Fun With Abstract Paintings

Here is a great fun game for kids of all ages.

It also has a very beneficial training aspect for all artists, who would like to loosen up their paintings. Not everybody likes painting so-called loose paintings but since The early 1800's and the maturing of artists like Turner and then the impressionists, modern art and indeed abstract art has been developing.

Many leisure painters find that this is very difficult. The difficulty arises because these painters need to identify with the images they are copying. I am drawing a horse, a tree , a flower, etc. They cannot let go and just paint for the sake of it. I would like to offer an exercise which is great fun and very useful to aid with the process of loosening-up.

Because many art schools try to teach this under the banner of creativity and originality, at the expense of drawing skills and it has created a generation of artists who do not fully understand or possess the academic skills of their predecessors. But that it is another, very big question. I do not intend to address that here.

For now, assume that it is a good thing for an artist to be able to let themself go when painting, if even just for relaxing and fun. This is a way of allowing yourself to be free of constraints when painting, almost!
  

CREATING AN ABSTRACT FROM RANDOM MARKS

 I came across this technique in a book by Betsy Dillard Stroud called The Artist's Muse, ISBN 978-1-58180-875-9 and tried it out with my art group last night. This is the result.

I asked my colleagues (there were 11 of us present) to make some random marks on a sheet of paper, offering a choice of coloured pastel pencils and suggesting they could draw lines, shapes or squiggles, but giving no further instructions. I did tell them I was going to create an abstract based on their collective marks. At first some of them were a little tentative and I could see the beginning of a landscape, for instance the first person drew an horizon. I then offered them a second opportunity, which was taken by some of the early contributors as they could now see what everybody else had done and they became more confident.

You can see an idea of what these marks looked like, but as I forgot to take a picture these were made by me tracing over the originals after I had started to paint.

This is the stage at which I did that tracing. I had started to fill the white paper with primary colours and build up the first stage of the painting.

This image shows the end of that first stage. By now I had extended some of the lines and blocked in some of the shapes which were introduced by this. I also extended the colour scheme, adding some secondary colours to offer more choices and create what I hoped was a pleasing image.

The final stage is shown here again , I had by now added some texturing, more smaller shapes and cross hatching to add detail and interest to the painting. Even if you do not like abstract painting, and I am not a great fan of this "free art" you have to admit it has a little of the style of Kandinsky, with a tiny reference to Miro. And it has very bright colours.

I enjoyed the evening, and have arranged with some of the group for us all to have a go in a couple of weeks. We shall each start with a clean sheet of paper and pass it around the group for everyone to add marks to everyone else's paper. When you get your own paper back, then you we shall all start to create an abstract "masterpiece". I can't wait to see how everyone gets on.

Of course, you can always make your own random marks you do not really need a crowd of people. Hopefully I can let you know how we get on with our abstract exercise.

A flight of Ibis

This one just missed the deadline for the free ebook (see last post) I had been contemplating doing it for some time but hesitating over that bird in the foreground. Gosh it has been so long since I did any real, representational sketching / drawing. Because it is so prominent, I wanted it to at least seem to be seen with good proportions so I filled several sketchbook pages with sillouettes before finally plucking up the courage to attempt the painting.

I am still not really happy with it but at least it has been done and I feel much easier, maybe I will do it again sometime. The biggest problem I have with this is that the birds legs are way too far towards the back, making it seem out of balance. Still I cannot be accused of being a perfectionist so I have already started to add products to my Zazzle stores with this image, will edit it later.

Flight Of Ibis At Sunset by PastelsByArtyfax
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Flight Of Ibis At Sunset Stretched Canvas Print by PastelsByArtyfax
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Flight Of Ibis At Sunset by PastelsByArtyfax
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How To Learn To Paint Abstracts - Free eBook

First of all, painting abstracts is about painting the feelings that are bought about by a subject, rather than painting the subject. You are not trying to represent the physical appearance of the subject. Therefore, you cannot get it wrong. Only you know how you feel about something, the painting is your way of describing these feelings to your audience.

