I plan to talk more about this in my free mini beginner abstract course I’ll be hosting in March, but I wanted to touch briefly on a few basic principles which I apply to my abstract pieces, which stem from my twenty plus years experience from working in graphic and web design, and even I never realised how these techniques applied so strongly to art until I started painting abstractly and how much they applied to a painting just as much as they did to a marketing campaign.
Have you ever looked at an abstract piece of art and thought, “I could do that!”, but when you’ve actually come to painting an abstract piece of art realised just how difficult it really is. That’s because when we look at a good piece of abstract art it is somehow satisfying to look at, yet we often don’t know why. It’s a subconscious feeling that creates a pleasing emotion within us and it’s because a good abstract painting moves beyond simply slapping down paint and moving it arbitrary around the canvas, (that is merely the beginner stage to cover the white parts!), it’s about using the paint with intention through balance, contrast and emotion. We need to take these expressive painting gestures and guide them into a pleasing state of being.
Some of the key abstract concepts to consider in your abstract painting are;
1. Balance
2. Contrast
3. Intent
To know if an abstract piece of art is balanced, a quick tip is to turn your work around and study it from different angles. Your painting may inevitable be biased to one direction and that’s fine, but by moving the canvas around do you notice that one side seems heavier than the other? Have you placed darker areas more on one particular side giving a sense of top heaviness? Imagine the darker shades have physical weight, would your painting drop to one side and float in the other? To offset this unbalanced nature, consider placing some darker shades in the lighter areas and vice versa. This can add dramatic effect if worked well and make a piece more pleasing to the viewer without them realising it. You too should notice an immediate difference.
Studying contrast, which is linked to balance can also often be over-looked too unless we’re working in monochrome shades of black and white because we usually paint in colour. A painting lacking in contrast can often leave a painting looking flat. What I mean by this is if you were to turn your painting into just black and white shades, would your painting look just a swathe of boring grey tones? That's because we need to build deeper contrasts of dark and light to offset the boring grey tones to help bring them alive and subsequently bring the painting alive, but we need to do it with colour. To help us with this you could photograph or scan your painting and using a computer or app turn it into a black and white image and then ramp up the contrast. This will immediately show you the areas you can improve on. Do you also see how much more visually pleasing your monochrome painting version has become? Also consider the balance of warmer and cooler colours as well as your darker and lighter tones.
Lastly, designing with intent. Painting requires soul does it not? It needs to evoke an emotion in the viewer whether that’s a pleasant feeling or a disturbing one, that is your decision as the artist, but to evoke emotion in your art you need to let your subconscious have a voice. Let your feelings and emotions come through in your art. On a basic level consider what an angry line would look like? Or a happy colour? This is obviously a simply way to think about emotion in your art, but it gives us an insight into how we can take our emotions and move them into our art using intent. Tiny details, elements of realism or just swathes of colour can both achieve this.
So rather than simply places paint down without much feeling behind it and wonder why it looks a mess rather than the amazing masterpiece you were expecting, consider these three points when playing with colour and texture. Take time to work on smaller areas of your painting and enjoy the details, the brush strokes or the textures. Turn your work around and study it from different angles and feel what needs changing. After a while this will become instinctive and you will start to see these principles all the time appearing in your thought patterns and you will recognise instantly when a painting looks unbalanced or off in some way.
If you’d like to take part in my free mini beginner abstract course coming in March, simply sign up to my
newsletter to be notified and we’ll be looking into these key points in more detail and sharing some examples to help you to look at your abstract art in new and exciting ways!