Digital abstract

Color selection | Mental preparationDigital painting technique | Resources

PreliminariesIf you bought this article, chances are you are wanting to know something about making abstract art, about the nitty-gritty nuts-and-bolts sort of stuff. I’m here to help you, to show you that although digital abstract painting is hard to do, it is very doable, even for someone who has never touched abstract. But first I would like to address your mind set. If you have ever gone in an art museum, looked through an art book or saw abstract paintings online, you probably have one of two solid attitudes about abstract:

First mind set:“Yikes! How does anyone do that? I could never do something like that!”You have to conquer this fear of the unknown. If you have this mind set, once I start tackling the practical exercises and techniques for making abstract art, your anxiety should melt away and you should flow right into making abstract art. If these first two sections frighten you too much, just hold on – the third section is about tricking your mind into losing the fear and the insecurities.

Second mind set: “Pppfhh. Anyone could make good abstract art. It’s just a bunch of scribbles – my five-year-old could do better then some of the abstract I’ve seen.”Now, it’s perfectly healthy to have some of this sort of cynical outlook about abstract, especially if you have never studied art. I understand: I’m fairly cynical about art by nature, but you cannot let this turn you off abstract! I used to be terribly “practical” (cynical) about my art. If a piece of art was completely abstract, I would almost always write it off – I was too intelligent to fall for that sort of garbage. I wasn’t going to be one of those silly artists who have to use gigantic words to try and make their art sound important. Please don’t fall for this trap. Feel free to like or dislike art according to your own taste, but don’t let cynicism turn you off of something you might actually enjoy! Lay this attitude aside for a while and try abstract: you can always go back to cynicism. Now that we’ve got your head in the right place, let’s move on to the practical steps you need to take to paint abstract art digitally.

Tools and techniquesI use Adobe Photoshop when painting. There are many different painting and image editing programs out there (including a few free ones that I will put in the resources), and I encourage you to try them out! I use Photoshop, and it’s worked well for me. Keep in mind that I am showing you the way that I currently make art, but that doesn’t mean that you have to do it at all the way I do. Feel free to use different programs, techniques and tools; shame on me if I tried to put your art in the box of my experience.

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Anyway, Photoshop is an incredibly useful program, but it doesn’t automatically make the painting for you. You will have to learn several tricks to be able to get the right effects. I’ve always admired digital painting, but not too long ago I really didn’t know how to do it. I tried to lower the opacity of my brush, but it didn’t look at all like I wanted it to! My paintings ended up looking choppy and weird. This drove me bonkers! It looked awful, and I didn’t know why. I kept scrubbing with the brush to try and get a nice beautiful gradient of color, but…the darks just got darker, so every brush stroke stayed. If you like, open Photoshop and try drawing a beautiful painting with a brush with low opacity – it’s incredibly frustrating, because once a color is layered over another, it’s there to stay. Then I discovered the wonderful fellow at Ctrl+Paint. He does simple, wonderful tutorials about how exactly digital painting works. I watched the first tutorial, and suddenly my strokes turned from a choppy, opacity-driven stroke to a beautiful, painterly stroke. What’s the secret? Tie your opacity and flow to pen pressure in your pen palette, then use the alt key (eyedropper tool) to sample colors, constantly. You can take two colors, sample them over and over again, layer and eventually blend the two together.This is the basis of digital painting. Do your Digital painting career a favor and check out Ctrl+paint.

Keep it simpleI typically only use one brush: the hard, round brush. This might seem odd to some of you, because Photoshop have such a wide variety of choices and even the ability to create your own brushes, but I find that keeping it simple saves me from some of the pitfalls that can come when dealing with custom brushes: to put it bluntly, custom brushes usually look kind of stupid. They are useful for some special effects, but many times you end up distracting people from your art. You want people focused on the energy, emotion and color of your art, not the way it was made, and custom brushes scream “look at me” much too loudly (although, again – feel free to prove me wrong! Send your amazing custom brush work to me at artisticadd@gmail.com, and I will be happy to be amazed and humbled).

Get a Tablet!I use a Wacom Bamboo (not actually made out of bamboo) tablet. This is an very inexpensive device, and it is absolutely crucial to your painting career. I would go completely insane if I tried painting with a traditional mouse or a trackpad. Do your art (and wrists) a favor and get yourself a tablet. However, I don’t think that you need to stress out too much about the quality of the tablet – I got the cheapest one I could find, and although a nicer tablet could provide more pressure sensitivity and other

Before

After

options, mine has worked perfectly well thus far.

