Start Your Next Painting Like THIS

And then I just grabbed different colors, different colors of inks, and I'm using Golden High Flow Acrylics. So these work like acrylic inks, and there's a lot of different brands that you can use. Also, my mom mentioned if you don't have inks, you could just water down some like heavy body acrylics. So now I'm just kind of pouring this on the canvas. And it's good to start with your lighter colors first, because once you go dark, it's harder to get that lightness back. So yeah, I'm gonna look at this as kind of like inspiration, but I love using these big brushes to get kind of like some fun background big brush strokes. So it's really, this process, you wanna be really free with this first layer and not think about it too much and just kind of go with your gut and use big brushes so that you're not getting to this like more refined stage too early. You want it to stay really loose and free. A good idea is to work from light to dark when you're using transparence and you're using ink like this. So she started with kind of lighter tones, just like how you build up a watercolor painting if you've ever used watercolor, you begin very lit light and you start adding darker tones as you go. So just have fun with this layer and you could spend, I mean, a whole hour doing this if you wanted. We're gonna do this kind of quickly, but this is just the fun expressive part. And I like to choose color families that kind of go well together because if I were to just put a bunch of, I don't know, blue in here, they would mess with these colors and get it kind of muddy looking. So if you stick with a color family, it'll just look nicer and it won't get too muddy. So that's something to be aware of when you're using inks. And what she means by a color family is she's kind of sticking with this sort of orangish, yellow, gold, you know, color family. So what I love about these golden acrylics is they kind of do this like bleeding effect when it touches like a wet spot. So I really love doing that. And these are some of the metallic ones. This is pearl, iridescent pearl. And there's not really, you know, like a wrong way to do this. This is like just your time to make a fun abstract. You do want to carry things to the edge like she's doing. If you can see, if you don't do that and everything just kind of almost goes to the edge, then it'll feel very contained and the composition won't be quite right. Yeah, this is the underneath layer that we'll kind of pull the flowers out of. This might look like a flower and then we'll just kind of add it on top. Reason you want to start with this sort of abstract underpainting is it builds into it this sort of abstract base and you can use all these abstract forms and pull your images from that while still leaving a whole bunch of it abstract. So that's the beauty of starting loose. If you were to draw your flowers first, it's okay, you can do that, but you might start to feel bound and kind of stuck to that drawing and have a fear of losing your drawing and it might begin to influence this abstract layer. So we kind of recommend that maybe you don't do that because it will sort of elicit this feeling of control and you might not feel as free in this stage of things. Okay, so now that it's really wet, it's the perfect time to start adding alcohol ink. So if you have these, you can give it a try. If not, you probably will want to buy some after this. What brand of alcohol inks are they? This is Marabu. There's different kinds. Most of these are Marabu. So Pinata and Marabu are the two major brands. They travel in water, so they only work on a wet surface. So if you can see that, the alcohol in it sort of dispels the water and then the pigment or whatever's in there kind of is left. And it shows up better on darker ink underneath. So, I mean, depending on the color. And so these, we have a lot of glitter ones. So I'm trying to add that in there because that's really fun. So maybe in certain angles of light, you can see like that rainbow glitter. And how are you thinking about composition right now? Well, I was looking at the source here and there's like, you know, some dark around here on the edges. So it was kind of going off of that. And like my mom mentioned, having things touch the edge is better compositionally. You don't want to keep it all contained in the middle. It's better to have things go off the canvas. But I'm not, you know, touching, I'm not covering every single spot of white. I'm letting some of the canvas show through at this point. And for the most part, you're trying to sort of match up the values that you have within the source with the values of the underpainting. Yes, exactly. And, but if you don't get it a hundred percent right, it's okay. Cause in the next layer, so there's basically three layers to this type of process. This first layer is an abstract mess. Just kind of make an abstract mess. If you have a source, you can follow, like Jake was saying, the darks are in the dark areas. The lighter parts are in the lighter areas. And you kind of want to be somewhere in the vicinity of the color and value. The next layer, once this is dry, is going to be either an acrylic or oil. We're gonna probably use acrylic and then oil. You're going to block in the big shapes of the flowers. And so that'll be the blocking in time. And again, that's pretty loose. And then the third and final layer will be, we're gonna use oil and that's when the refinement comes and you'll actually begin to pull the more details of those flowers out. And it'll really start to look like a flower. All right, so now I'm gonna do something a little bit more messy. And I would recommend doing this outside, but you can take spray paint and this is just Montana chrome spray paint. It's not like water-based, it's just regular spray paint. And it kind of reacts like the alcohol ink when it touches wet spots. So if you look at this painting, I kind of did that on top of some ink and that's when it's dry. So I'm just gonna add this in a few spots. That's so cool. Yeah, this, I love using it on like a dark spot. Isn't it amazing how like as artists, we just, all of us just see something like that, this metallic paint just floating in a black pool of ink and it's just so exciting and inspiring. It's fun. I started liking spray paint after discovering using it with inks. Spray paint's one of my favorite mediums to work with. Okay, I don't wanna do too much, but hopefully you guys can see that really beautiful rose gold. This is already a beautiful painting. Like I would put that on my wall. It doesn't need flowers. Yeah. All right, well, this could be done in this layer or you could keep going with it. And if you have some like water soluble crayons or markers, that might be fun while this is wet, you can like draw into it. I don't think we grabbed any of those. I think we're gonna let this dry and then we'll go to this layer. Would you add anything else? No, I like it. I think with washes, we can add at the next stage. So we have a heat gun and that will make it dry much quicker. And if you have one at home, you can also use a hairdryer because inks take a while to dry. And that's the bad thing about inks. They're super fun and you can get so much done really quickly, but then it takes a while for them to dry. The heat gun doesn't, the ones we have don't push out the air super strong. It's just like, it's like pure heat coming out of it. And I think it's like 400 degrees, right? It's like an oven. And so you have to be really careful. Don't touch the tip. It gets really, really hot, but you can also melt your paint or your canvas if you get too close. So you have to hold it like at a distance and it just dries it really quickly in just like a few minutes. So that's the benefit is it's just faster, but a hairdryer, you could, it also works and we've done it both ways. So if you want to see how to turn this abstract underpainting into a beautiful floral painting, be sure to check out our masterclass in the link down below.