The Rookie Tries: Abstract Painting

The title says it all! The main reason I decided to do this was because I still had a reasonable amount of acrylic paint left from my art class in high school ;P That painting, and a few others belonging to my friends, never returned to the hands of their owners. It's vexing, because it was my first painting on a canvas and I spent a reasonable amount of time on it, so I really wanted to treasure it. Ah, the sentimental value it had despite its lack of neatness! Haha! Another reason was that I wanted to see just what I could do with my nooby painting skills.

I made my first ever canvas painting for art class, so this is my second. To be really accurate, this also isn't my first try at abstract painting; it's my second. I made my first one on a canvas without a frame in 2007, following a manual. The colour scheme I used for it was purely blue, but on this one, as per my brother's suggestion, I decided to use all the colours related to mint. I'm really loving mint lately. My brother loves green and I love blue, so no debates were involved. Not that my brother actually had anything to do with the making of this painting, but it's good to ask for suggestions from others :P

Before I began, I stole (read: temporarily borrowed without permission) my brother's brushes and acrylic paint tubes. He won't be using them anytime soon anyway, since he's practically always glued to his computer. I had my own remnants-of-art-class paint, but I peeked into his, and to my surprise, he had two tubes of different shades of green. One was phthalo green, a dark shade of green, and the other was light green, a grassier hue.

 

An empty 20cmx20cm square canvas, brushes of various shapes, a palette and tubes of acrylic paint. I love and hate the fact that acrylic paint dries so quickly.You can't see it in the picture, but I had thinly sketched random quadrilaterals in a mint colour pencil to aid my colouring.

The finished result?

 

Meet 'Debris', my second abstract painting/my second painting on a framed canvas.

I know it looks random, but I promise, it's really not. I didn't plan this out at all except for the different quadrilaterals in the background, and it turned out this way. The colours look much richer in real life. The pictures here make them look more drab, and so I apologise. :(

Firstly, I will explain the setting. Ahem! B) Along the way, I started seeing the different patches of green as someplace like a forest with a few beds of yellow flowers that one can see from the sky. The blue parts represent water streams, water represents life, and the countless lives that may be harmed by the contamination of water. They're not really in their right places, but it's called abstract, right?

The rough strokes of dark blue paint (or phthalo blue) are the falling debris. They kinda look like comets, and adding them was the last thing I did to complete this painting (my initials not counted).

The globs of paint represent spots that are hit by debris falling from the sky. You can think of it as a meteor shower, an explosion in mid-air, a tornado, a military air raid, or anything else you can think of that produces falling debris. I wanted to name this painting 'War', but I scratched it because it made the painting so much less versatile.

 

A great way to get rid of leftover paint - making 3D globs of paint. I had to make the globs marbled, because I wanted them to represent confusion and chaos at every point the meteor/bomb debris hits.

If you look really closely, you might see some dark blue shards. Those are in fact, the 'debris'. Before I cast them as debris in this painting, these shards were parts of the dark blue paint covering my favourite paintbrush. While I was using it to paint, the paint coating my brush peeled off in pieces of various sizes, though none actually landed on my painting. It was when I saw the mess they were contributing to my work environment, that I decided to crush them with my hands and sprinkle them all over the painting. They only remained on the wet globs of paint.

I took around two hours to make it, and was pretty satisfied with the results :) I guess one of the best things about abstract painting is that you're truly free to paint however you like, and that no one can make it exactly the same like you do. Most importantly, I think abstract painting is really fun and will definitely do it again with the leftover paint I still have ;D What do you think? I would love to hear your opinions!

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