HotkeysI also use custom hotkeys. This isn’t crucial to your success at painting, but it sure will help save your sanity– in Photoshop just go to Edit>Keyboard shortcuts and you will easily be able to line up the tools you use most with easily accessible keys. I use F for my brush tool, D for my eraser, S for my color sampling tool, R and E for changing the size of my brush (and zooming in and out when command is held) and G for my selection tool. Having all of my most used tools in one easy-to-access place allows me to not glance down at the keyboard, interrupting my workflow constantly. It lets me work fluidly, and hide my tool panels (tab in Photoshop) to get as much screen real estate as possible. Once you’ve gotten used to using your own hotkeys, you’ll never go back.

Other ways There are other ways to seamlessly switch between tools, though – Voice activated tools are a possibility according to this lifehacker article, and you can also use something like BetterTouchTool (a completely invaluable tool for the macbook owner) to render your hotkeys down to a series of motions. These techniques have their drawbacks (inaccuracy and enforced silence for the voice commands, and fairly frequent errors with BetterTouchTool) but if you don’t like hotkeys or have trouble with your carpel tunnel, they might be worth checking out.

Problem: FuzzinessLet’s face it, being a raster-based tool, Photoshop is always going to be a little fuzzy. In contrast to something that is made in a vector-based program like Illustrator or Flash, Photoshop’s edges are going to be a little mushy, and not nearly the sharp, fine precision of vectors. This can be helped a little bit by reducing your work for the original size, but it certainly will still have that soft feel to it.

Problem: Photoshop bogging down computerIf you try drawing on a large canvas in Photoshop, or if you use to many layers, Photoshop may overwhelm your computer and slow down. This causes jerky pen movements, long waits, and complete insanity for this artist. Here’s how you can minimise some of this problem:

1.Buy a faster computerSometimes you just have to have a little more oomph. If you don’t happen to have the money for a brand new shiny computer, try

2.Restart your computer and shut down all other programs.If you keep your computer on all the time or are wont to keep a

dozen applications running in the background, your computer will slow down considerably. Restart that sucker and keep itunes off! It’s best if Photoshop isn’t even running.

3. Work on a smaller canvasCut down on the size of the canvas you are working on. You want to draw something bigger? Rough it out in a smaller canvas then blow it up a little bit for the finer detail. This might cause some of your to cringe, but digital painting many times doesn’t suffer much when it’s stretched. Beware, though– this method might not work for you. And never try this on a photograph.

4. Work with smaller brushes.Is your brush getting choppy or are you having to wait for it to catch up? Cut down on your brush size and Photoshop will thank you.

5. No layersDon’t be constantly making layers. If you need to have one for a little while, do so, but flatten it down as soon as your are satisfied with the result. Don’t make a stack of layers a mile high and expect Photoshop of perform at peak velocity!

ColorIf you’ve ever tried to pick out what color to paint your living room, you know that color selection is tough. Since most of us don’t have a complete education in color theory, it’s sometimes pretty tough to know where to start! Remember, some might say that color selection is the most important aspect of abstract art, and it certainly is key: you have to have lovely colors or the rest of the piece will fall flat on its face. Here are a couple of ideas and exercises.

StealOk, don’t steal. That’s bad. Borrow. If you see a particular color scheme, combination or use that you like, snap a photo (or a screenshot) of it! Your cellphone camera works fine for capturing colors. Save these images in a file, I suggest using a program called Evernote. it is a very useful note taking app that lets you put pictures, text and just about anything you want into notes that you can tag and search through. Evernote even uploads the notes to their cloud so you can access your notes from your phone, or any other computer that you own. Evernote is free, by the way – it took my a while to learn how to use it, but it’s worth it. It sure beats keeping files and files of images and text that I want to save. After you have started your library of color schemes that you like (and believe me, once you start you will see them everywhere) then you can just browse through them or search for a specific color. In this way you can overcome “artist’s block” and get painting.

WebsitesYou can also use one of many useful websites when selecting colors. Sure there are sites that will actually teach you some color theory, but there are also some that will just help you pick colors. One of these is called color scheme designer and it is an extremely useful little webapp. It seems to be more focused towards website design, but it certainly serves out purposes well. You can select different harmonious color schemes.Just play with the little color wheel for a while and see what you come up with. Or (to make it even easier) just hit the randomize button until you see something that you like. This is a handy tool, but it is severely limited – don’t use it solely or your colors will be limited. Also check out Color Lovers. This is a wonderful little site where people post different color combinations that they love. You can browse through quite a selection of these, and find inspiration. I would suggest that you don’t take a selection wholesale, but instead try to tweak it and add a little bit of your own colors to it. This way you can practice and develop your eye when selecting colors.

Exercise: Making the ugly beautiful.I believe that there are no ugly colors: every color is beautiful in a certain setting, or with a certain other color. Here’s a quick exercise that will help you select colors a little more effectively.1.Go into Photoshop and mess around in the color picker until you find a color that you consider ugly.2. Paint it on your canvas.3. Select other colors to paint with it, and try to make the ugly color look beautiful in a certain setting.

