It took me a few years to develop my abstract acrylic flower painting style. I started painting in 2010, and I took a couple online classes. The classes recommended intuitive painting, which means don’t start out with a plan. Let the painting tell you what wants to come out.
I first started by emulating the instructors whose classes I’d taken, as most beginners do. When I tried to let a subject appear in my painting, nothing really happened. I knew I had to come up with my own subjects.
Flash forward a few years, and I started painting more in 2018. I started my exploration with watercolors instead of acrylics, which is what I use now. Then I added pen marks using gel pens.
Finding my Subject
I’ve always been drawn to flowers and leaves, so that’s the subject I took. In some classes, we were told to pull out a figure, like an animal, but that never worked for me. Flowers and stems and leaves were the thing, and I started scouring Instagram and books, looking for inspiration.
I moved on to collages, using watercolors and pens there too. My first project was a series of collages on paper, using copies of letters that were written to my grandmother 100 years ago. Here’s the first one of the series.
After making 50 watercolor and pen paintings plus 16 in my collage series, I was ready to go back to acrylic painting. This time, I discovered a new material for making my paintings. I discovered that I could buy canvas sheets in a pad. This saved so much money over buying wrapped canvases, plus I could make a lot and store them easily while I was experimenting. I made about 30 of these, and played around with shapes, marks and flowers.
Adding Illustrations with Paint Pens
Then I discovered Posca paint pens. These are pens pre-filled with acrylic paint. I was able to illustrate flowers and branches, and create bolder marks. After painting about 50 of these, I was ready to go back to gallery-wrapped canvases for my acrylic paintings. Going all in, the first wrapped canvas I completed was my biggest one ever: 36″ x 36″. It took me a couple weeks to add flowers and leaves and marks using my pens. When I finished that painting, I new I had found my abstract acrylic flower painting style. This is the resulting painting, and I call it Walking the Butterfly Path. Since completing this painting, I’ve concentrated on this style for my acrylic paintings on canvas. Sometimes they are completely covered with flowers, like this one is, and sometimes they just contain a few flowers.
