Warm-up Abstract
Warm-up Floral
Warm-up Pear
In our Wednesday morning adult art class this week I gave a demonstration on “Loosening up” your paintings. I took a workshop several years ago from Robert Burridge, a terrific California painter and teacher, who taught us to do these warm-up paintings. His idea is to line up 6-8 sheets of watercolor paper and then quickly lay on several colors of paint. They will then all look like abstract paintings. The second step is to paint out anything that doesn’t look like whatever subject you want the painting to be. For instance, in the floral painting shown here I filled in background and added a vase. Then I shaped up a few of the colors to look like flowers and leaves. This entire process, all three of these paintings, took about 20 minutes. This forces a painter to work quickly and loose.
The Studio 