Art Ideas for Inspiration: Working to Music

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 and drawing 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. At a loss for ideas for an art project? In this free art lesson, an experienced artist presents ways to conjure creative ideas for drawing and painting projects. She discusses using music as an inspiration as well as photos and word play. Free association is also a tried-and-true method for creative inspiration. Many artists also try illustrating a story to get the creative juices flowing.

Video Transcript

"The first place I think of going is to music. A lot of artists I know do work to music but this is really about focusing on the music and letting it guide your mark making rather than just having it as background sound. So I'm going to work you know, with a fluid medium again although I might decide that I need something choppier as well. So I've got a charcoal stick here too and I've got some, a Bach Brandenburg concerto playing in the background and I'm just going to start thinking about how I feel and how I'm going to transfer that sound onto a piece of paper. So what I'm hearing right now is you've got that sort of beat that sort of marches through the whole thing so that might look like this. And then you've got these very light sounds and to me those sound small. So that's going to be small and then underneath it I kind of have like the, I don't know if it's the harmonium or whatever it is but it's something that sort of continues in, in sort of underneath everything else. And that's going to be some sort of continuous line. Now I might actually like this broken because it's not so heavy and so it is that sort of, it stays in the background. You know it still, what else do we have? We have that, I still don't have that sort of quickness yet so I've got to find a quickness and maybe I need to do diagonals. And really move quick and sort of flick and is that my music? I don't think it matters what music you use it's anything that you prefer but it just gives you a break from everything and you're concentrating not really on visuals but just on connecting two of your senses. And that might open up a whole new world for you, just starting to bring another sense into the visual."