Lesson 6: Abstract methods:
Drawing Exercises. Playing With Abstraction.
If Abstract Art Is Approached From An Experimental Point of View It Can Be Like Inventing A New Cake Recipe.
I suppose that when people invent recipes they decide that they want the cake to “be like this” or "that" ...sweet, or...creamy, etc. That is a bit the way an abstract exercise takes form. I want the picture to say this!! Evoke these emotions ??or remind me of****. Like the cake, the end product will be a surprise because at any time the author can take a flight of fancy.
For the sake of these exercises I am going to
- Give you structure to follow.
- Suggestions to help you begin the journey
- and then I am going to ask you take off on your own flight.
- Don’t forget to check in though. Post the results in the discussion area so that we can all discuss the out come,
- make suggestions and reboard the plane when it is time for another adventure.
- Draw an abstract composition that expresses the joy of a Festive Season. Capture the feeling, excitement and essence of this time of year without using any symbolic representations at all.
- Draw sadness. Draw any other emotions you can think of but do not use words or symbols. Be restricted to lines, colour, textures and shapes. Collage is okay.
- This is a hard one! Draw nothingness!
- Okay. Lets reverse the process. Draw sadness but restrict your colours to red and white. For this exercise you may use any representational matter you like. The only restriction is that you use red and white.
- Sometimes the abstraction works like a summary. In this exercise summarise an apple. I am not going to say draw the perfect apple. No - rather draw the “typical” apple.
- Draw shapes in black and white and bunch them into one corner of the ‘defined working space’
- Draw shapes in red and white and scatter them evenly across the ‘defined working space’.
- Draw shapes and create a trail of them across the ‘defined working space’ – don’t under any circumstances ‘spill’ and shapes into the rest of the working space.
- Create a trail across the defined working space but this time allow none of the shapes to be on the trail it must remain blank whilst eh rest of the defined space may have shapes scattered either evenly or in concentrated fashions. Push these exercises as far as you can get them to go. Write copious notes in your journal as you do this noting what made you frustrated as you went along. When you have created the works from these exercises as you have been asked go back and do them how you would have liked to do them. Note the differences. Note how this exercise has made you feel. Note whether you have changed the meaning of the exercise. If you have time reflect upon why you may have wanted to change it to be that way.
- characterisation
- intensification.
- dissipation
- great,
- quick
- not messy way
- to work out what will work and not work.
- Once finished I paint the final painting. Once the ingredients have been decided the execution of the final painting is easy and much more cost effective. Save time and money. I picked up on one suggestion by Carol Wallace of Virtual Gardening when she was writing a post in the very inspiring topic Digital Photography and Editing discussion thread
Sometimes abstraction is about
Psssttt!!!I usually like to do my experimenting on the computer. This is a
"Dan - what you say here about black and white revealing what color can often conceal is exactly why I like to convert garden photos to black and white. Color often masks or makes design flaws difficult to spot. Look at the real garden and you know something is wrong and yet you can't pinpoint it. Take a photo and you have the same problem - because if the colors work you still have something pleasing. But convert it to black and white and the problems with form and texture suddenly become apparent. Then I can go to the real garden and solve the problem - and take a better picture of the better garden when I am done. "I think that this applies to all visual, creative endeavour. One advantage of doing a lot of artistic preparation on the computer first in photoshop or a similar package is that we can quickly convert the image to black and white, and check it out for inconsistencies of perspective and shading. Again I stress that colour adds another dimension of complication that is not user friendly when we first get started.