Many artists however feel awkward about this. They have grown up believing that a painting is "of" something and should look like the original. This must be overcome to paint expressive abstract paintings.
 I would be the first to say that I still have problems with putting thoughts into abstract paintings but I will most stronly claim that by painting abstracts I have improved as a painter immensely. I have a very loose almost semi-abstract style and enjoy painting with colour. You can see what I mean by browsing a few of the earlier posts on this blog. I do find that fellow artists do find some, if not all, of my work pleasing and likeable. Not sure what this means but looseness is something that many artists seek. It works for me, and I find this style so much easier since beginning abstract painting.

When I was asked by my art group to run a workshop on abstract painting, I developed a methodology to enable them to try it out for themselves. I have written about this on Squidoo and you can read and see a step-by-step tutorial here:-

Learn to paint abstract art

and

A step-by-step method for painting abstract art

I have also collated these articles together into one, free eBook available on Scribd for download.

Learn to work with abstract art by John Dyhouse

I will in the near future be completing a "game" utilising sets of cards to give the arrtist some basic starting points to help with creating abstracts . I shall be saying more of this later.

New Pastel Landscape Painting

I was so pleased with last weeks "Tree and Sky" painting that I found another similar photo to take a shot at. This time a sunset, or maybe a sunrise with loads of colour in the sky and trees sillouetted against the sky.

This has been slightly edited in photoshop to try to achieve the feeling of the original painting.


Do you have problems with photographing your art work. The light can affect the look at your work, as you may have found out and it is almost impossible to edit the piece to get back to the original colours. Vitally important if like me colour is an important aspect of your art. The original photograph had a much more insipid appearance, and I wanted to  nudge it in the direction of the original painting.

I always try to photograph the artwork in daylight and then to edit as little as possible. visit my photography blog, Photography For fun, to see a few examples of what happens or can happen, using this piece as an example.

Completed "tree and Sky", a pastel painting

I had to do something with it, the painting from last week. I simply wasn't happy with it. Apart from the issues I raised in the last post, the perspective for the clouds looked wrong. Although it was reasonably faithful to the original photo, every artist knows that the lower down in the sky a cloud is, the farther away it is and should be smaller to provide recession. Solution: remove the clouds!

I fixed the painting so that I would not get any mixing of the pastels when I applied further colours, etc and went back in with a lighter blue to remove the clouds. You can see traces of them but that does not worry me. I repainted the tree and its branches and this time added a lighter edge to the main trunks / branches. It was quite a dark brown buut of course against the black it showed up relatively light.

Next step was to emphasise the foliage at the bottom of the painting. I used an olive green (again it looks lighter than it was) and a smaller area of a dark hookers green (ish!) to paint in a textured undergrowth.

I am now very pleased with the result. Zazzle here I come!

It does not show up too well in the photograph (probably taken too early in the morning as I was in a hurry- and may try to get a better photo) but there is a very good 3-D effect between the foliage, the lower trunks and the general background.

This shows better in a photoshopped copy of the image:

Much happier now and I will be putting this onto Zazzle where prints / poster / cards of the image may be obtained; more details later in the week for those (if any?) who might be interested.

A work in progress - a break with tradition.

I though I had finished this pastel painting and photographed it, loaded to my PC and then sat and looked at it. No it wasn't what I had intended at all.

What is wrong? Well the clouds are not like clouds, they look more like misplaced foliage and in the original photograph there was a vaulted appearance to the sky, I need to darken the top corners of the painting.

If you want to see the original by Robin (waterlily on Redgage), please be my guest; just pop over to the image titled heavenly.

You will see that it is not quite the same effect, I will be working on this again and will repost when I have completed it to my satisfaction. Check back to see when it is complete.

Adding figures in a landscape

Once upon a time I used to worry about drawing in a realistic fashion, I used to worry that people would look at them and say, "That isn't right!". In my early artistic career, I started to learn to paint and draw people. Portraits and figures. But I soon learned that the masters of the 20th century had had little truck with that notion, and finding the process boring I became less worried about getting figures absolutely right in my landscapes. So I practiced drawing with fewer marks (Turner drew the dog in the Haywain with five strokes apparently). Here are a couple of drawings from those days:

A sketch of my son with seaweed from a photograph

This one was from a photo but I was going to life classes at one time

practising for "victorian" landsapes

Eventually, I became less bothered even than this

figures became mere shapes in the overall composition

Now I rarely use figures at all.

 

with certain exceptions

Do I miss them, no I don't think so. My approach is to create what I think of as semi-abstract images based on colour rather than strict form. I enjoy this far more than when I was struggling with those figures.