A Painting Warm-Up Exercise

SOMETIMES WHEN I want to be in the studio but don’t really want to work on a painting it’s nice to have something creative to do that doesn’t take much time or mental bandwidth. I’ve created a bunch of these fun “let’s play” exercises. And today’s video is just ONE of them.

A PAINTING WARM-UP EXERCISE / Sometimes when I want to be in the studio but don’t really want to work on a painting it’s nice to have something creative to d…

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, it’s Adele. And in today’s video, I want to show you one way that you can just have a warmup exercise or play in the studio. If you have 10, 15 minutes and you just kind of want to get those creative juices going, this is a great way to do that. Watch. It seems simple, but wait until the end when I’m going to reveal what it looks like. Okay, Let’s get started. Now, I’m only going to use two colors because I want to show you the effect. I’m going to use pyrrole red light, and I wanted to do two different ones, so I could have one with a strong color and one with a subtle color.

Then I’m going to have tight and buff. Let’s do the red first. I’m just pouring it out, and I’m picking a brush. I’m going to pick a big brush, because I want a big stroke, and what I’m going to do is go all over this entire piece. Let me show you. I’m just going to use it. I’m just going to do meandering lines, wandering off the page. You can do them small. You can do them big, but just like this and kind of just play, like, okay, this is the way to my house, or this is the way to go to the grocery store. Just experiment with close lines, small lines.

I’m not doing straight lines because I just want to do… I want to do it this way and do several so that you have one like this, one a little bit different, in different colors, but I’m going to show you what we’re going to do at the end. This is basically what we’re going to do is a construct-deconstruct. And that means we’re going to make something and then we’re going to take it apart and put it back together. And that is one of my favorite things to do. It’s very unexpected what the result looks like, and yet it makes it exciting and really interesting.

Make sure you go off the page. Look how quick. Look how easy. I’m going to put this one aside to dry, and next, I’m going to do… Let’s see. This is just this newsprint. Move this. Put this down here. The next one we’re going to do is going to be… Let me take this off and get this over here. I’m going to do two different things. I’m going to draw all over it kind of like that with the China marker first, and so it’s going to be fairly similar. It’s going to have two different ways of doing things. Off the page. I love off the page. It just makes everything look a lot bigger.

Go like this and you can do small ones at one place and maybe a small one here like that. Next, I’m going to use tight and buff. I’m going to put this on here. Just to make it a variety, let’s do a different sized brush. This is a round brush. They’re both round that I use, but you could use any brush. Experiment with different things. And now I’m going to do this. I love the contrast between the lines and the subtle. It’s going to be three colors really. I love the contrast between the lines, this light color, like, cream, beige, and the white background.

Look how fabulous it is. And part of it you can see through. We’re going to just, again, meander all over and let’s see. We’re going to go off the page again. This time it makes it a little bit more interesting because of these black lines. We’re going to go like that and this. We might not even need to go all over. I wonder if we could do half? See, when you’re doing this ideas come to you. Like, okay, what if? Think of the what if question. What if I just did straight lines? What if I did big circular lines? What if I used a red marker? What if I just stayed within the page?

What if I use two different colors? You keep wanting to increase and expand your creativity and write down if you can’t remember. I have a hard time remembering some times, because there’s so many ideas that I keep coming up with. What you want to do is just write them down. Like, what if this? What if that? Keep asking yourself all the while you’re painting. What if? What if I stayed within? What if I went way out here? Watch this. What if I close my eyes and did it? I have no idea. I’m not planning anything. I’m going to do that one more time.

And then I’m going to do one that’s just that, closing my eyes and going all around. So there’s no planning and you can see how quick and easy this is. So much fun. I’m going to lift this up and put it aside to dry. And then I’m going to show you… I’ve made ones already, and I want to show you what they look like. And this is what you can do with them. So you let them dry. You’re going to have a whole stack. I’ve done some with just black and white, which is awesome. They look gorgeous. But what I’m going to do is… I did these yesterday. Let me show you what you do is you cut them in quarters.

They’re squares. You’ve got four different squares. Oh, by the way, this is water color paper that I painted on and it’s about 12 inches by 12 inches. What you do is you just cut it randomly in the middle on both sides or in the middle both ways, and then you’re going to start putting them together. Now, this can actually be a painting. You can do this and then glue it on something else and have a finished painting. You can glue this as collage and then go over it if you want. You can use this as just plain collage. You could put this for later for collage pieces.

But look at this, how interesting, and you can move it around. It gives so much energy. And one of the things I like to do when I remix these is try to find a line from the top or the side, and it goes into another line below it. That makes it to me much more interesting like this and this is right here. And this goes up here and look how this comes in here. So that’s this one. Now let me show you what it looks like. Oh, I love that. Now let me show you what it looks like when I also did… I didn’t do the China marker, but I did these. How about if we did this?

Let’s see. And you can try in different ways. Do it this way. Let me move this so I can just look at this one. I mean, look how cool that looks just like this. You could even use one of these as a small painting and then go into it and draw or expand on it or just use it like that. But now I’m going to come in here. Look how fantastic this looks, even on the background of this newsprint. I love all these neutral colors, but say you want it like this. Wonderful. And then move it around like this. Which way do you like it the most?

I think I actually liked it this way, the way I just kind of haphazardly put it down. This is exactly how it was painted. I can see. I’m going to move it around. What does it look like with this, with the big white there? I like that. It’s kind of like a negative space, great negative space. So anyway, this is just an idea for you to kind of play, warm up. It’s going to give you a lot of great ideas for future paintings or use these as collage and in other paintings. Thanks for joining and I’ll see you in the next one.

And one thing I wanted to mention, if you like doing things like this, I have a fabulous monthly membership called Art with Adele and we have 48 videos already and tons of great fun exercises just like this. You want to click the link below and please join.