How I Painted an Abstract Piece

I've been wanting a large, abstract art piece to hang above our couch. Unfortunately the paintings I loved were far out of my price range. Luckily, I found a large canvas marked way down at Micheals, and decided to attempt my own version of abstract art (albeit waaay out of my comfort zone).

Anytime I've tried this before, it's come out looking like a big jumbled color mess without any form to it. It didn't look like the paintings I loved. So this time I wanted to try a few different techniques:

1. I painted with a palette knife instead of brushes. This was a little awkward at first, but I really loved slapping paint around with these tools once I began!

2. I covered the canvas. I put down the first layer of paint trying to place all the colors I wanted in each quadrant of the canvas without overwhelming it. Not sure I succeeded because it sort of looked like the jumbled mess paintings from before, but I still had a few other steps to try.

3. I wanted thicker layers, so after the paint dried, I slathered molding paste onto the canvas. I just happened to have an almost full jar on hand from a previous project ~ whoo-hoo!

4. When the paste dried, I spotlighted my feature colors and made them the focus of the painting. I'll admit it was difficult trying to keep the focal colors as the focus without making them stark against the rest of the painting. The only advice I have is to add lot and lots of layers.

5. I added cascading colors. The painting still didn't look right to me, or at least not how I wanted it to look. I noticed that the art pieces I loved so much had a cascading flow to them. When I finally realized that, I began working to make my colors "waterfall" from top to bottom. 

6. I loved seeing movement with the brush strokes, so I added more of that. I wanted lots of layers and lots of texture. 

7. I added white space. I noticed I wasn't happy unless there was a large amount of white space, so I indulged myself. 

Here is the final result:

It was a fun challenge, but painting an abstract piece is much harder than it looks!

Have you ever tried a project out of your comfort zone?