Introduction: Make This Painting: Abstract #1 Rising, Full, Setting Suns

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Painting is what I do when I'm not sewing, lol. My book I'm writing on super easy to make specific baby items is currently giving me grief because I can't seem to pare down to just 35 patterns and I take a break from that by painting.

So, I thought that I would start a little something called make this painting. Easy painting that even my children could do. We'll call this painting rising suns because it sounds good and they do kinda look like rising suns and since it's abstract it dunna have to be exact ;-)& ok, ok, my wonderful neighbor Mary says it should be rising and setting suns so we'll call it Rising, Full, Setting Suns.

Step 1: Gathering Supplies

So, to begin you will need 3 canvases, your choice, just know that the ones I used were 16x24. You'll also need paint, now since these were just practice ones that are going up on my wall I'm not too particular about the quality of my paint and chose some of those great craft acrylics that you can catch on sale 2 for a buck sometimes. The colors that I used are

  • Dark Blue (really dark)
  • Light Blue
  • Green (hunter)
  • Olive Green
  • Celery Green
  • Dark Red
  • Orange Red
  • Bronze
  • Charcoal

But choose what you like ya know? Like I said this is practice and seriously anyone can do abstract, if you'd like to learn more about all kinds of acrylics check out Acrylic Revolution, I'm snagging a copy myself since everyone I've spoken with who does acrylics has recommended it.

Step 2: Preparing the All Ready to Use Canvas(es)

Ok, so what I did was... here lemme just draw you a picture.

There are the lines that I drew, then I just treated it like a coloring book but with paint. Now, there's no shock here that I'm not a trained artist and my drawings leave a lot to be desired but I figured I've seen some hideous abstract paintings and if some of those folks could make some yuck and have it sell I could at least do something neat for my wall and not have to pay the blasted $600+ bucks. In fact this whole project cost me less than $20 because I caught the canvases on sale at AC Moore (and can I just say again how happy I am that they put one in over by my house!)

But I digress. Ok, So I laid out a towel on the floor since I'd loaned my easel to someone and never freakin got it back :::cough::: Sara :::cough::: has issues:::cough::: and I plopped my stuff down and set to work.

Step 3: The Actual Painting Part.

Now since I was on the floor and have no training I just did what made sense and started at the top line and painted above it about halfway between the line and the top with light blue using a lot as I got to where I wanted to start the dark blue.

Dark blue came next starting at the tip top and working my way down to the light blue, when I got to the light blue I started pushing the brush a little harder (I used a flat 1 inch brush) and started blending it together.

Rinsed Brush.

Between the horizontal line and the top of the circles I filled in with the celery green til I was about halfway down the sides of the circles then I loaded the brush with the olive green and started at the bottom and blended up to the celery green.

Since I had olive on my brush so I filled in the bottom circle, I then skipped up to (and mind you these acrylics dry really fast so it was cool to skip around) so I skipped up to the outside of those two short vertical lines and filled in the edge ones with the olive and then grabbed up some hunter and blended it there side to side.

Rinsed brush and switched to orange, moved to middle section between those two lines and was feeling funky so I pulled down to a point in two of the paintings and then went and filled in the circle, but it was wayyyy too much orange so I grabbed the red and starting at the top of the circle I blended my way down til my green was even a bit gone.

Then I took my charcoal color and thinned it a bit with a few drops of water and outlined everything on the painting, it kinda& not dripped but was thin so it smeared a bit which made a cool effect.

When the whole thing was finished and dry I hit the outside edges of the canvas with straight charcoal color and now I've got some neat art on my wall.

Yeah, I know it's not the BEST set of direction you've ever read and any self respecting acrylic artist might faint at this tutorial, but I won't apologize for using what I had available to make a statement in my living room and neither should you.

Paint on folks, because if we don't practice we'll never get better