Example:This color is not very nice. It’s a drab, kind of pukey yellow color, and it really doesn’t look very useful. How could you incorporate this into a beautiful painting? Look on the next page.

It looks completely different in this setting, doesn’t it?

Are your eyes beginning to be opened to the possibilities?Subtlety is a beautiful thing, you don’t have to just use bright, primary colors – you have infinite possibilities at your finger tips.

Give it a breakOnce you’ve finished your painting, take a break. Sleep on it. Some back with fresh eyes the next day, and you may see something that you didn’t see before. Try to gather your first impression – if it’s negative, Photoshop has several different tools for messing with colors.For example, I painted this piece very monochromatically. I used only blue, and I thought I liked it. I came back later, and my first impression was BORING. I quickly copied the layer (command+J) over and over again, and messed with the hue sliders (image>adjustments>hue/saturation) on each layer and erased away what I didn’t want. It ended up being a much more effective piece.

So, selecting colors doesn’t have to be terribly difficult, and they don’t have to spring from your brilliant mind all by themselves. Advanced color selection is another subject for another time, but for now, using the tools that I’ve given you, you can get a good start and choose nice colors from the beginning.

The mindHere’s the problem: Even with great photoshop techniques and color selection, you still haven’t created one piece of abstract art that you can be proud of. It’s all well and good to learn the tools to create the art, it’s another thing altogether to actually create. It’s probably pretty daunting to begin, and at this point you might be doubting your own ability to make good abstract art. Maybe you think that your situation’s different, that you can’t make good abstract because of ________. Fill in the blank with whatever nagging fears you have. Then take a deep breath dive through the last barrier to your creating abstract art: you mind.

Clear your mindI don’t know about you, but I tend to have a lot of excess garbage in my mind. I have a little demon up there, constantly pointing out ways that I have failed, points where I need to improve, and telling me why I will fail. He’s a tenacious fellow, often getting so loud that he handicaps my art with his complaints. “You can’t do that!” “That looks stupid” “What in the world is that horrid thing?” “You’re just going to have to start over if you do that.” Seth Godin calls him “the resistance”, or the Lizard Brain– the part of your brain that tries to fit in. You don’t want to fit into what your demon says is good abstract. Shut him down as quickly as possible, or you’ll never get past

your first piece. How do you shut him up? There are quite a few ways to do this – luckily – and you need to find a way that works for you. My demon doesn’t like music. I turn on some peppy music, and he runs away, or is too busy tapping his foot to bother me about my art. My demon can sing along with the music instead of constantly analyzing (and over-analyzing) my artwork, which leaves my creative soul to quietly be fascinated with beauty, and to put it down on paper. I started to learn this technique when I was in college classes. You see, I’m a doodler. If I look at the teacher, I’m sure to be thinking about something else, but if I doodle, my conscious brain zeroes in on what the teacher is saying, and my pencil scribbles away, making really nice, if a bit rough, art. Often times I would open up my notebook, and I wouldn’t remember drawing what was in there – my conscious brain was so tied up with what the teacher was saying that it didn’t even register what my hand was doing. This is a really great way to make abstract art. Your left brain is safely out of the way, leaving your right brain (the creative, artistic, patient side) to go crazy and make beautiful stuff. So do whatever you can to distract your conscious brain! Listen to music, turn on a mindless TV show, listen to talk radio – you can even go to a coffee shop and listen to the people around you while you draw. A healthy level of distraction is a wonderful thing when making abstract art! Pursue it. What do you do when you just can’t distract yourself enough, when those silly, nitpicking, criticizing thoughts slip through? Don’t cater to them. They call you hold back, to go slower, to be careful not to mess anything up. Do just the opposite. Draw faster, be messier, deliberately draw over a really good part. The faster you move, the harder time your demon will have keeping up with you. One useful exercise is to turn on fast-paced music and move your pen (or paintbrush, or whatever) to the pace of the music. As the adrenaline courses through you from the upbeat music, allow that to move your pen. Imagine that the music itself is moving your pen. This will go a long way towards clearing your mind.

