‘Abstract Acrylic’ Painting Exercise No. 3 - Work Sequence A

Assignment number 3 in “Abstracts 50 Inspirational Projects” by Rolina van Vliet turned out really nice, even though my painting is a slight deviation from the monochrome colour requirements specified in the book.

To make starting the project easier, I followed the examples in the book and used red with gold outlines. After that, my own colours and marks were used. I had fun with a new tube of Pebeo relief outliner paint and may have gone a little design crazy, but I'm happy with the results. After all it’s my abstract... the book just gave me inspiration.

‘Abstract Acrylic’ Painting Exercise No. 2 - 'Working from a figure sketch'

This study involved working from a figure sketch and drawing it abstractly in ink; even though I took a life drawing class this wasn’t easy. It also required sand, which I couldn’t find, so I used a sand & modelling paste mixture.
My first attempt didn’t look right because the ink figures weren’t anatomically correct so I started again. The second time wasn’t really successful either, so I cropped the painting and have posted it even though it's not perfect. I enjoyed using the sand mixture and liked the way ink worked with wet paint, but my figures looked funny. It's difficult to get an accurate body shape that is also abstract.

Rolina van Vliet has done it to perfection in her example on pages 52 & 53 of “Abstracts 50 Inspirational Projects”. This is a method I would really like to explore more.

'Abstracts 50 Inspirational Projects’ Study 1 – Expressive Painting Style

Besides doing the exercises in "Vibrant Acrylics" and "Ways to learn Acrylics…" I’m now trying out another book by Rolina Van Vliets. "Abstracts 50 Inspirational Projects" has enough lessons to keep me busy; it’s very similar to her other book "Painting Abstracts ideas, projects and techniques" that I reviewed a while ago. This book has 50 studies, each on a different topic with images to use only as a guide. Rolina says it's better if you don’t have images and simply work out of your own imagination. That however, only works in her classes where she can observe and be there to answer questions. She has included some of the paintings from her students and it makes the book more interesting.

In the first study ‘Expressive painting style’ the work sequence was not for me; I didn’t like making scratch marks. I made a few changes with a putty knife and dripping paint; obsessed over it for a few days then decided the final painting was pretty good.  The assignment was to create a painting that was spontaneous and the stroke directions projected action and variation. I think I achieved that:))