pretty are these. This was super fun. I hope that you enjoy playing with this little paper cut-out technique that we've done here in class. This watercolor mosaic abstract is what I'm calling these. I hope you enjoyed doing a couple of these. They're easy. They give you a win, they're successful. At this point too, I might even go back and add some more little white posca marks and pens. You can continue working on it after you pull your tape off. If you think, "I need a bit more and I need it right here or there," or whatever, you can still add some little bits to your piece. But I hope you enjoy trying this out as an easy technique. It gives you a nice win for creating artwork. It's mindless, so you don't have to think too hard about it. When you peel your tape off, look at this super fun pieces that we created today in class. I hope you loved it. I can't wait to see the ones that you created, so definitely come back and share those. I'll see you next time.
8. Final Thoughts: I hope you enjoyed this class seeing the easy techniques that I'm showing you and the pretty fun pieces of art that you can create in this technique using just about any supplies that you happen to have on hand. I can't wait to see the ones that you create, whether you do those on watercolor, acrylic. Any type of art supply that you happen to have, I want to see your take on this project. I'm looking forward to seeing those. Definitely come back and share your small pieces and your large piece, and I can't wait to see you next time.
DENISE LOVE, Artist & Creative Educator
