Jan 20 2008
Make Art Fun Again Ideas
Remember when art was for the sheer joy it brought to your life - not for a likeness, for meaning or technical brilliance?
Finger-paint on a kitchen floor covered with newspaper - swirling bright colors around to see the patterns emerge, if possible, do it with a small child. I’ve been giving real watercolor to my grandson to use in his painting learning process since he was a toddler. My daughter thought I was crazy for “wasting” it on him. He gets better results and it encourages him to like it and to do more of it since the good paper does not make a mess for him like the “kids” newsprint paper.
Paint Chip Roulette - Go to a local house paint store and get paint chip samples (especially colors you do not usually use), then cut them apart and put them in a bowl. Pull out one and base a painting in that color key - no matter what your subject: a portrait in greens, a landscape in oranges, a seascape in reds or a still life in lavenders.
Go Places & Eavesdrop - Visit a crowded shopping mall with your sketchbook and listen to snippets of strangers conversations, then sketch or write down the pictures, impressions or feelings evoked by what you heard. Back in the studio, think about the colors - Mary’s buying a red prom dress - what shade of red did you see hearing that? Fire engine, brick, ruby or burgundy reds? Start a painting based on that particular red and add colors from that starting point.
Do Something New - If you normally create portraits, create a landscape or seascape or do one face feature such as an eye or an ear abstractly in the middle of a mountain or lake. If you normally work in seascapes like me or landscapes, do some portrait caricatures of fantasy or stick people in splotches of color strewn about the canvas haphazardly.
I hope you enjoy your painting - it shows in our work when we do - no matter if it is oil painting, watercolor painting or digital painting!
Emotional Painting Emotional Creativity - Give Yourself Permission - Take Walks and Sketch - Emotional painting requires giving yourself permission to have fun in doing something differently than you normally do in your artistic work. It also requires silencing the technical expertise critic in yourself while experimenting. Do something completely opposite to the way you normally work - give yourself challenges to resolve such as an oil painter creating a pastel pencil drawing. If you are a stickler for days, weeks or months of planning and meticulous detailed sketches before beginning a painting - set a timer for two hours and paint wet-in-wet sketches.
Sports Events / People’s Clothes - Go to a sports event. Notice the clothes colors worn by the spectators. Hot pink halter tops? Lime green capri pants? Lemon yellow uniforms? Dirt/grass stains? Notice the oddities and color clashing - build a caricature clashing color wheel - get out a box of children’s crayons at home and mosaic the clashing colors in splotches or shapes on a piece of paper with no planning …..then re-create the ones that evoke feelings. It doesn’t matter if you create oil paintings, watercolor paintings or digital paintings - expressing your emotions in your paintings will give you highly charged paintings from your soul that will resonate with people seeing them - it has never failed me yet - when I leave the emotion out of one of my paintings - no one connects to it - it might as well not even be there in front of them for all they notice it. Doesn’t matter if someone likes it or does not like it … it matters if it speaks to them.
Do you feel like you’ve lost your emotional art / painting edge? It is easy enough to do in the ordinary daily life grind. You get busy working a day job, cleaning the house, raising the kids, spending time with your spouse, visiting your family, watching TV, playing video games and a myriad of other non-art related activities - all sound familiar? You can challenge yourself and find it again but you have to set yourself to actually doing it instead of just thinking about it in your spare time between dishes, laundry, walking the dog or bathing the baby. When I need new inspiration, I tend to go out into nature and look at trees … look at flowers … listen to the birds … watch clouds … it helps me clear my mind of … yuck … then all kinds of new wonderful stuff jumps into my brain and begs to be let out in paintings.
Something I have noticed in life for me anyway is that when I am low on emotional creativity - it is very helpful for me to play music that is geared towards the spiritual realm. Normally I listen to country music on the radio on my way to work … but at home when I need a jump start to feel like I can paint when I really cannot seem to get in the mood to paint … I get out my Harp music CD’s … or my Fairy music CD’s … I want to get some Celtic music next to try putting that in touch with my Celtic / Irish roots to see if I can finally get motivated to actually learn to paint fairies or not. I’ve got a couple great books that show how to do it … I did at least paint a fairy home once! And then I used it as a contrast with some of my tribal dragonflies - I thought it turned out quite well and adds a different interest direction to the toadstools.
Technorati Tags: Emotional Creativity, Unleash Your Emotional Creativity, Emotional Painting, Ideas To Make Art Fun Again, Painting, Oil Painting, Watercolor Painting, Digital Painting
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
