Attempt at Abstract

Have you guys seen Alisa Burke's blog? Her art is bold and colourful and wonderful. She has a distinct style that is very different to mine, but I love it and wanted to have a go at something similar.

Abstract painting does not come naturally to me (in A level art we had an abstract module and my attempt was embarrassing!) so I looked closely at Alisa's work for inspiration and a few technique ideas to get me started.

This wasn't it! This is just the canvas that I used. It used to hang in our porch but it got faded and my parents didn't want it anymore so they gave it to me to use. The gold swirls are raised so the first thing I did was scrape them off.

Then I gathered some conventional, and less conventional, tools to work with, including pens, a wooden fork, sponge, paintbrushes, old rubber stamps I'd made, a cotton reel, a Nandos card. Not pictured is sequin waste which turned out to be my favourite thing to use.

I decided working on the floor would be best for this potentially messy project. I laid out some newspaper and then set out my tools and paints. I used acrylic paint and some interior paint tester pots that I'd picked up at the Scrap Store.

Here are a few photos of how I started. I didn't have a plan, I just tried different things. It's fun!

This is what I ended up with. I think the small additions of pink and blue make all the difference. As does printing with the sequin waste which you can see on the right.

I printed with a shot glass and pens, I dripped water from the top, I scraped paint with the Nandos card.

I'm not sure whether I should use this as a background and paint something like a flower on top, or just leave it as it is.