Trust your instincts.In Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards says that when we are young, we practice drawing things over and over again, until we have an image stored in our brains. For example, we might practice drawing a human eye over and over again until we draw it (we think) perfectly, when all we’ve really drawn is a cartoon eye. As we get older, our brains don’t let go of these images, and when we try to draw an eye from life, our right brain (the creative side) tries to draw the eye how it is, but the dominant, controlling left brain (the demon) juts in and takes control, saying “I don’t like all of this looking and drawing

stuff! I have an image already that you can use!” so our drawing ends up being a combination of real life and the childish image, and we usually are terribly frustrated that we can’t get it to look “right”. The solution to drawing from life is to shut down your left brain by deliberately doing things it doesn’t like, and in Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards goes through several exercises to do this. And guess what? The same holds true for abstract art. When drawing representational art, the demon might say such things as “That doesn’t look right” “I can draw it better” or “It’s just too hard to draw!”, When doing abstract art, the demon says “You can’t put that there!” “You can’t pick colors well, you don’t know enough.” and “You can’t draw abstract unless you are an expert!” Shut him up and trust your instincts. Do you have the random, quiet thought that maybe there should be some green in the corner? The demon will come up with twenty different reasons there shouldn’t be. “You haven’t used green yet, you shouldn’t now” “That’s not what you planned on” “It doesn’t go well with your other colors!” “It’s too bright/dim/dark/light/green for this piece”. Who cares? Do it anyway. You have the passing thought that you should scribble in one place for a few seconds? The demon will say “You can’t do that, it’s messy” “It’s not your style” “You can’t do it well enough” “You’re not confident enough” “It looks stupid”. Do it anyway. Let your art flow from the peaceful, quiet, seemingly random thoughts coming from the side of your brain that actually knows what it’s doing.

Exercise: Slave driverGet a friend who you trust to sit near by while you are drawing. But they won’t be watching your drawing: they will be watching your hand. Instruct your friend to watch your pen, and if you hesitate, the should “punish” you in some way: they could just tell you to keep drawing, they could yell at you, they could shoot you with a dart gun...don’t give this job to your especially sadistic friends! What does this accomplish? By forcing yourself to draw quickly and instinctively lest you get punished, you will understand how it feels to draw with confidence, not stopping to over think decisions. You might be surprised at how easily your painting flows after a few minutes of this.

Learn to let go.Exercise: Letting go. I’m going to describe it as if you’re doing a digital painting in Photoshop (because that’s where I do most of my abstract art) but it still applies for whatever art form you create in. Spend about 15 minutes drawing, doing whatever comes to mind. Practice shutting off the demons by listening to music (or whatever silences the little nag for you) and draw on the peaceful creativity of your right brain. Keep drawing constantly,

feeling the movement of your arm and you fingers, making the drawing fluid and beautiful. Put your best effort into the piece in the time allowed, explore new territory, follow your instincts. Make a piece that you are proud of. Once the 15 minutes are up, destroy your newly created art. Either close the window without saving, or tear it up into lots of little pieces. If my description of this exercise made your heart bleed a little bit, then that makes you normal. Most likely, you are a little bit angry – how could I ask you to destroy something you’re proud of, something that you put time and effort into, something that you think is brilliant? Because it helps you learn the fine art of letting go. You see, until you learn to let go, you won’t do very well with abstract art. I used to be the type of artist who would get to a certain point in my art and be afraid to continue, because I thought it was brilliant, and I was afraid to mess it up. This would cause me to either stop drawing, leaving a piece that could have turned out really nice unfinished, or I would be so terribly careful that the rest of the piece was static, ugly and poorly drawn. The same thing will happen to you when you draw abstract, if you don’t learn to let things go. You must trust yourself enough to forge on ahead, trust your instincts and draw confidently, not paralysed with worry about doing the wrong thing.

RecapWhen making abstract art, it’s important to clear your mind. Distract your conscious mind, if necessary, to allow your inner creative soul to thrive. Use music, videos or other people’s conversations if needed. Trust your instincts – don’t listen to the loud voices in your head, but instead listen to the quiet, peaceful suggestions. Act immediately, don’t give your demon time to nitpick and degrade your idea, just make art. If you start doubting yourself, draw or paint faster and messier, until the demon shuts up. Learn to let go. Let go of your need to be safe, let go of your extreme pride that says that every line you draw is brilliant. Draw over them anyway. Let go of your insecure thoughts that say you should improve and improve, that the piece is never good enough. When you need to stop, then stop. Don’t second guess. Now go, make art.

Andrew Miller is an artist who is learning to shut up his demon. He loves writing about art and life at www.andhedrew.com, posts his new abstract work at andhedrew.deviantart.com and loves sharing art. He loves seeing new art, so if you have any you would like to share, send a link to theandhedrew@gmail.com.

Resources

The GIMP, a free Photoshop alternative.http://www.gimp.org/

Free digital painting lessons at Ctrl+Paint.http://www.ctrlpaint.com/

BetterTouchTool, a free, incredibly useful touchpad tool.http://blog.boastr.net/

Evernote, a free note-taking tool.http://www.evernote.com/

Color Scheme Designerhttp://colorschemedesigner.com/

Color Lovershttp://www.colourlovers.com/palettes

Lifehacker article about using voice commands in Photoshop.http://lifehacker.com/215764/hack-attack-make-your-macs-speech-recognition-work-for-you

www.andhedrew.com