Hey guys! Hope your week has been going well. This week at Marywood is the final stretch, and next week will be finals. All my last month and a half of this semester we were working on abstract and nonrepresentational paintings, as you guys probably remember. I’d been working on some paintings that were very structured, the wave being one of those.

Last week though, I decided I finally wanted to break out my water soluble pastels and go crazy. The painting that came out was done for me, but I really just wanted to let out my frustrations from my days, and I wanted to play around with the bright colors I had. I stared out with an acrylic base, using a sponge to play around with the textures of the colors I laid down. Then I went over it with my pastels, making marks, of course not all willy-nilly but not completely planned out. If I made a mark, I decided to react to it with a different one. In the end I came out with a multimedia piece I’m really excited about.

The colors were ones I felt I had more control over, bright and playful is what I usually go for, and for some reason I had been holding myself back when working on the others.

I then decided to go back to another painting that I had been working on, that had been giving my quite the problem. I decided to not be afraid of the bright and bouncy and just play with it how I wanted. I would create a color problem for myself, then react to it in a way that would allow me to create a successful piece. Originally the painting was all black, and I pieced out the chucks of colors, leaving some black to create lines. After I laid more bright colors, I redid my black and darkened them, as well as added line variations to create some wobbling around the piece.

I’m hoping that when I get back to it tomorrow, the last of my painting classes, I can really get in there, and remember to not be afraid of mixing colors and making them bright. I’m pretty proud of these two in fact, and I’ve really learned to appreciate the time and work that can go into an abstract and nonrepresentational painting.

That’s all for this week. Thanks guys for reading my posts. If you have any cool abstract pieces let me know! I’d love to see them! Until next week, keep on creating!