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!

Acrylic painting, Letting Go

Here is the finished painting from my study that I posted on January 24th.  I'm pleased with the simple shapes and the drama factor of this one.  I've been having so much fun painting in acrylics lately.  I use Strathmore Aquarius paper for the large paintings and I paint on stretched canvases for the smaller ones.  I use completely different procedures for the 2 of them.  This painting was one of the first paintings that I liked after going through the dreaded "January artists' block".  I'm having so much fun looking back through all the 30 minute studies that I've done over the last year and a half, and intend to do many paintings in the next few weeks, using the studies.