Out of Abstraction

For me, doing abstract is a challenge.  My mind wants to see something that I can recognize.  I never know when to stop putting in more detail until my work is no longer abstract, but representational.  Here is a little exercise that Journal52.com presented that was fun and I felt successful for me in an abstracted way.  We were told to put three colors of paint on the plate.  We then got an old used gift card and started scraping the paint across our paper.  I made about five sheets of these colors on paper.  When they were dry, we took a sharpie and outlined every color shape we could find.  Of course, I found a butterfly in mine.  I did augmented the colors a bit to create the words in the picture.

This one became sort of a meditation for me.  I didn't get to choose what came out of the abstraction and I just kept drawing around the various shapes.  It was quite a fun process!

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