Monday, June 30, 2014

Warm-ups to kick Artist's Block

This is a "wire drawing" of an eye, done while I was up at the North Shore, relaxing.  Whenever I have art blocks, I have 3 or 4 tricks to get myself back into the mood.  One of these involves sketching anything with a pencil.  Then I use an ultrafine marker to connect all the lines, and finally, I add thicker lines with a fine marker.  Before you know it, an hour has passed, and now you'll be ready to paint the moon!  Another trick is to paint color studies, using only 3 colors, and starting with only 4 shapes.This color study started with a blue square surrounded by yellow.  In the middle of the blue square was a yellow olive shape with a red center.  Do you see them? I used manganese blue, cadmium yellow, and red rose deep.  At the very end, I allowed myself a mixture of alizarin crimson and winsor green for the black colors. Now you have 2 tricks to keep that mean old artist's block at bay!  Good luck!


2 comments:

  1. I zeroed in on that yellow olive before I read the description! Really lovely painting with great color and shapes! Very cool line drawing too. :D

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  2. Yowser! I LOVE that eye drawing - I can see all sorts of things in that!

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