Ever since watching Flora Bowley‘s Creativebug class on intuitive painting I’ve been filling my creative wells with color theory, mark making, and layering inspiration.
A few weeks ago I laid down some initial layers in my Stillman & Birn Beta sketchbook. I had originally bought this sketchbook to be my travel journal for our camping trips, but I learned that I really don’t like the way my fountain pen writes in it. Plus, I wasn’t enjoying painting in my travel journal… I like just writing about my experiences and maybe a doodle sketch here and there. Nothing that needs nice paper like the Beta — so now I’m using my bullet journal for travel and the Beta sketchbook for painting exploration.
Last night I had a free block of time all to myself and had so much fun adding more layers to my pages! Plus I got to use my new supplies: a couple of Caran D’ache Neocolor II crayons.
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| “Garden Under the Sun” |
My approach on this painting was to put down a layer of warm colors and then come in with black, white, and cool colors. I love the way the little dots in Turquoise Green contrast with the warm reds and browns. Some good complementary color stuff going on there. The yellow dots with dark red-brown centers remind me of avocados.
One of the things I’m experimenting with in my art journal is composition. I think these intuitive painting projects lend themselves well to composition studies because they’re abstract, so I don’t need to worry about painting representational objects. It’s one less thing to focus on. The page above uses a vertical design composition: I stacked things vertically, used long vertical shapes, and angled elements so the eye goes from the bottom up to the top.
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| “Oriental Hillside” |
The first layer of this page was some collage using tracing paper I had doodled on. Then I went over with my black brush pen, Stabilo water soluble pencils, and gold Gelly roll with all sorts of mark making. I covered a lot of it up with white acrylic and some black ink, then smeared on olive green.
After taking Flora’s class I bought a set of Blick Studio Acrylic paints in the intro set colors. One of my favorite color mixed is the ultramarine blue and cadmium yellow medium — it’s such a great warm green. And a little bit of the cadmium red medium dulls it out.
I’ve read that using a very limited palette for color mixing teaches you so much about colors and I’m starting to comprehend what that means. I’m so glad I bought this small color set because it’s helping me understand how to mix the colors I want and it’s also keeping the color palette for a piece unified. The red, yellow, and blue in this set have a warm bias, which I’m loving. So my green is a warm green not a bright grass green.
The bits of bright red on top combined with the black shapes and green remind me of a Chinese landscape. I didn’t set out to make a landscape, but when I look at this one that’s what I see. I think this one favors a horizontal composition.
