Practice Painting Loose Florals in a Vase.

I wanted to give you another preview of a workshop I will be giving at a great Trade Show - The Artisan Expo, September 29-October 2 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

At the Expo - my mini-workshops feature a single subject - like this week's BobBlast - "Abstract Florals from Loose, Colorful Splatters". 

Attending Expos are so valuable because you can try new techniques, new products and buy boatloads of art materials at heavily discounted prices!

So back about painting florals - I enjoy messing around with pure creamy paint so much, I find it impossible to stay put for hours copying a still life set-up of flowers in a vase. Others do this so well... I don't!

Instead, I attack the surface with colorful abstract splashes plus a few splashes of isopropyl alcohol to get me started.

When dried, I look for "that pony" in the herd and begin reductive painting - getting rid of the parts that don't look like flowers. I practice this a lot, on small 10x10 inch scraps of watercolor paper.

These loose florals are another example of the "automatism" I talked about in last week's BobBlast. It works perfectly when I am doing my warm-up exercises of paint-sketching 6 small paintings.

In this video - Watch me do reductive painting to uncover the florals and vase. It's great fun!

Thank you for your interest, questions, comments and support!