Creating Abstract Art

Do you shudder every time someone mentions the term “abstract art”? Many beginning and intermediate painters assume that abstract art means difficult and more complex compositions, but as you’ll see in this watercolor instruction workshop, this doesn’t have to be the case.

In this watercolor painting video, master artist and teacher Gerald Brommer will reveal his most reliable techniques and methods for creating abstract art based on a photographic reference. The workshop begins with a discussion of why and how to simplify the scene that you want to paint. Brommer demonstrates this extreme simplification technique by choosing a photograph of a lighthouse scene, and sketching it on watercolor paper.

The original sketch is highly detailed and complicated, but as Brommer revises it several times, it slowly becomes a simpler collection of shapes that are just waiting to be filled in with color. While Brommer is working on the lighthouse painting, he demonstrates four different methods for creating abstraction in a painting: simplification of shapes, distortion, overlapping and fractioning, and contour continuation.

Artists of all levels will benefit from this discussion of simplification techniques, and learn how to put them to work in their own paintings. Throughout the course of this art instruction video, Brommer uses clear examples to illustrate how and why design becomes more important than the subject in abstract art.

If you’ve been intimidated by complicated scenes in the past, and think that you’re not advanced enough to create beautiful paintings that evoke the memory of a person, place, or thing, Brommer’s advice and encouragement are just what you need to take your abilities to the next level.