I am overwhelmed with all that we "need" to get this new space filled properly. Need is, of course, the wrong word. "Want" surely fits better. But our list of furniture to buy is very long and so the money jar to buy rad art is…empty. This means I have to get a little bit creative and try and make what I am looking for. (It also means I am drawing up plans for building a TV stand, but that's a story for later in the month.)
I wanted something bright, special and abstract for over the mantle. Because of the odd light in the TV area, I wanted a canvas, not a frame that would send off glare. I also wanted it to be big. (And would you believe I didn't notice the command hook it's hanging on was visible from the top until I was prepping these photos for the post?!)
This week, I picked up a 30×40" canvas with a coupon at Michael's and set to work with some inexpensive acrylic paints and super cheap brushes. Abstract is SO hard for me. I always over-fuss and mess it up. Or worse, I get impatient and start adding a new color before the first color has dried so I end up with something that looks over-blended and slightly brown.
So patience and careful "studying" of a few artists that really nail it (Claire Desjardins is my favorite) helped me a lot. I stuck with really just a few colors, teal, light teal, gray blue, orange and pinkish-orange. They were all mixed from white, black, red, yellow, teal and blue.
And I went slowly. Part of what I learned is that having some places where the colors blended into each other and some places where there were defined shapes helped make this look less like something I hated and more like something I loved. I used one brush for blues and another for reds. That helped too.
It also started really bad. Like stop working bad. But I pushed through and worked to build a balance of warm and cool colors. I also thought a lot about this tutorial on Oh Happy Day. Abstract is so hard to teach, but they did a fantastic job helping me make sense of it.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with our new mantle art! I hope to do a much (much) larger canvas for another wall in the main room inspired by my success with this guy.
enJOY it 
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