Abstract Painting Techniques for beginners

When you paint, you always refer to something. If it isn’t to the outside world, it is to your own body, or mood, something you know, or the idea you have in mind while you paint. My experience is: when you paint without having any subject in mind, you create a depiction of yourself or the way you are or feel at that moment.

Some painters think that abstract painting techniques need to be disharmonic – but it doesn’t have to be that way. A painting can affect you in two different ways – one way is: luring you in with beauty, offering space or a scene that you’re free to respond to – or not. The painting doesn’t do anything directly: it waits until you are ready to open your soul and allow the experience.

When doing abstract painting techniques, you work with all the elements that you use in realistic painting. You use a form, color, some navigation in space, proportions, composition. The difference with realism is: you go to the inside of things, instead of the outside. However, there’s a sidetrack or parallel Universum you can lose yourself into the mathematic world of form or color, where all forms and qualities are abstract and equally interesting and valuable

Following are important tips for abstract painting techniques –

• Keep your painting composition as simple as possible.
• Keep your colors as simple as possible. Start with two or three colors, explore their possibilities to their full extent, only add other colors if the painting needs it.
• Work from big to small: first fill the whole canvas with a background.
• Try out different gestures: ‘feel’ what they mean, and use these qualities.
• Also ‘feel’ your way into different areas of your painting, and relate them to the way you feel your own body (it helps when you work standing up).
• If you want your painting to have ‘body’: don’t cling too much to your first strokes. Paint like a construction worker, when you do the first layer, and paint over that without pain in your heart.
• But when the painting has ‘body’, or you like a thin and ethereal look: hardly any effort can improve on the purity of the first stroke.