Introduction to Abstract Painting

Series Summary

Painting is the art of using a pigmented medium to create a picture of reality filtered through the imagination, the senses, emotions, and life experience. Artists the world over have multiplied the uses of painting as a vital mode of human expression, whether recording history, retelling myth and legend, expressing religious fervor, or exploring the unknown. From early history to the present, we have records of men and women making graphic representations of their world, showing their understanding and their curiosity.

In this series of free online video art lessons you'll learn how to create a large abstract painting for your home. Expert David A. Clemen shows how line, form, shape and space come into play when planning a painting. You'll learn tips on using texture, color, and proportion to add emphasis to certain parts of a painting, and how these design elements can add movement and create a sense of unity in your works of art.

Video Transcript

"DAVID CLEMEN: Hi. I'm David Clemen on behalf of Expert Village, and today, we're going to do an abstract painting on a larger scale on a piece of birch wood. Today, we're going to do a large abstract painting on this. It's a quarter inch piece of birch wood. It's got a sanded finish so it makes it painting on very smooth. Earlier, we did a smaller abstract painting on a canvass, but I find that working in a bigger scale is a lot more fun, and you have a lot more room to play with 'cause you actually use a lot of paint, the way I'm doing this technique. And it just kind of is more of a full body experience because I'm using my arm and I'm using a full range of motion. You'll notice that I'm standing, actually, in my kitchen, but this is a little bit bigger table than my drawing table. And so, I'm going to show you which supplies you need, different techniques and some techniques I've covered in other episodes, and we're just going to have some fun and the colors I'm probably going to use are red, white and black. And so, this is the intro to painting on birch wood, an abstract style painting in a much larger scale."