Art Techniques, Brushes In Action, WarmUps

Wednesday WarmUp Textures for Abstract

Welcome!

For the past few weeks, this blog has hosted “Wednesday Warm Up,”— a day of usually quick drawing, inking, brushing as warm up to our serious art. I share a strategy to try each Wednesday using the iPad app ProCreate. I only use the brushes in the app— there are so many I haven’t tried that warming up with a new brush will be an added bonus and challenge. Today I used whatever brushes I could find that are “textured,” and most are not native. However, here’s a list of possible textures– you’re looking for something that creates an impression of texture. It often depends on the interaction of the brushes and blend modes.

  • A whole category called Textures
  • Any of the brushes in drawing
  • Rusted Decay and others in Industrial
  • Bonobo Chalk, Artist Crayon, Oil Pastel, Chalk Pastel, and Shading Graphic in Sketching
  • Stipple, Thylacine, Inka in Inking
  • Quite a few, like Stucco and Fresco, in Painting
  • Interesting ones, like Aurora and Gesinski Ink, in Artistic
  • Twig, Clay and others in Organic
  • Burnt Tree and others in Charcoal
  • Blotchy and Chalk in Calligraphy
  • Flicks and Splatter in Spraypaint
  • Several possibilities in Abstract
  • Take a look in Elements, Vintage, Water, and Touchups– might fit your vision

This Week

This week, we’ll review the image above, which a I created with my CLmooc friends who doodle everyday. I chose a prompt “camera” as a prompt from DoodleADay ElloLovey.

I was pretty stumped as to what to draw because I always want something unique, not the usual. But, everything I considered was too complex and too complicated for my drawing skills.

Then I remembered Brenda Bakker’s post on abstract art in Instagram. I could combine that with Jennifer Nichols new Selection Tool Animal Illustration to get the texture into the abstract through the selection tool, which gave me the idea for today’s Wednesday Warmup.

I added interest to the textured shapes [rectangle or ellipse] with subtracted floral and leaf outlines from those abstract shapes using the floral assets I created for my Warm Up idea.

Next I added a frame with the technique from  Brenda Bakker s 3D Papercut  Skillshare Class.

Finally, I added text with the strategies from Jennifer’s  Typography Class on Skillshare.

This was a fun way to play around and practice a few skills:

  • apply textural brushes using the select tool,
  • “selecting” outline shapes and “cutting” from a textured layer,
  • arranging the layers using different blend modes for different effects.

Go ahead try it. Here’s my practice video with brief explanations of the above steps. Please remember to share #warmup4art

2 thoughts on “Wednesday WarmUp Textures for Abstract”

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